S U N D R Y

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Innovation in classical music can cause remarkable uproar. Here's a list of all the times the audience in a classical music concert was unruly; booed, hissed, and more generally behaved badly — wikipedia.org

How one of the most sophisticated AI may help us understand where language and intelligence come from. Two schools have been fighting for centuries (literally) over this fundamental question. The nativists (Plato, Kantian categories, Chomsky's universal grammar) believe that there is something innate that helps children makes sense of language. The empiricists (John Locke) on the other hand, favour a blank slate theory: all that is needed to learn language is experience, there is no “a priori” knowledge. GPT-2 is an AI system developed by OpenAI. It was trained on a 40 gigabyte dataset (this is immense). The article is worth your time. But the gist is that the nativists seem to be onto something. Although the AI can predict with impressive accuracy the next word in a simple sentence, it looks like it is not able to understand what it is saying—and so it cannot be deemed as intelligent — thegradient.pub

People will lie in order to appear more honest. In a game scenario where they experience a lot of wins, people will minimise their success in order not to appear as liars to other arguing that lying was essential to civilisation and that complete honesty was dangerous. I agree — apa.org

“To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing.” Apart from this thought-provoking headline, Doug Belshaw of Thought Shrapnel goes on critiquing London's Police launch of LFR, or live facial recognition, the latest Orwellian twist we are going through — thoughtshrapnel.com

What would Instagram look like if it were made for Windows 95? An interesting case of retro design — behance.net

Why do almost all societies practice divination? (That is the art of reading the future or the unknown via supernatural means.) Well, for two main reasons. The diviners seem not to be the authors of their statements so they are easier to trust. And in small-scale communities, people would tend to be more motivated to believe the diviners, thus creating a less costly way of generating cohesiveness — uchicago.edu

Navigation apps, like Google Maps or Waze, are causing more harm than good. Tiny residential streets that were not designed to handle traffic are now congested. Drivers focus mostly on their phones thus compromising safety. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. People are taking action. Herzliya Bet, a neighbourhood in Israel, has sued Waze, where the product was first launched — ieee.org

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This is the Sundry Newsletter. It is a distillation of what I read every week: society, fun facts, history, business, science, branding, art, etc. Thank you for reading — Ulysse Sabbag.