Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

If you’ve ever vented to ChatGPT about troubles in life, the responses can sound empathetic. The chatbot delivers affirming support, and—when prompted—even gives advice like a best friend. Unlike older chatbots, the seemingly “empathic” nature of the latest AI models has already galvanized the psychotherapy community, with many wondering if  they can assist therapy. The ability to infer other people’s mental states is a core aspect of everyday interaction. Called “theory of mind,” it lets us guess what’s going on in someone else’s mind, often by interpreting speech. Are they being sarcastic? Are they lying? Are they implying something that’s not overtly said?

“People care about what other people think and expend a lot of effort thinking about what is going on in other minds,” wrote Dr. Cristina Becchio and colleagues at the University Medical Center Hanburg-Eppendorf in a new study in Nature Human Behavior.”

In the study, the scientists asked if ChatGPT and other similar chatbots—which are based on machine learning algorithms called large language models—can also guess other people’s mindsets. Using a series of psychology tests tailored for certain aspects of theory of mind, they pitted two families of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT series and Meta’s LLaMA 2, against over 1,900 human participants. GPT-4, the algorithm behind ChatGPT, performed at, or even above, human levels in some tasks, such as identifying irony. Meanwhile, LLaMA 2 beat both humans and GPT at detecting faux pas—when someone says something they’re not meant to say but don’t realize it. To be clear, the results don’t confirm LLMs have theory of mind. Rather, they show these algorithms can mimic certain aspects of this core concept that “defines us as humans,” wrote the authors.

More here.

For Victor Jara

—A tribute to Victor Jara

Victor Jara
Victor Jara

Your name
bears the sound
of guitarra
your instrument of love

Victor Jara
Victor Jara

Your name
bears the sound
of tierra
the earth you cherished
like your mother’s songs

How I wished
there was no need
for yet another poem
dedicated to hands
that still sing and bleed

How I wished
the silence of this poem
was shattered now
by bullets of love
from your guitar

Victor guitarra
Victor tierra
Victor ah Jara

by John Agard
from Poetry International

About Victor Jara

Speak

Now is the time to speak
Lips not sealed
Body unbroken
Blood coursing still
Through your veins

Now is the time to speak
Look
The iron glows red
Like your blood
The chain lies open
Like your lips

Now is the time to speak

Speak
For the tide of life runs out

Speak
For truth and honor shall not wait

Speak
Say all that needs to be said today

by Anjum Altaf
from Transgressions- Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
LG Publishers, 2019

Bruce Hood at Aeon:

My own tutee students, whom I met on a regular basis, were reporting poor mental health or asking for extensions because they were unable to meet deadlines that were stressing them out. They were overly obsessed with marks and other performance outcomes, and this impacted not only on them, but also on the teaching and support staff who were increasingly dealing with alleviating student anxiety. Students wanted more support that most felt was lacking and, in an effort to deal with the issue, the university had invested heavily, making more provision for mental health services. The problem with this strategy, however, is that by the time someone seeks out professional services, they are already at a crisis point. I felt compelled to do something.

At the time, Bristol University was described in the British press as a ‘toxic’ environment, but this was an unfair label as every higher education institution was, and still is, experiencing a similar mental health crisis. Even in the Ivy League universities in the United States, there was a problem, as I discovered when I became aware of a course on positive psychology that had become the most popular at Yale in the spring of 2018. On reading about the course, I was somewhat sceptical that simple interventions could make much difference until I learned that Yale’s ‘Psychology and the Good Life’ course was being delivered by a colleague of mine, Laurie Santos, who I knew would not associate herself with anything flaky.

That autumn term of 2018, I decided to try delivering a free lunchtime series of lectures, ‘The Science of Happiness’, based on the Yale course.

More here.

Sigal Samuel at Vox:

For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them.

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity.

They’re not the only ones who’ve left. Since last November — when OpenAI’s board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman only to see him quickly claw his way back to power — at least five more of the company’s most safety-conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out.

What’s going on here?

More here.

Atul Dev in The Guardian:

Today, Amit Shah isn’t home minister for Gujarat, but all of India. From the heart of power in Delhi, he is in charge of domestic policy, commands the capital city’s police force, and oversees the Indian state’s intelligence apparatus. He is, simply put, the second-most powerful man in the country. With the BJP poised to win the current general election, he is all but certain to remain so for at least the next five years. For Modi, he is what Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were for George W Bush – the muscle as well as the brain – rolled into one. Over the past decade, he has been the key architect in remaking India according to the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology.

A defining feature of life in India today is the suffocating atmosphere of menace and threat to critics of the government. Shah is the face and embodiment of this fear, which lurks everywhere, from the newsrooms to the courtrooms, and which inspires a sense of alarm that is bigger than the sum of the facts and anecdotes that can be amassed to illustrate it.

More here.

Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian:

Sam Taylor, 53, was living in rural France with four well-received novels to his name when he realised that he wasn’t going to be able to support his family through writing alone. After being turned down for bar work in nearby Lourdes, he decided to try literary translating, starting with Laurent Binet’s Goncourt-winning novel HHhH. So began an award-winning second career that has seen him work with high-profile authors including Leila Slimani and David Diop. Now based in Texas, he has returned to novel-writing with The Two Loves of Sophie Strom. Centring on a provocative idea, it opens in 1930s Vienna as antisemitic neighbours torch 13-year-old Max Spiegelman’s home. In a parallel universe, the fire leaves Max an orphan, and he’s adopted by an Aryan family who rename him Hans and encourage him to join the Hitler-Jugend. At night, Max and Hans, on opposing sides of history, dream of each other’s lives.

Where did the idea come from?
Weirdly enough, the spark came from a line in my first novel [The Republic of Trees, 2005], about the night self and the day self, the waking self and the sleeping self. It’s sliding doors, except the twist is Max and Hans are dreaming about each other, so they’re aware of each other’s lives.

More here.

Richard Cohen at Lapham’s Quarterly:

William Ewart Gladstone was Britain’s prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894, a member of Parliament for more than sixty years, a brilliant and passionate orator, an accomplished writer, and an indefatigable social reformer. Lord Kilbracken, his private secretary, estimated that if a figure of 100 could represent the energy of an ordinary man and 200 that of an exceptional one, Gladstone’s energy would be represented by a figure of at least 1,000.

That’s some multiple. But then I vividly remember the day a Benedictine monk walked into my high school classroom and told us, “Some people are more alive than others. Even permanently so.” I find that true to my own experience, even if it is hard to state clearly in what form such vitality exists.

There are over a dozen common forms of energy, as usually itemized, from chemical, gravitational, and electromagnetic to nuclear, thermal, and wind. It is a formidable register—but human energy rarely appears in such listings.

more here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

The day when human sperm and eggs can be grown in the laboratory has inched a step closer, with the discovery of a way to recreate a crucial developmental step in a dish¹. The advance, described 20 May in Nature, addresses a major hurdle: how to ensure that the chemical tags on the DNA and associated proteins in artificially produced sperm and eggs are placed properly. These tags are part of a cell’s ‘epigenome’ and can influence whether genes are turned on or off. The epigenome changes over a person’s lifetime; during the development of the cells that will eventually give rise to sperm or eggs, these marks must be wiped clean and then reset to their original state.

“Epigenetic reprogramming is key to making the next generation,” says Mitinori Saitou, a stem-cell biologist at Kyoto University in Japan, and a co-author of the paper. He and his team worked out how to activate this reprogramming — something that had been one of the biggest challenges in generating human sperm and eggs in the laboratory, he says. But Saitou is quick to note that there are further steps left to conquer, and that the epigenetic reprogramming his lab has achieved is not perfect. “There is still much work to be done and considerable time required to address these challenges,” agrees Fan Guo, a reproductive epigeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing.

More here.

Matthew Longo at The Point:

In Dutch Golden Age art, the normal is odd, and the extraordinary is ordinary. The saying in Moser’s title—“upside-down world”—derives from a Dutch expression, “de omgekeerde wereld or de wereld op zijn kop [the world stood on its head],” used to describe “when the normal order of things is reversed.” Carel Fabritius’s famous painting, The Goldfinch (1654), is a good example. It is a simple portrait of a bird chained to its feeding box. “Nothing about it should make it unforgettable—but it is unforgettable,” Moser writes.

What makes these paintings so recognizable is that their ordinary is our ordinary too. No one better exemplifies this than Vermeer, whose work foregrounds individual subjectivity, especially in its modern, secular form. This comes out clearly in his use of light—crisp, outrageous even, often streaming in from an open window—which casts his subjects into relief and lifts them from their settings. In The Milkmaid (ca. 1657-58), a woman, front-lit, pours milk from a jug; the backdrop behind her is bare. Originally a rack had been affixed to the wall, which Vermeer later painted over. He preferred the contrast of his subject’s body against the plain wall, bringing her out of the clutter and into the light.

more here.

Sam Leith in The Guardian:

‘Catland”, as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other “Catland”, the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth.

For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.

In 50 chapters, Hughes tours these two Catlands using Wain’s life story – “which runs, or rather zigzags, through this book” – to stitch it all together.

More here.

Nikki Crowley in The Conversation:

I am a neurobiologist focused on understanding the chemicals and brain regions that underlie addiction to alcohol. I study how neuropeptides – unique signaling molecules in the prefrontal cortex, one of the key brain regions in decision-making, risk-taking and reward – are altered by repeated exposure to binge alcohol consumption in animal models.

My lab focuses on understanding how things like alcohol alter these brain systems before diagnosable addiction, so that we can better inform efforts toward both prevention and treatment.

More here.

John McWhorter in Persuasion:

Donald Trump is incapable of meaningful participation in such an event. Only in the sense that “match” can apply to both chess and mud wrestling could the word “debate” apply both to the Kennedy-Nixon event and to Trump’s on-stage behavior. Trump cannot help but distort a debate into a cage-fight. He will, again, shamelessly lie and endlessly interrupt.

This is especially problematic because Trump’s behavior during such events can be misleadingly seductive. Being highly focused on the details of political issues is by no means a human universal, and probably should not be. But this means that what can determine elections, especially with our modern media, is charisma. To many, Trump’s unplugged alpha splatter lends an enticing sense of vigor, strength, and even leadership quality.

More here.

Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

Earlier this year, the singer and songwriter Billie Eilish, who is twenty-two, became the youngest two-time Oscar winner in history, collecting the Best Original Song award for “What Was I Made For?,” a delicate existential ballad that she co-wrote for the film “Barbie.” (She also won in 2022, for “No Time to Die,” a moody and portentous Bond theme.) Incidentally, Eilish is also the youngest person ever to have a clean sweep of all four of the main Grammy categories (Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year), which she achieved in 2020, for her début LP, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” At that year’s ceremony, moments before Album of the Year was announced, Eilish can be seen mouthing, “Please don’t be me”; onstage, standing alongside her brother Finneas O’Connell, who is also her co-writer and producer, she seemed bewildered, if not mortified. “We wrote an album about depression, and suicidal thoughts, and climate change,” O’Connell told the crowd. “We stand up here confused and grateful.” It’s both heartening and slightly mystifying that Eilish, who writes sombre, idiosyncratic, goth-tinged electro-pop about her loneliness and boredom, has become such a lodestone for industry accolades.

more here.

Pedro Lemebel at The Paris Review:

On the edge of the Alameda, practically bumping up against the old Church of Saint Francis, the gay club flashes a fuchsia neon sign that sparks the sinful festivities. An invitation to go down the steps and enter the colorful furnace of music-fever sweating on the dance floor. The fairy parade descends the uneven staircase like goddesses of a Mapuche Olympus. High and mighty, their stride gliding right over the threadbare carpet. Magnificent and exacting as they adjust the safety pins in their freshly ironed pants. Practically queens, if not for the loose red stitches of a quickie fix. Practically stars, except for the fake jeans logo tattooed on one of the asscheeks.

Some are practically teenagers, in bright sportswear and Adidas sneakers, wrapped in springtime’s pastel colors, healthy glow on loan from a blush compact. Practically girls, if not for the creased faces and the frightful bags under their eyes. Giddy from rushing to get there, they show up tittering each night at the dance cathedral inside the basement of an old Santiago cinema, where you can still see the black-and-gold Etruscan friezes and Hellenic columns, where the stench of sweaty seat cushions hits hard once you finally get past the burly bouncer at the door.

more here.

Sam Adams in Slate:

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis took 41 years to make. It might take as long to understand. Coppola’s magnum opus, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last night, is a movie of extraordinary highs and baffling lows, alternately dazzling and confounding. Sometimes, in the same moment, it’s both. When I asked colleagues who’d seen it—at a remote early-morning screening, added at the last minute to accommodate Coppola’s preference for IMAX—they looked at me like the mute humans in the Planet of the Apes movies, as if their powers of speech had abruptly and unexpectedly deserted them. No one wants to trash an elderly legend’s passion project, one that, after decades of trying and failing to get it made, he finally financed with some $120 million of his own money—not to mention one that is dedicated to his late wife, Eleanor, who died last month. But it’s also a film that defies and even actively resists description, one that sounds even loopier in summary than its 138 minutes feel. You have to see it to believe it. And even then, you may not.

More here.