Interessant3 #135 | 🧬 Secular religion, 📱Android's privacy violations, 🤖 GPT-4.5 passes the Turing test
Three Interesting Things for W/C 2025-04-06
🧬 When Atheism Meets a New Orthodoxy
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has stepped away from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, disillusioned by its paradoxical drift into a new kind of religious fundamentalism. A vocal advocate for secularism and rational inquiry, Coyne resigned alongside
and after the foundation retracted his rebuttal to an essay denying biological sex. In his view, the embrace of gender identity ideology over empirical science mirrors the very religious dogma the organisation was meant to oppose. Coyne links the shift to deeper intellectual currents like postmodernism, Gnosticism, and critical theory, which elevate internal feelings above observable facts and frame dissent as heresy.Read in The Wall Street Journal →
📱 Your (Android) Apps Are Watching
Android’s supposed privacy reforms haven’t stopped apps from snooping on what else is installed on your phone, they’ve just made the process sneakier. This sharp investigation by
dives into the manifest files of dozens of popular Indian apps and reveals how delivery giants, along with finance platforms, compile disturbingly detailed profiles by scanning hundreds of unrelated apps on your device. Some even exploit a loophole using a generic UI filter that quietly bypasses restrictions. What you download can reveal where you live, what you earn, and whether you’re about to be charged more for ordering a samosa.🤖 Turing Test, Passed with Personality
A milestone: GPT-4.5 has passed the classic Turing test. In a rigorous three-party setup, participants had five-minute conversations with both a human and an AI, then judged which was which. When GPT-4.5 was prompted to adopt a relatable persona—young, internet-savvy, slightly introverted—it convinced judges it was human 73 percent of the time, outperforming actual people. LLaMa-3.1 also performed well. Without those persona prompts, both models struggled. It’s not just the algorithm that counts, but the character it plays. The study reopens questions of AI deception, humanlike intelligence, and the social costs of counterfeit people.
Join us next week for three more intriguing topics that challenge the norm and expand your horizons! ✌️
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