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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "

The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."

Beware fictional evidence.

The joke works because we have assumptions about what it means to be able to play chess, and we know that a dog playing chess with any significant chance of success implies a much greater jump in intelligence than the jump between playing poorly and playing well.

If the dog was playing chess using some method that was not like how humans play chess, and which couldn't generalize to being able to play well, the joke wouldn't be very funny. Of course there isn't such a method for chess-playing dogs. But we know that Claude doesn't play Pokemon like humans do, and this may very well not generalize to playing as well as a human.

(Notice that your assumptions are wrong for computers playing chess. My Gameboy can beat me in chess. It has no chance of taking over the world.)