[FRIAM] essentialism

[Roger Critchlow]

Been cleaning my spam folder daily, 6/10 not spam this morning, 5 from
friam.  I'm clicking the "Report Not Spam" button individually for each
false positive.

I really enjoyed this lecture by Susan Gelman, shared by her brother
Andrew, on her research in essentialism in children:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etTPgJHsAKw&t=1053s

So telling a child that "Cats love catnip" or "This cat loves catnip" or
"She loves catnip" will contribute differing weights to the essence of cat,
though you have to make up another animal which doesn't have a pre-existing
essence for the child.

This fits nicely into this other study via hackernews on the essence of
bullshit:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/03/05/it-turns-out-you-can-bullshit-a-bullshitter-after-all/

I love that they can identify sub-groups by giving them a mixture of truly
profound statements and pseudo-profound bullshit and seeing how well they
sort the crap.  A new kind of intelligence test.

-- rec --
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