conan wishes you a happy trans pride

"It's good to have an idea where this NPC's story is going. Which is apparently France."

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

For all the many flaws of the tagging system on this hellsite, it is so perfect for Sending Home. A man's not dead while his name is still spoken, and what are the tags but the Overhead of tumblr? They aren't the posts themselves, but they are metacommentary on posts, notes to friends, info to be passed on. The message has been logged and is continuing to be sent on. GNU

Keep thinking about this Austin Walker post that now lives in my brain. It's a reply to people saying genAI can help creators 'develop concepts' and waste less time on research (x)

ALT

ALT

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Fuck off and give me the ball . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

Is "Mary Sue" Still a Valid Criticism? (pt. 1)

To start off with: The recent backlash against calling characters "Mary Sue" is valid as hell — the term is often sexist, racist, and simply unfounded. However. I do think that there is still a baby somewhere in that bathwater, and that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can still be a meaningful criticism.

Argument 1: "Mary Sue" is a valid criticism to the extent that a character like that can create the problem of excessive match between the challenges of a plot and the strengths of a character. That story is always going to be completely lacking in tension and excitement. If Jim is the world's best wizard ever to wizard, and now there's an entire book about Jim using wizardry to solve wizard-related problems... Yaaaawn. No challenge for Jim means no uncertainty, no investment in the character.

• Example of this problem*: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. A very cool premise, that a human gets forcibly turned into a self-replicating android and sent to the edge of space to save humanity, became (for me) a fairly boring read. Because it becomes clear about 15% of the way in that Bob will more-or-less effortlessly solve every challenge that comes his way, using his superior intellect. I don't hate this book; it's a fun thought experiment. But it didn't exactly suck me in, because Bob gets set a series of tasks and then solves them in a fairly predictable fashion.
• Counter-example: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Similar concept, that one lone super-genius gets sent to the stars under similar circumstances. BUT the challenges that Grace has to solve are almost all (the horror!) interpersonal communication. We don't know if he'll ever make it back to Earth, and we don't know if he'll get eaten (or impregnated) by aliens for 90% of the length of the story. Hence, this book's well-earned reputation as a page-turner.

Tl;dr: the "Mary Sue" character can be a serious problem for a story because a character extremely well-equipped to solve their own plot problems will pretty much never create tension or interest for the audience.

Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 | Pt. 7

*Going to constrain my examples to white male protagonists that someone else has called "Mary Sue", as part of my argument that it's not all sexism.

Gee, maybe if they hadn't started out by STEALING all that dystopian SF to train their autocomplete machine, this wouldn't be happening... :/