I love stuff like this, but I can't help but wonder much of this is simply editorialization on top of natural selection.
Do infected wolves really take more risks? Or are we just connecting two dots with a thin bro science understanding of evolution? It seems impossible to know when you're looking for a broad narrative that fits how genes are spread
No doubt it could be over-interpreted, but seeing toxo correlate with risk-taking behavior in enough different species, does seem to increase the plausibility, otherwise we need special pleading that we have several different spurious correlations all pointing in the same direction.
However, and maybe this is what you're getting at, it could be that risk-taking individuals are more likely to get infected with toxo? Telling the difference between those two ideas would be harder, although in lab rat experiments you could control for it.
"This asymptomatic state of infection is referred to as a latent infection, and it has been associated with numerous subtle behavioral, psychiatric, and personality alterations in humans.
"Behavioral changes observed between infected and non-infected humans include a decreased aversion to cat urine (but with divergent trajectories by gender) and an increased risk of schizophrenia. Preliminary evidence has suggested that T. gondii infection may induce some of the same alterations in the human brain as those observed in rodents. Many of these associations have been strongly debated and newer studies have found them to be weak, concluding:
"On the whole, there was little evidence that T. gondii was related to increased risk of psychiatric disorder, poor impulse control, personality aberrations, or neurocognitive impairment."
There is a lot of evidence out there for diseases and specifically parasites modifying host behavior, toxo does indeed settle in the brain, and there is quite a lot of evidence for toxo specifically modifying behavior in different host species.
Doubt is always healthy but this one is not at all hard to believe.
The practice of rephrasing to get your word count up really irks me.
"Today, wolves, foxes, and snakes inhabit the cave, but it was once a popular spot for human pastoralists and their domesticated animals."
"Rather, they think it was a convenient spot for herders to stop and provide their flocks with shade and water."
"Even though humans didn’t have a permanent presence in the lava tube, the natural structure provided shelter for people and their herds for thousands of years"
They're a gizmodo writer. An attention predator. If they cared about producing genuine values for humanity, they would not be working in attention predator journalism
Therefore don't expect their writing to improve from your criticism. It's designed to take, not give.
I like to stop reading these kinds of authors as soon as I realize I'm experiencing a memetic attention attack. Then I write a snarky comment so others will start to hate them as well.
Generalizing topics and/or adding caveats about how something may not always be true is the easiest way for a LLM to increase the rate of providing factually accurate responses (aside from refusing to answer). Both of those strategies requires being more verbose.
Concise and to the point is not in the best interest of a LLM designed to give decent answers 99% of the time.
I also believe that OpenAI's RLHF process highly biased the model towards producing that sort of specific verbose, padded-out 'chatGPT speak' that we are seeing. The RLHF fine tuning process took outputs from the instruction-tuned model and A/B tested variations with human workers who may or may not have had the same feelings towards writing quality as many of us.
The process resulted in those verbose, interjection-laden responses that we see now, because that type of response was deemed 'better' (thumbs-up'd more) than the shorter, more-direct-but-less-impressive-sounding responses.
I use it for work so much I’d gladly pay way more than $20 just for access to GPT-4. It’s pretty terrible at programming but it still saves me loads of time generating the easy functions.
Anything remotely complex I still do by hand. But holy shit its nice having something do my boilerplate.
Gizmodo and anything gawker media is utter and total junk, pushing Disney media and other hidden agenda. Was irked when I accidentally clicked it, I block it on almost all my systems to avoid feeding the beast.
Agreed, the original commenter was highlighting how difficult those decisions can be psychologically. I mean, you try to convince your spouse to sell the house and move into a cottage and see how it goes.
A "cottage" sounds like an exaggeration, but in any case if your spouse would prefer that you spend endless hours at work rather than home with the family, then you've actually got bigger problems than "golden handcuffs".
Oh, thanks. I've never seen that before for new college grads -- usually these big companies have a centralized hiring and interviewing and placement process for grads since that's so much more efficient.
Especially grad students tend to already have some work or research experience under their belt - meaning they don't necessary have to go through the meat grinder of "new grad" job listings.
If GP is anything like me, they used Firefox before Chrome was released. The Mozilla/Netscape suite that spawned Firefox is older than Google itself.
For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.
In my case: Because Opera stopped using Presto and switched to Chromium. That does says a bit about when I switched.
I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.
Do infected wolves really take more risks? Or are we just connecting two dots with a thin bro science understanding of evolution? It seems impossible to know when you're looking for a broad narrative that fits how genes are spread