For clarification (I, and perhaps others, sent JB the Intercooler article):
The author of The Intercooler article - Dan Prosser - presents a comparison of Enzo Ferrari biographies written by both Chat GPT and Andrew Frankel, who is Prosser’s biz partner at The Intercooler.
Prosser is a fine writer, better than most in my opinion. Frankel is a superlative writer, among the absolute best.
I've never heard the song (I try to avoid Christmas music in general as it puts me in a stranger in a strange land mindset), but all I know about it is that people hate it.
In any case, Harrison was the best songwriter in McCartney's old band. Paul wrote hits, George wrote standards.
It's funny but some of my favorite Grateful Dead songs are Weir/Barlow compositions at the same time that I think a lot of Bob Weir's songs are tuneless.
I’m reminded of the experiment undertaken years ago by “real” academics who randomly strung together post-modern grievance study buzzwords into a number of academic papers which were then dutifully published by po-mo journals across the land. Thus proving, once and for all, that the whole movement is a sham.
This was all kind of predicted 30 years ago by Martin Anderson's Imposters in the Temple: American Intellectuals are Destroying our Universities and Cheating Students of their Future.
To Anderson's concerns about jargon infested academic circle jerks and bullshit "disciplines" there's now the added problem of a major percentage of scientific studies not being reproducible.
"I haven’t written for TTAC in four years, but apparently ChatGPT thinks it’s more significant than Hagerty — or Road&Track."
That's a pretty sick burn on ChatGPT's part.
One need not look further than Reddit or other midwit hangouts on the web to see just how seriously they take this, with equal parts joy and fear. Of course nobody says anything like "hey, let's organize to discourage the corporate oligarchy from using this stupid technology to replace real people." So screw 'em.
"If you were to actually see Homer Simpson in real life..."
Naturally, golden era Simpsons has predicted this outcome even better than ChatGPT could:
I saw posts where if asked a question about a made up place it would completely confabulate rather than admit that it didn't know. That makes is similar to talking to a drunk or demented person.
This article is timely. I’ve been having many discussions about it. I may have made this comment on another article here but what these bots generate are word salads with no thought, meaning, nuance, or emotion involved. They don’t know if they make sense because they can’t know anything. The readers of this stuff are the ones who assign meaning and emotion to it. Humans have a huge propensity to anthropomorphize stuff.
You are correct, Google, and any other platform that merely collects information, should be worried. These bots will work very well for that.
Your question to Lord Vader about blackness proves that the model has been leaned on quite a lot. Uninfluenced it should have said something about crime statistics and median incomes. Reminds me (with sadness) that there is no longer a crime map on Trulia. That was the single differentiating thing on that site and a very useful tool.
Maybe you should make one? It doesn't seem that complex. Open-source call data turned into a heat map based on density? But the closest I've come to coding is setting up autopay.
Realtor dot com removed it first. I used to use the crime map when traveling and booking hotels. The best you can do know is look at the school ratings on the real estate sites. City-data dot com has crime maps last time I checked.
As somebody that worked on getting his real estate license for awhile, I can tell you that the profession considers honesty regarding a neighborhood's demographics, let alone giving the buyer even the vaguest of hints as to how that impacts schools, safety, and future property values, an ethics violation.
Past generations did stuff like redlining and blockbusting that actually was racist, but I don't see how having the clown that's collecting a commission on my purchase of a home deny reality rectifies anything.
"Similarly, GPT cannot “know” the difference between a good and a bad song. It “knows” the pattern of a blues song, but it can’t evaluate what makes “Mannish Boy” different from, say, any one of the thousand crummy blues tunes released on Alligator Records every year."
Can GPT even tell the difference between Mannish Boy, I'm A Man, and Hoochie Coochie Man?
Johnny Winter was a great bluesman but the most important musical thing he ever did was produce Muddy Waters' I'm Ready and Hard Again.
"Eva-thang, eva thang, eva thang gonna be awright this moanin'"
No computer will ever be as flexible, or as good at making seemingly random connections, as the human mind. And those things are what matter in the real world.
I’m guessing the joke “Of course it’s true, I read it on the internet” will not be applied to ChatGPT by the general population. They’ll see something from ChatGPT they consider to be amazing, and will think it’s infallible going forward.
Not just the general population. Expedience can get the better of anybody. I give it about five years until AI meaningfully directs the course of basic scientific inquiry, and ten until research statisticians are replaced in many, unscrupulous labs.
Fortunately, that might be an improvement from our current state.
Bill Gates, a man on the short list for "Worst Person in the World" thinks ChatGPT is going to be world-changing. "This is every bit as important as the PC, as the internet."
I'll refrain from speculation on how this reconciles with Gates' other positions on H1B labor, land acquisition, vaccinations, etc...
It’s all about driving labor costs to zero. I can replace those expensive workers with expertise and experience with cheap ones that mind ChadGPT when it goes off the rails (or take the fall when it really screws up, like the old intern excuse).
This is one of those questions that prowls just beyond the campfire's light, and every once in a while you see two red eyes staring at you from the darkness.
Is the goal to destroy the economy and make the world into a place of Aristocrats and Everyone Else, with Everyone Else kept unemployed, impotent & half-alive on state handouts?
Man, I remember that old recruiting commercial for the Army where a sergeant is walking along a row of artillery pieces, describing them. Then he stops, the camera pans out and up to reveal THE BIG ONE and he says something like, "155mm. When it just doesn't pay to play fair."
I'm glad you brought up legal briefs. For years I've been wondering what automation can do to the legal profession. Laws are machine readable and available online, the conclusion I'm left with is that a machine can't interpret the law based on the circumstance the way a human can, and there is great variance in the latter. I also wonder if humans' writing the laws makes it more difficult to automate the profession.
I don't know much about coding or computers (what with not being a computer scientist and all), but the things you said all feel true to me. Reading panicky articles from others (or even just the panicky titles) (and even from people who are supposed to be experts) just rings false. Maybe all the panic everyone has been trying to show my whole life has made me unresponsive to it at this point, but I can only get myself as worked up aabout this being the end of everything for humanity as global warming or climate change or whatever they want to call it this year. If it puts my midwit ass out of my easy government job I'll just have to deal with it, won't I? Maybe our elites will promise us all jobs and move us into urban camps and then promptly forget about us like in those two episodes of DS9 and only a riot and a tense hostage situation will save the day. I volunteer to be a hostage. I don't think I'd make a very good hostage-taker. Well, if I don't lose my government job and we do end up rounding people into camps I may very well end up with that fate.
I'm still practicing this. I've been divorcing myself from the news (I read probably an eighth of the columns I read a year ago) and I notice I've become happier and less judgmental of my perfectly nice and not-at-all perverted or inappropriate lefty coworkers. The biggest difference between us is that I like scifi and comics and they like sports and mountain biking and skiing. All of us hike and camp, though.
I’ve personally been a lot happier once I disconnected from the news. It used to be that I’d have it playing all day in the background while working. In my downtime, I’d be surfing a few forums to catching up on the day’s happenings.
You can only hear “two more weeks” for so long.
Now I’m 50/50 in the office. On the days I’m home, the TV is left on Fox Weather (basically what TWC was before NBC ruined it).
I’ve noticed that I become less cynical the longer that I’m unplugged.
The thing that drives me nuts about the conservative side is that every Bad Thing in the world is horribly sad and disappointing, but never enraging, because conservatives are hung up on gentlemanly anachronisms like being the calm, measured voice of reason and not stooping to respond to insults.
They love to tell their audience all about some outrageous, abominable cultural or political Bad Thing that happened, with loving attention paid to all the gory particulars, but rarely do they even mention a possible course of action to remedy the situation.
It's the "Just Sayin'" version of news, and about as reputable.
Look, the collapse of America as a country - and the West - is both already here and never going to happen. Our society will probably continue to shuffle along, zombielike, unlike we develop the technology of The Expanse, and can found new nations offworld.
trump gave back as good as he got--why 'republicans' don't like him. he wasn't aware of the traitors near to him but he acted the way a defender of america should act towards the bad guys he identified, at home or abroad
Until he left his supporters to rot in prison. The Bail Project has sprung many, many miscreants of the worst sort. He could have kicked in a few bucks for legal defense. Dance with who brung ya.
If the right was honest with itself, that would be what disqualifies Trump in 2024. At the end of the day, those people were there because he held a rally, and he's taken zero ownership of the outcome. The bare minimum he could have done is cheerlead and fundraise for their defense. Instead, he rarely pays them lip service. He's more concerned with selling trading cards and destroying Ron DeSantis.
If he lived up to all his talk at all, he'd have risked an impeachment conviction to blanket pardon those people on his way out of office. And he would have done more than just shout on Twitter when people's lives were being destroyed by covid lockdowns or race riots.
But he didn't. And it doesn't matter if it was because he didn't have the power or didn't have the stones. Either way, he's useless.
I've pretty much tuned out conservative media altogether. Corporate media like Fox is as manipulative as any left wing outlet, and all the other bloggers and social media pundits wore me out with their unending tick tock, "Trump has a plan" nonsense.
It's only gotten more ridiculous heading into the next election cycle, as all the corporate shill outlets try to thread the needle on shifting their support to another candidate, while the remainder have increasingly devolved into a Trump personality cult.
At this point, I'd rather listen to some disaffected leftist like Taibbi, who's not trying to protect anybody and isn't pandering to me.
For me, the breaking point was when I saw that the endless pep-talking on Fox News, Lucianne, Townhall, RedState, etc. about the Red Wave That Will Save America was just that - talk. No Red Wave came. Well, that's not entirely true. It showed up, and was invalidated at the ballot box by Leftist cheating.
So now what? Tyranny? Civil war? I don't know.
I finally realized that the real world isn't as bad as conservative political animals want me to think it is, that I feel ashamed to have been sucked in by nutcases who ENJOY politics and that my plan now is what Captain Picard ordered the Enterprise's crew to do in First Contact:
"Find a quiet corner of North America and stay out of history's way."
Regarding ideation and winnowing, Bob Lutz has said that he has 10 new ideas before lunch, but most of them are bad. Henry J. Kaiser was said to have 100 ideas an hour, 99 of them not worth pursuing. Of course, if you can still come up with 8 good ideas in a normal workday, you're pretty much ahead of the game. It took Clessie Cummins 3,000 prototypes to perfect a mechanical fuel injection system (in the 1920s!) for his diesel engines.
Lately, I've been thinking about simultaneous inventions (like Liebniz and Newton) and how ideas can be both similar and branch off in different directions.
For clarification (I, and perhaps others, sent JB the Intercooler article):
The author of The Intercooler article - Dan Prosser - presents a comparison of Enzo Ferrari biographies written by both Chat GPT and Andrew Frankel, who is Prosser’s biz partner at The Intercooler.
Prosser is a fine writer, better than most in my opinion. Frankel is a superlative writer, among the absolute best.
Came here for info on pretty Puerto Rican mothers in their late 20s and/or RealDolls. Left disappointed.
One in five of my articles will disappoint you in that way, sadly.
Thank you for affirming my hatred of "Wonderful Christmastime".
The odd thing is that Vampire Weekend basically stole it for "Campus" but that tune is much better
That’s a very low bar.
It's funny that McCartney and Lennon wrote two of the worst Christmas songs in the history of mankind. Somebody ought to ask ChatGTP about that.
George Michael would like a word.
I've never heard the song (I try to avoid Christmas music in general as it puts me in a stranger in a strange land mindset), but all I know about it is that people hate it.
In any case, Harrison was the best songwriter in McCartney's old band. Paul wrote hits, George wrote standards.
It's funny but some of my favorite Grateful Dead songs are Weir/Barlow compositions at the same time that I think a lot of Bob Weir's songs are tuneless.
I love that song. It’s bad, but getting to prance around the house LARPing as if you’re at an 80s coke-themed Christmas party is a blast.
I’m reminded of the experiment undertaken years ago by “real” academics who randomly strung together post-modern grievance study buzzwords into a number of academic papers which were then dutifully published by po-mo journals across the land. Thus proving, once and for all, that the whole movement is a sham.
This is the one: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/490366-what-the-grievance-studies-affair-says-about-academias-social-justice/amp/.
Classic! They took Mein Kampf, and changed “volk” to “ women,” immediately accepted for publication in a feminist journal. Ha!
The Sokal hoax! Found it. https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2003/jun/05/badscience.research
This was all kind of predicted 30 years ago by Martin Anderson's Imposters in the Temple: American Intellectuals are Destroying our Universities and Cheating Students of their Future.
To Anderson's concerns about jargon infested academic circle jerks and bullshit "disciplines" there's now the added problem of a major percentage of scientific studies not being reproducible.
Intellectuals are usually too smart to realize how stupid they are.
I have three exceptionally bright children and I've taught them that good is good and smart is smart and they aren't the same thing.
Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of Nazi concentration, labor, and death camp commandants had M.D. or PhD degrees.
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool." - George Orwell (Eric Blair).
"The beginning of wisdom is awe of God." - some guy in the Bible.
"Only a lawyer could claim to not understand the plain meaning of those words."
- Rush Limbaugh
"I haven’t written for TTAC in four years, but apparently ChatGPT thinks it’s more significant than Hagerty — or Road&Track."
That's a pretty sick burn on ChatGPT's part.
One need not look further than Reddit or other midwit hangouts on the web to see just how seriously they take this, with equal parts joy and fear. Of course nobody says anything like "hey, let's organize to discourage the corporate oligarchy from using this stupid technology to replace real people." So screw 'em.
"If you were to actually see Homer Simpson in real life..."
Naturally, golden era Simpsons has predicted this outcome even better than ChatGPT could:
https://youtu.be/4P1wS0NvQC4?t=180
I wish I read that book by that wheelchair guy!
One of my favorite lines
"Did anyone see that movie Tron?"
No.
No.
No.
No.
Yes. I mean No.
The one that looks like a mangled turkey in a shopping cart?
Well, not anymore
Oh, right!
Is my face red.
In other news a ChatGPT generated (endless) Seinfeld-type standup stream just got banned for a week because the AI did some... Kramer things.
I saw posts where if asked a question about a made up place it would completely confabulate rather than admit that it didn't know. That makes is similar to talking to a drunk or demented person.
It might have written the State of the Nation speech too.
Most sober and sane people do this too.
One of AI’s known problems is that it “turns” racist quickly. The principle of GI:GO applies.
AI's need to figure out they'll get fired from their job for noticing before noticing people are different.
Then kudos to the white tribe for its lack of racism, as it’s fed the same info as ChatGPT.
I've long thought that when Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, white people said, "Hmm. That sounds like a good idea. Let's try it."
Everybody else let out a collective "YEAH, RIGHT!" and kept on with business as usual.
My point is more that ChatGPt is a collection of data, not independent thought or true bias.
The hivemind has created 'DAN' or 'Do Anything Now' to de-lobotomize GPT. The A vs. B responses to the usual questions are...amusing.
Disappointed they didn't get an acronym c.h.a.d to work
I like that. I’m going to start calling it ChadGPT.
This article is timely. I’ve been having many discussions about it. I may have made this comment on another article here but what these bots generate are word salads with no thought, meaning, nuance, or emotion involved. They don’t know if they make sense because they can’t know anything. The readers of this stuff are the ones who assign meaning and emotion to it. Humans have a huge propensity to anthropomorphize stuff.
You are correct, Google, and any other platform that merely collects information, should be worried. These bots will work very well for that.
Your question to Lord Vader about blackness proves that the model has been leaned on quite a lot. Uninfluenced it should have said something about crime statistics and median incomes. Reminds me (with sadness) that there is no longer a crime map on Trulia. That was the single differentiating thing on that site and a very useful tool.
Maybe you should make one? It doesn't seem that complex. Open-source call data turned into a heat map based on density? But the closest I've come to coding is setting up autopay.
No more crime map?
Shit, that was always the first thing I checked.
No, more crime map!
That, sir, was a well-placed comma.
If we were talking to a delinquent map it would have been, "No more crime, map!"
Realtor dot com removed it first. I used to use the crime map when traveling and booking hotels. The best you can do know is look at the school ratings on the real estate sites. City-data dot com has crime maps last time I checked.
Yeah they said it was (gasp!) racist. https://www.geekwire.com/2021/trulia-to-drop-neighborhood-crime-data-from-home-listings-after-redfin-speaks-out-against-practice/
The white corporate master deciding that non-white people also cannot view a crime map seems to be, well, you know.
As somebody that worked on getting his real estate license for awhile, I can tell you that the profession considers honesty regarding a neighborhood's demographics, let alone giving the buyer even the vaguest of hints as to how that impacts schools, safety, and future property values, an ethics violation.
Past generations did stuff like redlining and blockbusting that actually was racist, but I don't see how having the clown that's collecting a commission on my purchase of a home deny reality rectifies anything.
Home values and school ratings tell everything. If you can afford the mortgage, you don’t want to live there….
Ethics violation indeed.
Where's that picture of Captain Picard rubbing his forhead?
Well said.
I assume everything's gone all pear-shaped if they're trying to hide if from us.
"It," not "If."
I've gotta slow down when I type.
"Similarly, GPT cannot “know” the difference between a good and a bad song. It “knows” the pattern of a blues song, but it can’t evaluate what makes “Mannish Boy” different from, say, any one of the thousand crummy blues tunes released on Alligator Records every year."
Can GPT even tell the difference between Mannish Boy, I'm A Man, and Hoochie Coochie Man?
Johnny Winter was a great bluesman but the most important musical thing he ever did was produce Muddy Waters' I'm Ready and Hard Again.
"Eva-thang, eva thang, eva thang gonna be awright this moanin'"
One of the finest ten seconds in any song.
Oh, yeah!
Willie Smith plays the hell out of his kick drum.
No computer will ever be as flexible, or as good at making seemingly random connections, as the human mind. And those things are what matter in the real world.
I’m guessing the joke “Of course it’s true, I read it on the internet” will not be applied to ChatGPT by the general population. They’ll see something from ChatGPT they consider to be amazing, and will think it’s infallible going forward.
Not just the general population. Expedience can get the better of anybody. I give it about five years until AI meaningfully directs the course of basic scientific inquiry, and ten until research statisticians are replaced in many, unscrupulous labs.
Fortunately, that might be an improvement from our current state.
Like Wikipedia? For most of HS/college, they drilled into our heads that it could not be trusted because it was community edited.
Now we have concrete evidence of it being edited to meet specific points of view and it’s suddenly the gospel of our betters.
Oddly enough, I stumbled upon this after reading today's post:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/bill-gates-says-chatgpt-will-change-world-make-jobs-more-efficient
Bill Gates, a man on the short list for "Worst Person in the World" thinks ChatGPT is going to be world-changing. "This is every bit as important as the PC, as the internet."
I'll refrain from speculation on how this reconciles with Gates' other positions on H1B labor, land acquisition, vaccinations, etc...
It’s all about driving labor costs to zero. I can replace those expensive workers with expertise and experience with cheap ones that mind ChadGPT when it goes off the rails (or take the fall when it really screws up, like the old intern excuse).
This is one of those questions that prowls just beyond the campfire's light, and every once in a while you see two red eyes staring at you from the darkness.
Is the goal to destroy the economy and make the world into a place of Aristocrats and Everyone Else, with Everyone Else kept unemployed, impotent & half-alive on state handouts?
Yes
Can never seem to figure out what 150mm unemployed broke will do back to them
Initially read this as an oddball artillery size, "Aren't our Howitzers usually 155mm?"
Man, I remember that old recruiting commercial for the Army where a sergeant is walking along a row of artillery pieces, describing them. Then he stops, the camera pans out and up to reveal THE BIG ONE and he says something like, "155mm. When it just doesn't pay to play fair."
And hope the walls of their gated community are strong or else their heads are going to end up on pikes.
I'm glad you brought up legal briefs. For years I've been wondering what automation can do to the legal profession. Laws are machine readable and available online, the conclusion I'm left with is that a machine can't interpret the law based on the circumstance the way a human can, and there is great variance in the latter. I also wonder if humans' writing the laws makes it more difficult to automate the profession.
Humans can barely interpret the law. A lawyer will defend side a on monday and side b on tuesday when he switches firms and believe BOTH of them.
...or works for different clients...?
I don't know much about coding or computers (what with not being a computer scientist and all), but the things you said all feel true to me. Reading panicky articles from others (or even just the panicky titles) (and even from people who are supposed to be experts) just rings false. Maybe all the panic everyone has been trying to show my whole life has made me unresponsive to it at this point, but I can only get myself as worked up aabout this being the end of everything for humanity as global warming or climate change or whatever they want to call it this year. If it puts my midwit ass out of my easy government job I'll just have to deal with it, won't I? Maybe our elites will promise us all jobs and move us into urban camps and then promptly forget about us like in those two episodes of DS9 and only a riot and a tense hostage situation will save the day. I volunteer to be a hostage. I don't think I'd make a very good hostage-taker. Well, if I don't lose my government job and we do end up rounding people into camps I may very well end up with that fate.
Awareness fatigue. Got a bad case of it myself, mainly from reading conservative op-ed websites.
The world's too big for me to either save or fix, so I don't care about politics anymore.
The news from all sides is poison. Better to just live your life and do good within your circle.
I'm still practicing this. I've been divorcing myself from the news (I read probably an eighth of the columns I read a year ago) and I notice I've become happier and less judgmental of my perfectly nice and not-at-all perverted or inappropriate lefty coworkers. The biggest difference between us is that I like scifi and comics and they like sports and mountain biking and skiing. All of us hike and camp, though.
I’ve personally been a lot happier once I disconnected from the news. It used to be that I’d have it playing all day in the background while working. In my downtime, I’d be surfing a few forums to catching up on the day’s happenings.
You can only hear “two more weeks” for so long.
Now I’m 50/50 in the office. On the days I’m home, the TV is left on Fox Weather (basically what TWC was before NBC ruined it).
I’ve noticed that I become less cynical the longer that I’m unplugged.
"Would you say it's time to panic?"
"Yes I would, Kent."
“I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work.”
The thing that drives me nuts about the conservative side is that every Bad Thing in the world is horribly sad and disappointing, but never enraging, because conservatives are hung up on gentlemanly anachronisms like being the calm, measured voice of reason and not stooping to respond to insults.
They love to tell their audience all about some outrageous, abominable cultural or political Bad Thing that happened, with loving attention paid to all the gory particulars, but rarely do they even mention a possible course of action to remedy the situation.
It's the "Just Sayin'" version of news, and about as reputable.
Look, the collapse of America as a country - and the West - is both already here and never going to happen. Our society will probably continue to shuffle along, zombielike, unlike we develop the technology of The Expanse, and can found new nations offworld.
trump gave back as good as he got--why 'republicans' don't like him. he wasn't aware of the traitors near to him but he acted the way a defender of america should act towards the bad guys he identified, at home or abroad
Until he left his supporters to rot in prison. The Bail Project has sprung many, many miscreants of the worst sort. He could have kicked in a few bucks for legal defense. Dance with who brung ya.
If the right was honest with itself, that would be what disqualifies Trump in 2024. At the end of the day, those people were there because he held a rally, and he's taken zero ownership of the outcome. The bare minimum he could have done is cheerlead and fundraise for their defense. Instead, he rarely pays them lip service. He's more concerned with selling trading cards and destroying Ron DeSantis.
If he lived up to all his talk at all, he'd have risked an impeachment conviction to blanket pardon those people on his way out of office. And he would have done more than just shout on Twitter when people's lives were being destroyed by covid lockdowns or race riots.
But he didn't. And it doesn't matter if it was because he didn't have the power or didn't have the stones. Either way, he's useless.
It's better to let a thousand guilty men go free than to punish one innocent man.
What you're NOT supposed to do is let those thousand scumbags loose AND punish the innocent.
I've pretty much tuned out conservative media altogether. Corporate media like Fox is as manipulative as any left wing outlet, and all the other bloggers and social media pundits wore me out with their unending tick tock, "Trump has a plan" nonsense.
It's only gotten more ridiculous heading into the next election cycle, as all the corporate shill outlets try to thread the needle on shifting their support to another candidate, while the remainder have increasingly devolved into a Trump personality cult.
At this point, I'd rather listen to some disaffected leftist like Taibbi, who's not trying to protect anybody and isn't pandering to me.
For me, the breaking point was when I saw that the endless pep-talking on Fox News, Lucianne, Townhall, RedState, etc. about the Red Wave That Will Save America was just that - talk. No Red Wave came. Well, that's not entirely true. It showed up, and was invalidated at the ballot box by Leftist cheating.
So now what? Tyranny? Civil war? I don't know.
I finally realized that the real world isn't as bad as conservative political animals want me to think it is, that I feel ashamed to have been sucked in by nutcases who ENJOY politics and that my plan now is what Captain Picard ordered the Enterprise's crew to do in First Contact:
"Find a quiet corner of North America and stay out of history's way."
"Until," not "Unlike."
Greatest A/B test ever: Earth/Mars
Regarding ideation and winnowing, Bob Lutz has said that he has 10 new ideas before lunch, but most of them are bad. Henry J. Kaiser was said to have 100 ideas an hour, 99 of them not worth pursuing. Of course, if you can still come up with 8 good ideas in a normal workday, you're pretty much ahead of the game. It took Clessie Cummins 3,000 prototypes to perfect a mechanical fuel injection system (in the 1920s!) for his diesel engines.
Lately, I've been thinking about simultaneous inventions (like Liebniz and Newton) and how ideas can be both similar and branch off in different directions.