How many books Americans own — and how they organize them
YouGov poll from 2023.
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G. Foster, S. Rahmstorf, "Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly"
Recent record-hot years have caused discussion over whether global warming has accelerated. Previous analysis found acceleration (i.e., increase in warming rate) has not yet reached a 95% confidence level, given natural temperature variability. We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.
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Matthew Schneider-Mayerson ,Christopher A. Walker et al, "To Delight and Misinstruct: Strategic Environmental Narratives in New Yorker Fiction"
How has contemporary literature responded to, helped mitigate, or exacerbated the climate and nature crises? To begin answering this question systematically, we developed the Strategic Environmental Narratives codebook and applied it to 474 short stories published between 2014 and 2023 in The New Yorker, the most prestigious Anglophone literary magazine. We find that climate change exists in just 10.1% of these stories and freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction / biodiversity loss, or toxic waste exists in 15.6%. When present, these environmental problems are mostly marginalized and minimized; structural culprits – governments, corporations, and the wealthy – are rarely assigned responsibility; and pro-environmental actions and behaviors are rarely modeled. Synthesizing these results with recent data on popular films suggests an unspoken “cultural climate consensus” across contemporary media on how often climate change can or should be included in fictional narratives. Through a typology of “strategic environmental narratives” – including “eco-lite narratives”, “normalizing narratives”, and “symptomatic climate fiction” – we discuss how fiction can pursue its time-honored goal of both delighting and instructing readers in an era of planetary polycrisis.
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The AI Resist List
A list of actions ppl can take when they oppose AI.
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John J. Conlon and Peter Schwardmann, "AI Sycophancy and Decisions"
"...we find that AI advice depolarizes choices on average, moving participants away from their initial leanings. This depolarization arises despite the LLM being measurably sycophantic: it disproportionately offers considerations that support users’ initial leanings and uses agreeable and flattering language. Depolarization occurs across moral and non-moral, objective and subjective, strategic and non-strategic, and complex and simple tasks. Increasing sycophancy weakens depolarization, showing that sycophancy is behaviorally relevant, even if it is generally outweighed by the informativeness of AI advice. Finally, several results mitigate the concern that market forces will generate greater polarizing effects outside the experiment or in the future. On the supply side, our baseline AI’s level of sycophancy is typical of leading models, and these models are not becoming more sycophantic over time. On the demand side, participants do not prefer greater sycophancy, do not select into AI advice in tasks where it is more polarizing, and exhibit greater depolarizing effects when they are more frequent AI users outside the experiment."
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Anthropeum
Museum game where you guess an artifact's time and place.
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