Pigeon Anatomy

• 1 min read

Why Do People Persecute City Pigeons?

Zaria Gorvett | BBC Future | 21st June 2024

Charles Darwin adored pigeons. A Mughal emperor had 20,000 of them. During WW2, we gave them medals. Humans domesticated them into their current form, yet the average city dweller today considers feral pigeons to be "dirty, disease-addled and akin to flying rats". Our dislike is recent, and based on faulty information. These birds are clever, caring and disease-resistant (2,600 words)

An Anatomy Of Algorithm Aversion

Cass R. Sunstein & Jared H. Gaffe | Social Science Research Network | 15th June 2024

Algorithm aversion is the impulse to distrust forecasting or decision-making done by machine learning or language models. This effect persists even when the algorithms can be proven to outperform humans on the same task. It has to do with "a desire for sovereignty over one’s own life", it is theorised. It feels better to do a bad job ourselves rather than have a machine do a better one (9,000 words)

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