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"Write a critique of the following article, using the style of the article:"


If you get anything as succinct and focused as what I (genuinely) wrote myself, I'll gladly take the criticism!


to be fair i pasted your prompt into chatgpt and it was genuinely funnier and more readable than the article, it even had jokes.

They are EVERYWHERE. Behind desks. In alcoves. Possibly in your very home...if you've recently borrowed War and Peace and failed to return it on time.

lol


I'm guessing it's passages like this one regarding transitional forms:

Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.


Fun fact: Archaeopteryx - a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds - was discovered two years after Origin of Species.


> shared experiences and emotions

I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.

Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.


If you search for Shockmaster, the AI Overview you get is as follows:

> Fred Alex Ottman, a retired American professional wrestler, is known for his WWF personas "Tugboat" and "Typhoon". He also wrestled as "Big Steel Man" and "Big Bubba" before joining the WWF in 1989. Ottman wrestled for the WWF from 1989–1993, where he was a key ally of Hulk Hogan. He later wrestled in World Championship Wrestling as "The Shockmaster", a character known for raising his fist and making a "toot-toot" sound.

Which is obviously false. The "toot-toot" was part of his gimmick as Tugboat, while the Shockmaster gimmick is known for its notoriously botched reveal.

Point being, Google is losing on the "telling one early 90s wrestling gimmick from another" AI front.


Gemini 2.5 pro is not the same that powers web search (or any of the dozen other Gemini related things).


This post is claiming Google is winning on every AI front. Search summary is a front on which, as far as I can tell, no one is winning. But Google is one of the worst.


Grape Brick style: "It is of the utmost importance that you do not do the following with your longbow. Lest you maximize its lethality, please take care to avoid carrying out these specific instructions with your new purely decorative longbow. At all times, ensure that the bow is never fired in the direction of the vital points outlined on the anatomical chart (FIG. 1)"


And then there's Beowulf, which is Anglo without the Sphere.


Night is important, but I really don't recommend it for emotionally volatile teenagers. I was already mildly depressed when I was assigned it, and borderline suicidal after I finished it. Maybe read it in college when you have easier access to alcohol.


I should add that point as a comment on the essay, thank YOU - I will link to it


Night shocked me in a way I didn't know I could still be shocked. I think it has given me a very helpful perspective in the following 35 years.


There’s controversy about this book - claims that some or all of it was fabricated. Terrible book to teach the holocaust with since a lot of gen Z or alpha either doesn’t think the holocaust happened or thinks it should have been worse. Giving them a book of fabrications plays into this narrative.

“ Franklin argues that the power of the narrative was achieved at the cost of literal truth, and that to insist that the work is purely factual is to ignore its literary sophistication”

Wiesel wrote in 1967 about a visit to a rebbe (a Hasidic rabbi) who he had not seen for 20 years. The rebbe is upset to learn that Wiesel has become a writer, and wants to know what he writes. "Stories," Wiesel tells him, " ... true stories": About people you knew? "Yes, about people I might have known." About things that happened? "Yes, about things that happened or could have happened." But they did not? "No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end." The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: That means you are writing lies! I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: "Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred."[68]“

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(memoir)

It was the same year that I read this crap book that they forced me to read Lolita by Nabokov. I realized that year that “classic literature” was decadent and degenerate - and often so were my teachers!


Incidentally, I agree with you on Night. I have visited Auschwitz 3 times, read widely on the horrors. It is a disheartening, horrible, read and experience to visit, but something more should do, maybe we would have more peace in our world... although I doubt it.


haha - yes, in senior/high school my teachers were the same!


Sometimes the man really is made out of straw.


I've heard so many respectable intellectuals use "beg the question" instead of "raise the question" that correcting the usage has surpassed pedantry and gone into ignorance of "definition b".

It's like correcting someone on the pronunciation of French-English forte. It just gets you uninvited next time.


What's the threshold they have to meet to ban? Half of them, give or take, will probably not be able to recognize the lie, and a sizeable portion of them would likely not be convinced in deliberation. It's also subject to nullification, e.g. "I know it's a lie, but it 'owns' the people I don't like"


Yep, it's hard. Let's deter it in the first place with imprisonment for the CEO if convicted. Ads will be amazingly informative.


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