CoBot Systems

On games, winning, and cheating.

Would you think that Wordle players cheat? Why would they? And yet, "Many Wordle users cheat to win, says mathematics expert" 😲

Many Wordle users cheat to win, says mathematics expert It seems there's a five-letter word describing what many players of the wildly popular Wordle puzzle do daily as they struggle to find a target word within six tries.

VanMoof e-bike customers are at the risk of their bikes becoming bricked if the company shuts down.

VanMoof is a Dutch e-bike success story. It was founded in 2009 by two brothers to make the "perfect city bike": custom built & premium. The bicycles look slick, employ sound effects, have a built-in battery, etc.

VanMoof bikes depend on VanMoof’s servers to operate. The bikes can be controlled by a smartphone. This connection is encrypted with a key obtained from VanMoof’s servers when logging onto the mobile app. If VanMoof’s servers go offline, customers cannot get this key, meaning they cannot communicate with their bike.

The Pulse: VanMoof files for bankruptcy protection The electric bike company raised close to $200M, but now closed all its service points. For bike customers, they could face the risk of their bikes being bricked if they don't take prompt action.

The S-shaped curve of the Prospect Theory subjective value function naturally emerges as the optimal solution to the problem of value perception.

It's not a bug, it's a feature: Revisiting Kahneman and Tversky's insights on subjective satisfaction The good reasons behind reference-dependence

The illusion of moral decline
Adam M. Mastroianni & Daniel T. Gilbert, Nature (2023) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x

Morality is not actually declining. Studied across a 55-year span from 1965 to 2020, people’s reports of the current morality of their contemporaries were stable over time. On average, the year in which the survey was conducted explained less than 0.3% of the variance in responses, and in almost all cases it explained less than 1%.

If morality has not declined, then why do people think it has?

First, numerous studies have shown that human beings are especially likely to seek and attend to negative information about others, and mass media indulge this tendency with a disproportionate focus on people behaving badly. As such, people may encounter more negative information than positive information about the morality of ‘people in general’, and this ‘biased exposure effect’ may help explain why people believe that current morality is relatively low.

Second, numerous studies have shown that when people recall positive and negative events from the past, the negative events are more likely to be forgotten, more likely to be misremembered as their opposite, and more likely to have lost their emotional impact. This ‘biased memory effect’ may help explain why people believe that past morality was relatively high.

Working together, these two phenomena can produce an illusion of moral decline. Specifically, biased exposure to information about current morality may make the present seem like a moral wasteland, biased memory for information about past morality may make the past seem like a moral wonderland and when people in a wasteland remember being in a wonderland, they may naturally conclude that the landscape has changed.

The illusion of moral decline - Nature We show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced, and suggest that this illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.

Marc Andreessen on AI: If you don’t agree with the prevailing niche morality that is being imposed on both social media and AI via ever-intensifying speech codes, you should also realize that the fight over what AI is allowed to say/generate will be even more important – by a lot – than the fight over social media censorship.

AI is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered. You should be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the age-old claim that they are protecting you.

In short, don’t let the thought police suppress AI.

Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz There's a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. But the real risk is losing the race to global AI technological superiority.

National artificial intelligence R&D strategic plan from the White House | INFORMS Open Forum The White House released the national AI R&D strategic plan and is soliciting public input on critical AI issues. You can weigh in by June 7.FACT SHEET: Biden-H