Edgar Dubourg, Valentin Thouzeau, Thomas Beuchot, Constant Bonard, Pascal Boyer, et al, in a new paper:

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens.The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology–in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of interindividual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the patterns of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate.To generate this review, we (1) listed more than 70 adaptive challenges humans faced in the course of their evolution, (2) identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, (3) specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism(i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and (4) linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.

More here.

Jeremiah Johnson at Asterisk:

Some of the largest and most notable prediction markets to date have been around elections. The only problem? Prediction markets simply aren’t very good at political predictions. Markets for major U.S. elections are some of the deepest prediction markets anywhere: billions of dollars bet, millions of daily trades, and huge amounts of press. In theory, the larger the market, the more accurate the predictions. But in the markets with the biggest spotlight, we see a lot of strange stuff. Predictions that don’t line up with common sense. Odds that seem to defy reality. Obviously noncredible market movements. To figure out why, we’ll have to explore the underlying mechanisms that make markets work, and why the typical user of political prediction markets may not behave in the ways we expect.

More here.  Scott Alexander’s comments on this article here.

Adrian Searle at The Guardian:

Coming upon an Andre as you turn a corner in a gallery can be a lovely surprise. But for all the smaller controversies it has generated, it has become almost impossible to look down at Andre’s bricks, to tread his floors of metal plates, or gaze at his constructions of cut ash and cedar timbers, without thinking of the death of the young Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, Andre’s third wife, who died in a fall from Andre’s 34th floor apartment in lower Manhattan, one night in September 1985.

The two had been drinking, and were alone. Neighbours had heard them arguing. Mendieta was 36, and they had been married eight months. Two days later Andre was charged over her death. He was never found guilty. After Mendieta’s death, Andre’s career faltered. He was called “the OJ of the art world”, in reference to OJ Simpson, and his shows were picketed. At one New York opening, more than 500 protesters showed up with placards reading “Where is Ana Mendieta?”

more here.

Joseph Horowitz at The American Scholar:

The biggest recent find in classical music was the discovery that in 1940, Sergei Rachmaninoff was privately recorded by the conductor Eugene Ormandy. Seated at Ormandy’s piano, he played through his new Symphonic Dances, which Ormandy would soon premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Singularly, Rachmaninoff never permitted his public performances to be broadcast—so this surreptitious home recording is the best evidence we have of what Rachmaninoff’s legendary pianism sounded like outside the confines of recording studios sucked clean of the oxygen a body of listeners can activate.

Rachmaninoff’s RCA recordings are justly famous. They document his imperious, interpretive mastery, embellished with miracles of color and texture. But they are also emotionally controlled. When we eavesdrop on Rachmaninoff playing privately for Ormandy, the cork is out of the bottle: his keyboard presence surges with cataracts of feeling and sound. (It’s all documented in a three-CD set, Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances, issued in 2018 on the Marston label.)

more here.

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Forbidden Desire, Noel Malcolm’s sober and footnote-heavy history of male homosexuality between 1400 and 1750, has some friskier bedfellows: on Amazon it shares its title with a slew of hairy chested bromances, one or two Sapphic romps, and a sulphurous tale about a witch’s affair with a tormented demon. Against such competition, Malcolm fields a cast that includes lustful Turkish potentates, predatory Catholic priests, corruptible scullions and smooth-cheeked choristers, together with two English kings who allegedly fooled around with virile young favourites. But mostly the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them, are left to satisfy their desires in private; the historian’s concern is the forbidding religious commandments that the same-sex couples flouted and the crazily brutal penalties imposed by laws that purported to uphold the divine order of the universe.

Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death. In the 15th century, sodomy in Venice was punished by decapitation, after which the corpses of the malefactors were burned to ensure that no trace of them remained. Because it was unlawful to kill an ordained man, a lecherous cleric was locked in a cage in the Piazza San Marco and left to starve in full view of a gloating populace. In Florence a boy aged 15 was castrated on the scaffold, then fatally sodomised with a hot iron poker. A Dutch youth placed in the pillory was pelted with filth and bombarded with stones, which finally finished him off. Others were sentenced to row themselves to death as galley slaves; the lucky ones, in a bizarre act of mercy, had their noses, not their heads or penises, chopped off.

More here.

From Nature:

For the past decade, Collinge and his team have studied people in the United Kingdom who in childhood received growth hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers to treat medical conditions including short stature. The latest study finds that, decades later, some of these people developed signs of early-onset dementia. The dementia symptoms, such as memory and language problems, were diagnosed clinically and in some patients appeared alongside plaques of the sticky protein amyloid-beta in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors suggest that this amyloid protein, which was present in the hormone preparations, was ‘seeded’ in the brains and caused the damage.

The work builds on the team’s previous studies of people who received cadaver-derived growth hormone, a practice that Britain stopped in 1985. In 2015, Collinge’s team described² the discovery of amyloid-beta deposits in the post-mortem brains of four people who had been treated with the growth hormone. These people had died in middle-age of the deadly neurological condition Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is caused by infectious, misfolded proteins called prions. The prions were present in batches of the growth hormone. The four people analysed in that study died before clinical signs related to the amyloid build-up might have been observed. But the presence of these amyloid plaques in blood vessels in their brain suggested they would have developed a condition called cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) — which causes bleeding in the brain and is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease.

More here.

by Terese Svoboda

The first video portapacks arrived in the 1970s, cameras that skipped the lab and allowed the cameraman to be mobile, but they were so expensive only those who had connections with a TV station could experiment with them. Or if you had a rich aunt who needed to document a wedding, sometimes exorbitant rentals were available. Those with the ties to TV stations became the pioneers of art video. The rest of us painfully wove our laurels out of what could be cadged or granted. The tech, always changing, improved year by year, as did access and the imagery. We were offered new ways to think about color, resolution, and the translation of experience to video. Seeing invention at work as each new video tool appeared – sometimes developed by the artists themselves – was thrilling.

I’m reminded of that thrill every time I read the rather pedestrian-sounding Green Car Reports, a daily survey of the wildly innovative engineering teams who are pushing the market to accept what’s going to save the planet. Not that experimental video had quite that lofty aim, not even the neighborhood verite cable programs were that high-minded, but early video did require persuasive skill and constant tech fooling around in order to share the fruits of our clumsy innovations.

I don’t own a car. Never have I taken the slightest bit of interest in cars. I couldn’t tell a Chrysler from a GTO. Whoops! Are they the same? But about a decade after I weaned myself off video tech – tiring, at last, of always having to learn new skills  – I became fascinated with the Jetson-future-feeling surrounding electric cars. Once again I could see invention unfolding with a capital I, creation in battle with capitalism trying to outrace the death of the planet. Like Nikola Tesla vs. Edison quarreling over AC vs. DC power, only we’re all going over Niagara Falls.^[1] Read more »

Paul Bloom at Small Potatoes:

Why do we enjoy showing and sharing?

Showing first. A certain sort of evolutionary psychologist (like me, on some days) would point out that, when properly done, showing impresses others. It’s similar to making people laugh or surprising them with a sharp observation. Maybe we enjoy showing, then, because it raises our status. It makes us more desirable as a friend, partner, or lover.

A different, but compatible, explanation applies to both showing and sharing. It involves empathy, and like many clever thoughts about empathy, it comes from Adam Smith.

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data.

This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. From all accounts, they’ve made a strong case that the largest LLMs are not just parroting what they’ve seen before.

More here.

Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

One unfortunate feature of American politics is that both Republicans and Democrats tend to work themselves into a frenzy over the other party’s presidential candidate, no matter who it is. To put it bluntly, both sides cry wolf all the time. Yes, I am a Democrat, but Democrats do this too — I’m old enough to remember when people I knew went crazy over poor old Mitt Romney saying that he had “binders full of women”, denouncing him as a sexist when all he meant to say was that he personally knew lots of highly skilled women in the business world.

Anyway, because we cry wolf all the time in American politics, it’s easy to dismiss criticisms of Trump as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. And indeed there are some people out there who see everything Trump does and says as a harbinger of imminent fascism and atrocity. I know some of them. In 2017 a Google engineer bet me $1000 that Trump would commit genocide by 2020; when I won the bet, I had him send the $1000 to a rabbit rescue. (I just wish I had bet him more.)

But I do not have Trump Derangement Syndrome. As proof, let me list a few important things that Trump got right.

More here.

Kristen Arnett at Literary Hub:

Greetings, gentle readers! Welcome to the very first installment of Am I the (Literary) Assh*le, a series where I get drunk and answer your burning (anonymous) questions about all things literary. 

When it comes to the writing world, it seems that everyone’s got an opinion. And sometimes we like to revisit those opinions online, usually in a highly cyclical manner—every three months or so, give or take—at a frenzied pace designed to drive people wild (see: are blurbs really necessary, come on we need blurbs, why is there so much sex in everything, why isn’t there more sex in everything, why are the classics so bad, why are the classics so good and why can’t anyone read nowadays, audiobooks aren’t reading, of course audiobooks are reading, why do adults read YA, why are you gatekeeping YA, libraries should do more, libraries are doing all they can they are stretched to the limit have you completely lost it, etc, etc, etc, hallelujah, forever, amen).

Before we dig in, it’s important that I point out the obvious here: generally speaking, I don’t ever know what I’m talking about. But much like everyone on the Lord’s internet, I do have some Opinions™! And I definitely have some beers. I think if we combine those two factors, we should get some satisfying results.

More here.

Zack Beauchamp in Vox:

On Monday, tens of millions across India celebrated the opening of the Ram Mandir — a huge new temple to Ram, one of Hinduism’s holiest figures, built in the city of Ayodhya where many Hindus believe he was born. The celebration in Ayodhya, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attracted some of India’s richest and most famous citizens. But in the pomp and circumstance, few dwelled explicitly on the grim origins of Ram Mandir: It was built on the site of an ancient mosque torn down by a Hindu mob in 1992.

Many of the rioters belonged to the RSS, a militant Hindu supremacist group to which Modi has belonged since he was 8 years old. Since ascending to power in 2014, Modi has worked tirelessly to replace India’s secular democracy with a Hindu sectarian state.

The construction of a temple in Ayodhya is the exclamation point on an agenda that has also included revoking the autonomy long provided to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, creating new citizenship and immigration rules biased against Muslims, and rewritten textbooks to whitewash Hindu violence against Muslims from Indian history. Modi has also waged war on the basic institutions of Indian democracy. He and his allies have consolidated control over much of the media, suppressed critical speech on social media, imprisoned protesters, suborned independent government agencies, and even prosecuted Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi on dubious charges.

More here.

David Marchese in The New York Times:

There’s a scene in that modern classic of screwball existentialism, “Being John Malkovich,” from 1999, in which John Malkovich, playing a version of himself, enters a portal that others have been using to climb inside his mind. Suddenly, Malkovich is in a world populated solely by variations on himself: Malkovich as a flirtatious sexpot, a genteel waiter, a jazz chanteuse, a bemused child, everyone speaking only the word “Malkovich.” In a way, that scene is a microcosm of the actor’s decades-long, always-interesting career. He has played a million different parts, but somehow they’re all defined by the unmistakable, enigmatic, magnetic presence of Malkovich. Same goes for his work in the Apple TV+ series “The New Look,” premiering Feb. 14, which is based on the experiences of the fashion icons Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga and others who helped build the French fashion industry while enduring the impossible complexities of World War II. Malkovich, playing the couturier and Dior mentor Lucien Lelong, delivers a softer, warmer performance than the ones for which he is probably best known. But even so, with his off-kilter line readings, his louche manner, his oddly wavering yet commanding voice and his general air of playing a game to which only he knows the rules, the role is, as always, pure Malkovich.

If we take style to mean a manner of doing something, could you articulate the John Malkovich style? Not really, because it’s not something I think about much — what I am or what I do. But I’ve always felt style is the only constant in life. By style I mean, simply, the way you move through life. If you get sad news, how do you respond? What do you do if you’re angry, if you’re amused, if you’re moved? That’s what style is. It’s not really up to me to say what mine is.

More here.

Dance Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

by William Carlos Williams