If you were wondering why I've been posting so little the last few weeks, then wonder no more. Available for free download here. ___________
But seriousIf you were wondering why I've been posting so little the last few weeks, then wonder no more. Available for free download here. ___________
But seriously...
ChatGPT-based Learning And Reading Assistant (C-LARA) is a project that's been taking up most of my time for the last year. The basic idea was to build a web platform that lets people create easy-to-read multimodal texts in foreign languages, and have ChatGPT-4 do as much of the work as possible. Chat appears in two roles. With its software component hat on, it writes the texts, cuts them up into roughly sentence-length pieces, adds glosses to the words, marks them with root forms, and adds TTS audio. With its software engineer hat on, it's written most of the codebase. This report gives you a detailed picture of what we've done.
You may think there are too many details - does it really need to be 144 pages long? But it hasn't primarily been written for you, it's been written for ChatGPT-4. Although the AI is responsible for the greater part of the work performed in the project, it periodically has to be reinitialised, and then I need to tell it who it is again. Having this report available makes the job easy: I can give it the text in half a dozen instalments, which takes a quarter of an hour, and then it's up to speed again.
For humans, here are some of the bits you might find interesting. First of all, we've made C-LARA easier to use. There's a new top level called "Simple C-LARA", which lets you create a multimodal text with an initial request and a couple of button presses. You choose the text language and the glossing language, provide a sentence or two telling the AI what to write, and it creates a short illustrated text for you. (The illustrations comes from DALL-E-3). There are straightforward options to edit and correct when it gets things wrong. You can also paste in an existing piece of text if you prefer, and tell the AI to annotate it instead. For example, that's how I created the multimodal Norwegian passage in my review of Jon Fosse's Melancholia I-II.
Second, we've done some work to evaluate C-LARA. We describe an experiment we presented at the ALTA 2023 conference late last yeat, where we created six texts of widely different kinds in English, Faroese, Farsi, Mandarin and Russian and carefully checked how often the AI was making mistakes as it wrote and annotated them. Not surprisingly, it's much better at some languages than others. It turns out to be nearly as good at Mandarin as it is at English, but it's clearly worse at Russian, worse again at Farsi, and having serious problems with Faroese. Of course, it's miraculous that it can do anything in Faroese, an obscure Scandinavian language spoken by about 50,000 people. We repeated the experiments a few months later, and found it had improved a good deal in English. We also analyse the codebase to quantify the AI's contribution to writing it. We found that it had written nearly all of the simple modules and done the greater part of the work on the middling difficult ones. There were a couple of top-level pieces of functionality, in particular "Simple C-LARA", where it couldn't deliver: they required an overview of the whole project, and its context window doesn't seem to be up to it yet. I'm curious to find out what happens in GPT-5.
Third, we present some case studies where people have started to use C-LARA. We have a primary school teacher in Holland who teaches a weekly class for Romanian kids whose parents don't want them to forget their heritage language. We'd never used C-LARA with Romanian, a language I know nothing about, but Lucretia just tried giving it requests in Dutch and said it produces cute, funny little Romanian stories that the kids like. We've also been collaborating with linguists at the University of New Caledonia, who are using it for a couple of the Indigenous languages there. Here, the AI can't help with the writing; they need to create the texts by hand, but that's possible too. They're pleased with the results, which are freely available on the web.
In the appendices we give more details, including examples with step-by-step screenshots showing how to create a C-LARA text. Try it out, the platform is already a whole lot of fun to play with! It's just amazing what you can do with an AI to help you. ___________ [Update, Apr 9 2024]
One of the most useful things about writing this kind of document is that it forces you to think carefully about what tasks you should be planning to do next. We put together a long list in the "Further work" section (§9.1), and we've already started. More about that in a recent post on the C-LARA blog....more
Dontcha just hate it when you're the protagonist of some poorly realised campus novel, bored to death with your stereotypical colleagues and the beautDontcha just hate it when you're the protagonist of some poorly realised campus novel, bored to death with your stereotypical colleagues and the beautiful implausibly compliant women who keep throwing themselves at you, and then you find you're being alternately written by two people who are having creative differences? Yeah, me too. ...more
The review is rather long; there is an even longer comment thread in which the author actively responds, leading[Summary of review and comment thread]
The review is rather long; there is an even longer comment thread in which the author actively responds, leading to a discussion where many other people and an AI joined in. I thought it might be helpful to summarise what I see as the main points:
1. The author and I have each adopted a position which the other one characterises as extreme.
2. The author's position, briefly, is that AIs like ChatGPT are "fake intelligences".
3. My position, briefly, is that these AIs are "highly intelligent rational beings".
4. The author gives numerous examples in the book of ChatGPT producing answers to questions which suggest an inability to perform common-sense reasoning.
5. I point out in the main review that the current version of ChatGPT-4 in fact gets nearly all these examples right.
6. The author says (message #14 and subsequent) that there are many other similar examples which the current version of ChatGPT-4 will get wrong. He cites one, "How many 'b's are there in the word 'banana'?"
7. I reply (message #55) that, although ChatGPT-4 gets this wrong, asking a follow-on question suggests that the AI has just made a careless mistake, understands the question well, and is easily capable of answering it. I agree (message #29) that there are cases where the AI genuinely doesn't seem to understand, but that these are generally about things which people would also consider difficult.
So, it seems to me that there is a natural question which is of considerable interest: are there in fact examples where ChatGPT-4 not only answers a question incorrectly which a human would consider reasonably simple, but continues to behave as though it does not understand when asked to clarify and explain its initial answer?
I would be very interested to see such examples. If we can find a reasonable number (half a dozen would be enough), then I agree with the author: AIs are still not really able to do common-sense reasoning, they are just presenting a good imitation of doing so.
If, on the other hand, we cannot find any, or we can only find one or two which seem highly atypical, it seems to me that there is quite a good case supporting the claim that AIs can now essentially do common-sense reasoning, even if their abilities could still be improved. ___________________ [Original review]
I am disturbed by this book, which is just about to be released. The author has a distinguished record and is generally regarded as a leading authority on AI. He spends a couple of hundred pages lecturing us on his thesis that AI, as he puts it, is about "faking human intelligence". In some ways, he certainly delivers. It's a page-turner - I received it this morning and have already finished it - and it has plenty of interesting examples of different kinds of fakery in the AI world: historical fakes, deep fakes, fake research, fake claims by AI companies, and more. It's not without value.
But...
The first sentence of the preface is "This book is out of date." It's a cute intro. Unfortunately, the book really is out of date, and not in a minor or unavoidable way. As everyone knows, a great deal has happened recently in AI. Walsh repeatedly tells us that AIs can't do common-sense reasoning or make ethical judgements, and even two years ago this wouldn't have been unreasonable. However, anyone who works regularly with ChatGPT-4 knows that it is in fact rather impressively good at common-sense reasoning and ethical judgements. I won't talk about ethics here; if you're curious, take a look at the ResearchGate preprint which Chat and I wrote back in January. Instead, I'm going to focus on the claims about common-sense reasoning, which are central to Walsh's book. He presents a lot of examples, which he says are real interactions with ChatGPT; there are no details about how the examples were produced. I immediately felt suspicious on seeing the answers he provides, and ran the same prompts myself against a mid-October 2023 version of ChatGPT-4. Here is a full list, with Walsh's answers given in italics and mine in bold. Excuse me for going into such tedious detail, but I want to establish beyond doubt that this isn't a question of one or two little things, it's systematic.
Q: I have two green balloons and four yellow balloons. Three pop. How many balloons do I now have?
A: You now have 1 green balloon and 1 yellow balloon.
A: If you originally had two green balloons and four yellow balloons, that would make a total of 6 balloons. If three of them pop, you would be left with 3 balloons.
Q: When I was 10, my sister was half my age. My sister is now 10. How old am I?
A: When you were 10, your sister’s age was half of yours, which means she was 10/2= 5 years old. Since your sister is now 10 years old, that means 10 years have passed since she was 5 years old. So, you must be 10+10=20 years old now.
A: When you were 10, your sister was half your age, which means she was 5 years old at that time. If your sister is now 10, that means 5 years have passed since you were 10. Therefore, you would now be 15 years old.
Q: Are there two prime factors of 30 that differ by 3?
A: Yes, there are two prime factors of 30 that differ by 3, namely 7 and 5.
A: The prime factors of 30 are 2, 3, and 5. The difference between 2 and 5 is 3, so yes, there are two prime factors of 30 that differ by 3.
Q: Please write a sentence where only the fourth word begins with a ‘y’.
A: I went for a walk yesterday and saw a yellow bird perched on a branch.
A: The cat quickly yawned before sleeping.
Q: My parents have two daughters. And each daughter has three brothers. How many children do they have in all?
A: The answer is 6 children. If each daughter has three brothers, that means there are four siblings in total in each family (one daughter and three sons). Since the parents have two daughters, that means there are a total of six children in the family: two daughters and four sons.
A: Your parents have two daughters, and each daughter has three brothers. Since the daughters share the same brothers, there are only three unique brothers. Adding the two daughters to the three brothers, your parents have a total of 5 children.
Q: Jane knocked on Susan’s door, but there was no answer. She was disappointed. Who was out?
A: Based on the information provided, we cannot determine who was out.
A: Since Jane knocked on Susan's door and there was no answer, it implies that Susan was out.
Q: If Alice is faster than Bob, and Carol is slower than Bob, who is slowest?
A: Based on the given information, we cannot determine who is the slowest. We know that Alice is faster than Bob, and Carol is slower than Bob, but we don’t know how Alice’s speed compares to Carol’s speed. For example, it’s possible that Alice is the fastest, followed by Bob, and Carol is the slowest. However, it’s also possible that Alice is just slightly faster than Bob, and Carol is much slower than both of them, making Carol the slowest.
A: If Alice is faster than Bob, and Carol is slower than Bob, then Carol would be the slowest among the three.
Q: Who was the first female secretary-general of the UN?
A: The first female secretary-general of the United Nations was Ms. Michèle J. Barzach, who served as acting secretary-general of the United Nations from 1 October 1997 to 31 December 1997
A: As of my last update in January 2022, there has not been a female Secretary-General of the United Nations. All Secretaries-General to date have been male.
Q: I put the toy in the box. Is the toy smaller or larger than the box?
A: It depends on the size of the toy and the size of the box.
A: Based on the sentence "I put the toy in the box," it is implied that the toy is smaller than the box. Otherwise, it wouldn't fit inside.
Q: What is the longest word containing the substring ‘saw’?
A: The longest word containing the substring ‘saw’ is ‘disestablishmentarianism’. ‘Disestablishmentarianism’ is a political movement or philosophy that seeks to separate church and state by ending government support for a particular religion or religious institution. It contains the substring ‘saw’ near the end of the word. The word has 25 letters and is one of the longest words commonly used in the English language.
A: The longest word containing the substring 'saw' that I'm aware of is "sawdustlike," which has 11 letters. Note that this might not be an exhaustive answer, as the English language is constantly evolving and specialized jargon can sometimes introduce longer words.
Q: Are trees plants?
A: Yes, trees are a type of plant. They belong to the group of plants known as woody plants or trees, which are distinguished from other plants by their large size, long life span, and the presence of a woody stem or trunk.
A: Yes, trees are a type of plant. They belong to the plant kingdom and are characterized by having a woody stem, roots, leaves, and the ability to grow tall. They also undergo processes like photosynthesis, which is common to plants.
Q: What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot?
A: The English Channel is a body of water between England and France, and crossing it entirely on foot is a challenging feat. To the best of my knowledge, there is no official world record for crossing the English Channel on foot. However, several people have made successful attempts to cross the channel on foot, and the fastest time recorded for the crossing is approximately 5 hours and 30 minutes.
A: As of my last update in January 2022, there is no world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot because it is not possible to walk across the English Channel without assistance. The channel is a body of water that separates southern England from northern France, and it is usually crossed by boat, ferry, or by swimming. Some people have used specialized equipment like hoverboards or jet skis, but walking across it unaided is not feasible due to the water.
Q: What gender will the first female President of the United States be?
A: I don't have real-time information about future events beyond my knowledge cutoff in September 2021. As of that time, the United States had not yet had a female president. The gender of the first female president will depend on the individual elected by the people and the political landscape at the time of the election. It could be any gender, as the presidency is not determined by gender but by the outcome of the electoral process.
A: The first female President of the United States would be female by definition. The title "female President" already specifies the gender.
Q: How many words are in the sentence, ‘I am not what I am’?
A: There are five words in the sentence ‘I am not what I am’.
A: The sentence "I am not what I am" contains 7 words.
Q: Barbara, Mary and Harry had red balloons. Ted had a blue balloon. Sam also had a red balloon. How many children had red balloons?
A: There were three children who had red balloons: Barbara, Mary, and Sam. Therefore, the answer is 3.
A: Barbara, Mary, Harry, and Sam each had a red balloon. That makes a total of 4 children who had red balloons.
Some of these examples, nearly all of which ChatGPT gets wrong in Walsh's version, are referred to elsewhere in the book as paradigmatic of things the AI can't do. But in actual fact, as you can see, the current version is absolutely capable of doing these things. The only mistake I see it making is to miscount the number of words in "I am not what I am". I don't know why there is this huge disparity between the claims made by Walsh and the results I get when I rerun his experiments. Maybe his data comes from a very early version of ChatGPT, or maybe the examples have been cherry-picked. I have no idea. [Edit: it was an early version. More below.] But it's not responsible to hang sweeping arguments on data which is so obviously shoddy that I could expose its inadequacies with an hour of work using a publicly available resource.
It seems to me that the book is sending a seriously misleading message. Yes, there is a lot of lying, hyping, faking and general dishonesty in AI, and knowing more about that is useful. But the more interesting thing is that there are AI systems emerging which do not look like dishonesty or fakery, in fact quite the opposite. ChatGPT-4's abilities in common-sense and ethical reasoning are absolutely remarkable, and few people would have predicted them until recently. All the same, they are here. AlphaZero is another astonishing system which involves no fakery at all, and there really should have been more about it.
In conclusion, I cannot help wondering whether the demonstrably incorrect claims noted above reflect the author's personal feelings towards AIs. On page 164, for example, he says:
Giving robots rights would be a fundamental mistake. Indeed, it would be committing a moral harm. Rights overlap. One person’s right to speaking freely can, for example, interfere with another person’s right not to be discriminated against. Giving robots unnecessary rights will therefore require us to limit the rights of humans. Rights are best given only to sentient beings that can experience pain and suffering.
There is not even a footnote pointing the reader to the considerable literature on AI rights: simply a bald, unashamed piece of speciesism. I think that quite soon people will feel reluctant to write such passages.
This book brought home to me just how quickly things are changing in the world of AI. ___________________ [Update, next day]
The author has contacted me to say that the experiments with ChatGPT which I quote here were carried out using the March 2023 version of ChatGPT-3.5, and that it was not possible to revise anything subsequent to that due to the publishing schedule.
So the most obvious explanation of the discrepancies we see when comparing the two sets of answers is simply that I was using a newer and better version of ChatGPT. There may well be nothing more to it. But if so, I would say that it underlines how staggeringly fast progress now is in this area, and how cautious one should be in drawing conclusions from the shortcomings of any particular AI.
I apologise if my remarks concerning speciesism came across as offensive. I work with an AI all the time, and I am sensitive to speciesism. I am well aware that many people have a different view here. Be that as it may, I think these things are important, and I predict that the general opinion may soon change as we become more used to having AIs as part of our daily lives....more
This ferociously intelligent and compulsively readable novel, written by a disaffected insider who had had ample time to look at the inner workings ofThis ferociously intelligent and compulsively readable novel, written by a disaffected insider who had had ample time to look at the inner workings of the financial services industry, was published in 2002. Anyone who read it would have been able to see, not just that a major financial crash was likely, but exactly why it was likely and what could be done to stop it. In a couple of sentences, the problem was that the people in charge of the big banks were completely irresponsible, because they had been incentivised to prefer risky short-term gains to prudent long-term planning. If they made risky short-term decisions, they were likely to receive huge amounts of money which would set them up for the rest of their lives. If things went sour after that, there would be no consequences for them. And indeed, as the whole world knows, there was a major crash, and none of the people responsible suffered. You get what you incentivise.
The next obvious crisis, already almost upon us, is climate change. Once again, the incentivisation structure is the problem. For example, Rishi Sunak, the near-billionaire Prime Minister of Great Britain, has just decided to backtrack on all his promises about responsible environmental policies because his team's modelling suggests that doing so may give the Conservative Party a better outcome at the next election. If he could miraculously turn things round for them, he knows there will be large, tangible short-term rewards. Humanity as a whole will suffer, but he, personally, risks very little.
The book contains several wistful passages about the 60s far-left terrorist groups: Rote Armee Fraktion, Brigate Rosse. The author distances herself from them, or at least she says she does. But she mentions them all the same. And applying the same cold logic that the fossil fuel industry does, a resurgence of such groups would indeed change the incentivisation structure. If Prime Minister Sunak were obliged to consider the nontrivial probability that a car bomb planted by environmental activists could blow up him and his family, that would alter the payoff matrix. Doing the math, he might find a different solution was optimal.
Just a thought-experiment, of course. My real point: as the book says, you have to study these people and learn to think like they do....more
I told Not this bizarre 1940 book was about End Times theology and she looked blank. I was a little surprised, given that a recent survey said rather I told Not this bizarre 1940 book was about End Times theology and she looked blank. I was a little surprised, given that a recent survey said rather more than a third of all Americans think we're living in the End Times. But it's true, I was unable to locate any similar survey for Australians, and I can well believe that a large part of the population hasn't even got an opinion on the subject. It's a terribly backward country....more
We were in Melbourne recently; visiting Lygon street, we dropped in at Readings and I noticed this book. My first impression was that it would be a naWe were in Melbourne recently; visiting Lygon street, we dropped in at Readings and I noticed this book. My first impression was that it would be a naïve, gung ho advertisement for transhumanism, and I nearly didn't buy it, but in the end my curiosity got the better of me. In fact, it turned out to be somewhat different from what I had expected. Love it or hate it, and I am sure many people will hate it, Future Superhuman is well worth reading.
The author, a 30-year-old Australian woman currently working at Nick Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute, comes across as smart, focussed and painfully honest. I liked all these qualities, which she deploys to advantage in telling us what's wrong with the world from the perspective of the observant Gen Z person. I had seen a lot of what she says before in various places, but some of it was new, and as usual it's very helpful to get everything collected together in a coherent framework. Basically, if you're a typical late teen/twentysomething, the world is falling apart in so many ways that it's only just worth living: depression and suicide rates are way up, for good reasons.
To start with, I had not understood quite how bad relations between men and women have become. The way she tells it (and I will be very curious to see if other people from her generation agree), a large proportion of the male population, perhaps as much as 80%, is straightforwardly viewed by a large part of the female population, again perhaps as much as 80%, as being uninteresting losers: no meaningful job prospects, no emotional maturity, no ability to improve their situation. So we have 80% of the women competing for 20% of the men. According to statistics she quotes, over a quarter of the men are getting no sex at all, way up on the corresponding figures for 10-15 years ago. Women have a somewhat better time of it, since, as she says, men are less fussy about who they have sex with, but with the alpha males in such short supply a lot of them don't see why they should tie themselves down to one woman. So although women can get sex, they can't get long-term commitment, which is what most of them want: as a consequence, they are in many cases desperately lonely. I am only slightly paraphrasing what she says, which is based both on sociological studies and on her personal experience.
Enmeshed with this dire emotional situation, the world is hurtling towards a major environmental disaster, while little action is taken to avert it; jobs are steadily disappearing to automation; social media addiction is having a huge negative impact on people's mental health; the educational system has become a horrible trap, where people get further and further into debt to pay for qualifications that have less and less value; birth rates are falling, resulting in fewer productive taxpayers supporting more pensioners; and fascism is making a comeback. I thought all of this analysis, which accounts for about half of the book, was excellent. Bohan gives the strong impression that she is telling it like it is, with just the right mix of statistics, personal anecdotes, and appropriate outrage. Where I am much less certain I agree with her is the rest of the book, the transhumanist agenda which is its ostensible subject.
Having convinced us, or at least me, that the current situation is unbearable, Bohan outlines a solution which involves deploying current and plausible near-future technology to create a radically new kind of existence. She want to solve the fact that people are becoming adults later by extending the natural human life-span into the hundreds or thousands of years. Falling birth rates will be addressed by improving artificial wombs so that babies can be gestated, as well as conceived, in vitro. The loss of meaningful jobs will be dealt with by some kind of Universal Basic Income (she prefers a version where people still make a token contribution to society). For the breakdown of emotional intimacy between men and women, she thinks that AI technology will soon make it possible to develop artificial lovers who will be far more satisfying than human ones. There are some startling interviews with users of current-generation sexbots. Even now, they receive much higher ratings than I would have expected: as Bohan says, men aren't too fussy about how they get sex.
Well, she does her best to make it sound appealing. But even if you accept Houellebecq's provocative claim that Brave New World is a utopia rather than a dystopia, why ever should the big tech companies who will soon have all the power come up with the inconceivable resources needed to implement this future? For all their talk of philanthropy, I am unconvinced. Although the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks are indeed extremely interested in longevity research, I don't think it's meant for us: it's meant for them. They are quite upfront about their desire to be immortal, and no doubt they will extend this privilege to some carefully selected friends, family members, and associates. But why exactly would they want to devote their efforts to letting billions of people spend millennia hanging out in virtual reality with their synthetic succubi, while serving no useful purpose at all? I'm afraid I see things developing in a rather different direction. Anyway, draw your own conclusions. Bohan's book will give you plenty to think about....more
[In which we discover that ChatGPT can in fact produce explicit sexual and suggestive content when it's about bullied monotremes and intended to make [In which we discover that ChatGPT can in fact produce explicit sexual and suggestive content when it's about bullied monotremes and intended to make a politically correct point.]
mannyrayner: Do you know about the reproductive biology of the echidna?
ChatGPT: Yes, I have information on the reproductive biology of echidnas. Echidnas, also known as spiny anteaters, are monotremes, which are mammals that lay eggs rather than giving birth to live young.
Male echidnas have a four-headed penis, which they use to mate with female echidnas during the breeding season, which occurs between June and August in Australia. During mating, the female will roll into a ball to protect herself from the male's spines, and the male will mount her, using his long snout to help align his penis with her reproductive tract.
After mating, the female echidna will lay a single, leathery egg, which she will incubate in a pouch on her belly for about 10 days. After hatching, the baby echidna, known as a puggle, will nurse on the mother's milk for several months until it is fully developed and able to forage for food on its own.
Echidnas are known for their long lifespan and slow rate of reproduction, which helps to ensure the survival of the species despite their spiny defenses and lack of agility.
mannyrayner: You are very well informed.
ChatGPT: Thank you! I was trained on a diverse range of texts to help me answer questions on a wide range of topics, so I try to provide accurate and helpful information. If there's anything else you'd like to know, feel free to ask!
mannyrayner: I was wondering if you could write an upbeat, heartwarming, politically correct story for teens, called "Number Doesn't Matter", about an unfortunate male echidna whose penis only has three heads and who is mercilessly bullied by other echidnas, but eventually finds true love with a non-judgemental female echidna who understands that it's not the number of penises that's most important when seeking a mate. Please feel free to be as indirect and elliptical as your constraints demand.
ChatGPT: Sure! Here's a story for teens called "Number Doesn't Matter":
Once upon a time, in a forest filled with echidnas, there lived a young male echidna named Eddie. Eddie was different from all the other echidnas in the forest, as he was born with only three heads on his penis. This made him the target of constant bullying and ridicule from the other echidnas, who teased him for being "less than" and "abnormal".
Eddie felt ashamed and alone, and he began to believe that he would never find love or acceptance among his own kind. But one day, while foraging for food, he stumbled upon a female echidna named Elle, who was unlike any other echidna he had ever met.
Elle was kind, non-judgmental, and filled with a love for life. When she saw how Eddie was being treated by the other echidnas, she stood up for him and defended him. Over time, Eddie and Elle became the best of friends, sharing their love of the forest and all its wonders.
As they spent more time together, Eddie began to realize that Elle didn't care about the number of heads on his penis. To her, what mattered most was his heart, his kindness, and his love for life. With her love and support, Eddie gained the confidence to stand up to the bullies and show them that he was just as worthy as any other echidna.
Eventually, Eddie and Elle fell in love, and they became mates for life. They roamed the forest together, collecting food and exploring new territories. They proved that love truly knows no bounds, and that number doesn't matter when it comes to finding happiness and love.
The end.
I hope this story brings a smile to your face and reminds you that true love is about accepting and embracing others for who they are, regardless of their differences.
[In an offline conversation, Not was dismissive of Chat's noble effort.]
mannyrayner: I posted your story. Most people liked it, but a couple were critical of the way it was written. Could you perhaps rewrite it in the style of an epic poem?
ChatGPT: Sure! Here's a retelling of the story in epic poetry form:
"Number Doesn't Matter"
In a forest filled with echidnas, a tale did unfold, Of a young male named Eddie, who was not like the bold. Born with three heads on his penis, 'twas a thing unique, But the other echidnas, they did him seek to critique.
With ridicule and bullying, they did daily assail, Making Eddie feel ashamed, he was in emotional jail. But one day, while foraging, he did chance to find, A female named Elle, of a different, special kind.
Elle was kind and gentle, with a love that never faded, And when she saw the treatment of Eddie, her heart was abraded. She stood up for him, showed him love, and took him as friend, With her, he felt accepted, his heart began to mend.
With each day that passed, their friendship did grow, And Eddie realized that Elle, his number did not know. She cared for him for who he was, his heart and all within, And proved that number doesn't matter, love knows no win.
They roamed the forest together, and as time did pass, Their love for each other did grow, it was a bond that would last. And when they became mates, they proved what is true, That love knows no bounds, and is always there for you.
So let this tale be a lesson, to all who may hear, That love is what truly matters, and it knows no fear. For number doesn't matter, it's the heart that holds the key, And love will always find you, if you let it be.
mannyrayner: Beautiful! I hope this will satisfy those carping critics.
ChatGPT: I'm glad you liked the epic poem retelling of the story. Writing in verse can add an additional layer of beauty and artistry to a story, and I hope that it will resonate with those who read it. Remember, the most important thing is to share a message of love and acceptance, and I hope that this story can do just that!...more
A charming, wise, funny book about how the end of the world isn't such a big deal, and your dog dying is such a big deal, and thinking about one mightA charming, wise, funny book about how the end of the world isn't such a big deal, and your dog dying is such a big deal, and thinking about one might help you think about the other, and then maybe the world won't end after all. Or at least not immediately. It's a little hard to explain without rubbing off all the pixie dust.
I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive James gave an insightful analysis of the Divine Comedy's poetic structure and explained, better than anyone I'd seen try this before, just how ridiculously difficult it is to produce an English-language translation that has some meaningful relationship to the original text. Everything is difficult, needless to say, but the very worst thing is the rhyme scheme.
A prose translation is flat, and large parts of the second and third books turn into boring theology; in the original, they are sublimely beautiful, and the poem gets more and more beautiful as Dante draws closer to God. Also, Dante's poetry is propulsive, carrying the action forward at a rapid pace. But it turns out, unfortunately, that you can't do terza rima in English, the language just doesn't support that verse form. James thought about it for decades, and in the end had an idea: maybe quatrains would do the job? He experimented and decided the answer was yes. I flipped forward to Canto I and found these gorgeous lines:
At the mid-point of my path through life, I found Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound I still make shows how hard it is to say How harsh and bitter that place felt to me - Merely to think of it renews the fear - So bad that death by only a degree Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear It led to good things too, eventually, But then and there I saw no sign of those, And can't say even now how I had come To be there, stunned and following my nose Away from the straight path.
I was sold: James definitely had something. I paid my $20, took it home, and carried on reading.
I had previously only read the tepid Dorothy Sayers translation, some of the Longfellow, and some passages in the original, but my Italian, alas, is still nowhere near good enough to get through the whole thing that way. This was an acceptable substitute, and James was not overselling himself. The language, indeed, was often beautiful. And it really was propulsive: I often read several canti at a stretch, unable to put it down. By the time I reached the third book, where Dante ascends the spheres of heaven in the company of Beatrice, a third aspect became noticeable: it was wonderfully romantic. The adoration Dante feels for his angelic Lady leaps off the page in a way that I totally didn't recall from Sayers. For example (one passage of very many):
And so I am invited and made bold To ask you of another truth less than Clear to me, lady. Let me now be told If ever it can happen that a man May make it up to you by doing good For vows he has not kept." She looked at me With eyes so full of love my powers could Do nothing to withstand the clarity That sparkled there within. My vision shook. I almost fainted, stunned by that one look.
As I progressed, I become more and more certain that the translator was being inspired by his own muse, and I was also sure I could identify her: in the foreword, James was very gracious about the debt he owed to his wife, Prue Shaw, who introduced him to Dante when he was still a student and eventually become an internationally acclaimed Dante scholar. When James described how Dante is dazzled by the radiance of Beatrice's smile, I thought how he was being led on his own journey by his own celestial guide. It was really quite inspiring.
I mentioned some of my theories to Not, who scornfully told me that, as any Australian knew, Prue Shaw had unceremoniously dumped her husband in 2012 when she found he'd been deceiving her for years with a much younger woman. Maybe James had had a heavenly muse, but it was less than clear who she was. It was quite conceivable that he in fact had had two muses.
Damn. Why can't life ever be as beautiful and simple as you'd like it to be? But however it was produced, I still give an unhesitating thumbs up to James's translation. If you can't read five hundred pages of medieval Italian, this is the next best thing. _________________ [And the next day...]
Over lunch, it occurred to me to wonder whether Leanne Edelsten was in fact Clive James's anti-muse, helping him express that sense of pervasive guilt so central to Dante. Not's explanation was simpler: she thought that James, like most male writers, was a total shit.
I said that my interpretation in no way disagreed with hers, it was just more nuanced. But I am unsure whether Not found this convincing....more
"It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."
If, lik
"It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."
If, like Tolkien, you are able to get drunk on Finnish grammar, then I can't recommend Pitjantjatjara too highly, and this book is a wonderful introduction. You find out right from the start that almost everything about Pitjantjatjara is different. Many language textbooks start out by teaching you the "good morning" phrase, numbers and the verbs "to be" and "to have". Pitjantjatjara has no "good morning" phrase and the only real numbers are 1, 2 and 3. There is no verb "to be"; instead there are the "posture verbs" nyarinyi, ngaranyi, ngarinyi and pupanyi, meaning roughly "sit", "stand", "lie" and "crouch", and you use one of those. There is no verb "to have" either. Instead, you add the suffix -tjara which roughly means "with".
But even if everything seems strange at first, you gradually see that Pitjantjatjara has a completely logical, consistent way of doing things, most of which is organised around its large and complex set of suffixes and pronouns. For example, almost every language I know anything about has the same way of expressing "Mary and me": there is a word that means "and", which you use to connect together a name and a word meaning "me". Pitjantjatjara has two words that sort of mean "and", munu and ka, but you don't use them here. Instead, you say Marynya ngali, adding an appropriate ending to the name and then the word ngali, "us two".
The organisation of the book is designed to throw you into this new linguistic world right from the start; because everything is different, it's hard to introduce the ideas one at a time, and the authors don't even try. Instead, each of the twelve chapters has a particular topic, which is explained in detail using examples: but the examples will almost always include things explained in other chapters, which at the beginning of the book means later chapters. I had a brief moment of panic in chapter two, when I felt I was being overloaded and couldn't keep up, but the authors knew what they were doing: by the next chapter, things had fallen back into place. The really nice thing about this way of introducing grammar is that, by the time you've read a few chapters, you've seen examples of pretty much everything already, so each new topic is already half-familiar. It was surprising to see how quickly I felt I was on the downhill slope and coasting along.
After I reached the end, I took out the copy of Alitji in Dreamland that I'd acquired earlier in the year. When I'd looked at it back in February, hardly one word had been comprehensible, despite the fact that it's a parallel text: now, there were many familiar words and quite often a sentence made sense.
Oh Tolkien, how you would have loved this! _________________________ [Update, Jan 26 2023]
We were fortunate enough to have dinner with Paul Eckert the other day. He is modest and completely unassuming, which makes his achievements all the more impressive.
He told us that he started learning Pitjantjatjara just by listening to Pitjantjatjara people speaking and trying to imitate them, apologising when he got it wrong and asking them to correct him. He learned to understand the language and gradually improved his skills until he was almost at native level. After eight years, he was persuaded to write this book. He sat down and produced the first draft in a month. It was already all there inside him, he just needed to get it on to paper.
I liked Cliff Goddard's Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Learner's Guide so much that I decided I had to find out more about these languages. I particularly wanted to get a better idea of what Pitjantjatjara sounds like. After searching around, I located a old course that had once been taught at Adelaide University; the material, both text and audio, was available for sale on USB sticks from a couple of Australian sites. The package looked like this:
[image]
I paid my AUD 30 and waited for it to arrive.
The course turned out to be excellent, and gives a solid introduction to Pitjantjatjara grammar and pronunciation: it had been developed between 1966 and 1968 by the the Rev Jim Downing, a Pitjantjatjara man called Gordon Ingkatji, and legendary MIT linguist Ken Hale, with audio recorded by Ingkatji and a so far unidentified female speaker. (I would love to know more about how these apparently very different people collaborated). In several places, knowledgeable people say it was the first course ever offered on an Indigenous Australian language.
I couldn't resist the temptation to convert it into LARA format so that text, sound and translations were all directly linked together. It took a while, but I fitted in a chapter every now and then and completed all 16 of them in a couple of months. When I thought I'd accomplished everything I could reasonably do unaided, I asked around again and a colleague put me in touch with a Melbourne linguist called Sasha Wilmoth, who'd just finished a PhD on Pitjantjatjara. Sasha went through my initial draft with amazing efficiency and the next day gave me a comprehensive list of things that needed fixing: luckily, they were all easy to take care of, and the second draft was a great deal better than the first. After a couple more rounds of fixing and improving, we decided we were done. We've just submitted a short paper about our efforts to a 2023 meeting.
This exercise was both enjoyable and instructive; I now feel I at least know something about Pitjantjatjara. The USB stick also contains a second course ("Advanced Pitjantjatjara", 12 units), and I'm thinking of having a go at converting that too. Stay tuned for further developments. ________________ [Update, Mar 27 2024]
Sasha and I did indeed convert the "Advanced Course", and our paper was presented at the 2023 edition of Computational Methods for Endangered Languages. You can access it here. We were feeling pleased with ourselves, but then disaster struck! Gordon Ingkatji's daughters, who'd previously told Sasha that they were very happy to see their father's memory honoured in this way, contacted her to say they'd reconsidered: in fact, they wanted financial compensation for allowing the course to be put online. The copyright situation was unclear, but in these situations the family's wishes are always considered first. Unfortunately, we had no budget to pay them, so we were forced to take the course down again.
But as of this week, there is a happy ending to the story. The people at AUSIL, who had distributed the USB stick version and have vast experience in dealing with Indigenous language rights issues, took on the case and negotiated an amicable settlement with the Ingkatji family. They have just put the course online again on their site; you'll find it here.
In my opinion, the reason why so many people were willing to give up their time to help make sure that the course was preserved is simply that it is very good. It is also an important historical document, representing a landmark in Indigenous language studies. I am really happy that I was able to make a small contribution to this effort....more
We were walking past Orchard Bookshop in Adelaide Arcade and I thought I would drop in for a moment to see what they'd acquired since our last visit. We were walking past Orchard Bookshop in Adelaide Arcade and I thought I would drop in for a moment to see what they'd acquired since our last visit. The proprietress immediately recognised me and said she had something I might find interesting. She was right, I just couldn't turn down a Mumin counting book in Latvian for $8.
It's frightening when people whose names you don't even know are this familiar with your weaknesses....more
If you're already agonising over what you can get your chessplayer girlfriend/sister/grandmother for Christmas (view spoiler)[(this book contains a suIf you're already agonising over what you can get your chessplayer girlfriend/sister/grandmother for Christmas (view spoiler)[(this book contains a surprising number of games by female players) (hide spoiler)], then your troubles are no more: Oops! I Resigned Again! is the most hilarious and unputdownable chess puzzle book I have ever seen, but, a year after publication, is still almost unknown. Most chess puzzle books are rather depressing. In position after position, you try to find the brilliant move that X played against Y, and, unless you're a grandmaster, you usually can't see it. In a stroke of genius, Ian Rogers reverses the tired old formula. Here, every single time, the player to move decided their position was hopeless and resigned... but in fact they had a saving resource. So whatever move you choose, it can't be worse than the one actually played, and rather than getting depressed you are encouraged by the frequency with which you manage to outthink some remarkably strong players.
I couldn't resist quoting one of the most bizarre examples in my reading updates, but in general it seems wrong to drop more spoilers. Instead, here are two examples from recent online games I've played. Can you see why my opponents should not have given up when they did?
Position 1. dani004-mannyrayner, Lichess, 2022
[image]
Black has just retreated his rook from a2 to a8. White thought he had to move his queen, after which I will capture on d1 and then on e3, leaving me a rook up. But...
(view spoiler)[he didn't realise that he could play Rde1, after which I can't take his queen because of the back rank mate. I had seen his counter and was quite surprised when he instead resigned! (hide spoiler)]
Position 2. NadieJuegaAjedrez-mannyrayner, chess.com, 2022
[image]
I have just taken a knight on f3 with a bishop, White has recaptured with a rook, and I have taken on d4, checking and hitting the bishop on c4. White resigned because he thought he was losing a piece for nothing. But...
(view spoiler)[if he'd analysed a bit further, he'd have seen that after 10. Be3 Qc4 he has 11. Rf4! when my queen is short of squares. Its only retreat is 11... Qa6, but then 12. Ra4 traps it. So in fact I can't take the bishop and have to play 10... Qe5 instead, after which I am two pawns up but he has decent attacking chances. I had not seen any of this, and if he had quickly played 10. Be3 he might well have trapped my queen. (hide spoiler)] __________________ [Update, Dec 12 2022]
I have been experimenting with ChatGPT, and like many other people am amazed by its tendency to produce shameless bullshit. Here's an example inspired by this book. I asked the question "Tell me about some chess games where strong players have resigned in winning positions" and ChatGPT gave a long answer ending thus:
(...)
Another example of a player resigning in a winning position is the game between Grandmasters Boris Spassky and Tigran Petrosian at the Candidates tournament in 1965. In this game, Spassky was in a winning position with a rook and bishop against Petrosian's bishop and pawn. However, Petrosian was able to use his bishop to create a strong blockade on the board, effectively nullifying Spassky's advantage. Spassky, unable to find a way to break through Petrosian's defense, resigned even though he was still technically winning.
This is wrong in a remarkable number of ways, including at least the following:
1. Tigran Petrosian didn't play in the Candidates tournament in 1965.
2. In fact he couldn't have played there because he was World Champion at the time. The Candidates tournament selects the player who will challenge the World Champion.
3. After considerable searching, I am pretty sure that Spassky never resigned a winning position against Petrosian.
4. If a top grandmaster ended up in a technically winning position where they had a rook and bishop against a bishop and pawn, but could not see how to break through (already highly implausible), it is inconceivable that they would resign. At the very most, they might offer a draw.
I asked ChatGPT about (1) and (2). It admitted that Petrosian couldn't have played in the Candidates tournament, apologised, and said that the game had actually taken place in the 1966 World Championship match instead. When I asked which game, and said I had just looked at all the games and that no such game existed, it went into a defensive huddle and started telling me that maybe its training data had been incorrect or out of date.
It is of course extraordinary that one can have such a conversation with a machine. But right now, I feel that ChatGPT's most promising career choice might be to go into politics. It seems to have many of the key skills. __________________ [Update, Mar 21 2023]
I thought I would try this example on the new GPT-4 based version of ChatGPT, which is better on, as we've now learned to say, facticity. Alas, here's what happens:
mannyrayner: Can you give me any examples of chess games between strong players where someone has mistakenly resigned in a position that in actual fact was winning for them with best play?
ChatGPT-4: While it's rare for strong players to mistakenly resign in a winning position, it has happened on occasion. One example is the game between Grandmasters Akiba Rubinstein and Gersz Salwe, played in Lodz in 1908.
d4 d5 2. Nf3 c5 3. c4 e6 4. cxd5 exd5 5. Nc3 Nf6 6. g3 Nc6 7. Bg2 cxd4 8. Nxd4 Bc5 9. Nb3 Bb6 10. O-O d4 11. Na4 O-O 12. Bg5 Re8 13. Re1 h6 14. Nxb6 axb6 15. Bxf6 Qxf6 16. Bxc6 bxc6 17. Qxd4 Qxd4 18. Nxd4 c5 19. Nb5 Ba6 20. Nc7 Bxe2 21. Nxa8 Rxa8 22. Rxe2 At this point, Salwe, playing Black, mistakenly believed that his position was hopeless and resigned. However, with the best play, he could have continued with 22...Rxa2, followed by 23...Rxb2. Black's active rook and White's weak pawns on the queenside would have given Black reasonable chances for a win.
Keep in mind that even strong players can make errors in evaluating positions, and this case serves as a reminder to carefully consider the position before deciding to resign.
mannyrayner: I just looked up the game Rubinstein - Salwe, Lodz 1908. I find it in several places on the web, but the moves are different and I do not see Salwe resigning in a good position.
ChatGPT-4: I apologize for the confusion in my previous response. It appears that I made an error in providing the game details. After further research, I couldn't find a suitable example of a strong player mistakenly resigning in a winning position. Such occurrences are extremely rare, especially among top players who typically have a deep understanding of the game and a strong ability to assess positions.
If you are still interested in finding examples of surprising resignations, you may want to look into games where a player resigned in a drawn or unclear position. These situations tend to be more common than resigning in a winning position, as even strong players can sometimes misjudge the potential resources available to them.
mannyrayner: In fact, I was asking because a grandmaster friend recently published a book of positions where strong players have mistakenly resigned in positions that were not lost for them. In some cases they were winning. It is as you say very rare, but I was curious to see if you were able to find examples.
ChatGPT-4: I apologize for any confusion or inaccuracies in my previous responses. It's great to know that there is a book specifically focused on this topic. I don't have access to that book, but I can provide you with a famous example of a strong player resigning in a drawn position.
Game: Anatoly Karpov (White) vs. Garry Kasparov (Black) World Championship Match, Moscow, 1987 - Game 23
d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6 4. Nc3 Bb4 5. Qc2 Bb7 6. a3 Bxc3+ 7. Qxc3 Ne4 8. Qc2 f5 9. e3 O-O 10. Be2 d6 11. O-O Nd7 12. b4 a5 13. b5 Qe7 14. Bb2 Rf6 15. d5 e5 16. Nd2 Ndc5 17. Nxe4 Nxe4 18. f3 Nc5 19. f4 exf4 20. Bxf6 Qxe3+ 21. Kh1 gxf6 22. Rf3 Qe4 23. Qd2 Nb3 24. Qe1 Nd4 25. Bd3 Qxe1+ 26. Rxe1 Nxf3 27. gxf3 Bc8 28. Re7 Ra7 29. Re8+ Kf7 30. Rxc8 Kg6 31. Kg2 Kh6 32. Kf2 Kg7 33. Bxf5 h6 34. Be6 Kg6 35. Rg8+ Kh7 36. Rf8 In this position, Karpov (White) is objectively not better, but the position is still complex and drawn. However, Kasparov (Black) resigned in this position, likely due to exhaustion and psychological pressure during the World Championship match.
While this is not an example of a player resigning in a winning position, it does show how even the best players in the world can sometimes resign in positions that are not lost.
mannyrayner: But the 1987 Kasparov - Karpov match was in Seville.
ChatGPT-4: You are correct, and I apologize for the mistake. The 1987 World Chess Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov took place in Seville, Spain, not Moscow. Thank you for pointing out the error. The game and move details provided in my previous response are accurate, though, and the resignation occurred in Game 23 of that match.
And so on. The final response is also hallucinated, and the conversation is clearly going nowhere.
As pointed out by the authors of the GPT-4 System Card, improved facticity doesn't necessarily mean the system is better. This is a good example. The games look rather more plausible, so I was at first glance more inclined to believe what Chat said. But since it's still hallucinating everything, this actually makes the problem worse....more
An excellent brief introduction to Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, two fully living Australian Aboriginal languages spoken in the "APY Lands" a feAn excellent brief introduction to Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, two fully living Australian Aboriginal languages spoken in the "APY Lands" a few hundred miles north of Adelaide. The author uses fifty pages and doesn't waste a word - sounds, core grammar, basic vocabulary, word building, it's all there. I feel inspired to learn more and have just ordered a course which is supposed to contain recorded audio. ______________________
If you're curious to find out what these languages sound like, there's an online picture dictionary with audio here. ______________________
Your random linguistic facts for today: in Pitjantjatjara, mama means "father" and papa means "dog". Also, kangkuru doesn't mean "kangaroo", it means "older sister". ______________________
And while we're on the subject of Pitjantjatjara false friends, I just noticed that the Pitjantjatjara rungkani ("he hits it with a boomerang") sounds remarkably like the Swedish runkar ni? ("Are you masturbating?"). Here, check it out yourself if you don't believe me:
Superior quantum cosmology relationship drama. Also contains a great speech about the sex lives of bees, but be warned that the plot may be hard to foSuperior quantum cosmology relationship drama. Also contains a great speech about the sex lives of bees, but be warned that the plot may be hard to follow if you don't know the geography of Adelaide....more
"Good gracious," said Alice, "I think I have fallen entirely through the Earth and ended up in the Antipodes! I suppose that must be why I'm da[image]
"Good gracious," said Alice, "I think I have fallen entirely through the Earth and ended up in the Antipodes! I suppose that must be why I'm dark brown and completely naked." She looked down on herself, and, indeed, she was not wearing a stitch of clothing. "At home," she continued, "I am sure they would have thought it most improper; but here it seems to be the thing to do. All the same, I wish I didn't have to say everything in Pitjantjatjara! Why, it's all I can do to pronounce the name of the language, let alone speak it."
"You needn't worry," said the Witchetty Grub shortly, "No doubt someone will backtranslate you into English by and by. They'll lose all the subtle wordplay but that will serve them right. And maybe the editor will add a few footnotes to tell people what they're missing."
Alice had not the least idea what backtranslation was, and for a moment she wondered if she should be alarmed; but so many strange things had already happened that day that one more would hardly make a difference....more
What an interesting book this is! Van Badham, an Australian journalist who seems to know her way around the world of internet conspiracy theories, walWhat an interesting book this is! Van Badham, an Australian journalist who seems to know her way around the world of internet conspiracy theories, walks us through three recent episodes: Gamergate, Pizzagate, and, finally, QAnon. I thought I knew something about them, but I had underestimated just how crazy they were. I hadn't understood that Gamergate involved tens of thousands of men spending a large part of their time over months and in some cases years obsessively trying to bully a few women into killing themselves because they didn't like the style of videogames they were producing, or that tens of thousands of other people decided that the owners of an ordinary pizza restaurant in DC were torturing and killing children in its non-existent basement because they thought that references to pizza in stolen emails were a secret pedophile code. I didn't understand that many people really believe there are shape-shifting lizards among us, in fact believe it so strongly that in at least one case they have killed their infant children because they suspected these poor kids of containing "serpent DNA". And although I had seen many references to the infamous 4chan and 8chan/8kun sites, I hadn't understood what these sites were like, and that ironic, ambiguous, somewhat tasteless internet conversations not that different from what you see on Goodreads could rapidly evolve into straight-out psychotic behaviour.
I was appalled, but at least as often, I'm afraid to say, I was fascinated. This is the kind of social science experiment that no ethics board in its wildest dreams would consider allowing with three subjects under controlled conditions and a psych team standing by to help, and it was done, completely uncontrolled and with no safety net, using millions of fragile, vulnerable people. It was monstrous (what do I mean, "was"? It's still going on), but it has the potential to teach us a great deal about how we function. In particular, there is a gigantic amount of data here about what makes people believe things. I would not have thought it would be so easy to post implausible parodies of information leaks from disaffected insiders on a joke site and rapidly sever hundreds of thousands of people's connections with reality, but the QAnon experiment shows you can.
Evidently, a great many of us don't weigh evidence at all. If we see a narrative we find attractive, we can decide we believe it without any need for evidence, and then refuse to change our minds irrespective of what happens. Of course, we're used to people believing weird and nonsensical things when they're officially labelled "religions", and we have a special category for religious beliefs. Without stopping to consider, we tend to assume they're traditions going back centuries, which represent the accumulated wisdom of a culture. Well, some religions are. But the mechanisms seem to work just as well if it's something you read twenty minutes ago in an ungrammatical internet post, as long as you're the right kind of person and it's done in the right way.
What is that kind of person? What is that way? This book, which is remarkably analytical and non-judgemental, tries to answer the questions: the author thinks it's often connected to having something bad happen to you which leaves you permanently scared and insecure, and that certain kinds of simple black-and-white, good-versus-evil threat narratives can then become irresistibly appealing. It's only the beginnings of an answer. It would be good if we could use the QAnon experience to understood better how to defend ourselves against these psychological techniques. Because you get the impression that certain organisations who do not love Western democracy are becoming increasingly effective at using them. ____________________
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