Sara Herrero

Nelli Walli

@tinybutterfly687613 · Jan 12, 2026 6:40 am

Is the Scrabble world champion (Nigel Richards) an example of the Searle's Chinese room

I'm currently in my undergraduate degree and I have been studying AI ethics under one of my professors for a while. I always have been a partisan of Searle's strong AI and I never really found the chinese room argument compelling.
Personally I found that the systems argument against the chinese room to make a lot of sense. My first time reading "Minds, Brains, and Programs" I thought Searle's rebuttal was not very well structured and I found it a little logically incorrect. He mentions that if you take away the room and allow the person to internalize all the things inside the system, that he still will not have understanding--and that no part of the system can have understanding since he is the entire system.
I always was confused on why he cannot have understanding, since I imagine this kind of language theatrics is very similar to how we communicate; I couldn't understand how this means artificial intelligence cannot have true understanding.
Now on another read I was able to draw some parallels to Nigel Richards--the man who won the french scrabble championship by memorizing the french dictionary. I havent seen anyone talk about this online so I just want to propose a few questi

Allan Simmons

@blacklion900609 · Jan 12, 2026 12:40 am

i feel like i deserve a thanks for living alone for four years at 11 years old.

when i was about ten my grandmother got extremely ill and nobody else could look after her but my mother who is a single mother and unfortunately i have no siblings so my options either were i go down my grandmother house everyday when her whole house was falling apart, it was constantly so cold you could see your own breath and be alone because my mothers full attention would be on my grandmother or be home alone in my own house that isnt falling apart and isnt cold.
eleven year old me ended up deciding to just be completely home alone because i didnt really have any other option. being home alone lasted just until i turned 15 because thats when my grandmother passed away. i never really got a thanks for being home alone for almost every single day from the age of eleven when i feel i shoudve to some extent.
it was everyday i was alone. i have no siblings or father who could keep me company. my mother would leave for work around 8-9am and then come home around 8pm but by then she would be exhausted from working and looking after my grandmother that she would go straight to bed because she was also ill with dizzy spells. so for me it felt like i was constantly home alone.
i didnt g

Luz Lozano

@browngorilla160747 · Jan 12, 2026 12:55 am

CMV: A few swing districts in the US hold the outsized power to upend geopolitics/economics, and that is a systemic risk

US elections are typically polarized, and only a few swing states matter - yes we know that. But even within those states, many localities or districts vote on familiar lines and don’t affect the outcome of that swing state. It is truly a few districts that end up deciding the fate of USA and arguably the world (as 2025 is evidence enough)
This is an extremely high concentration of power in hands of a few (say hundred of thousands to a few million at most), which makes it a significant *systemic risk*. Yet global agencies don’t talk about it (e.g. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2025.pdf)
Add social media propaganda, and AI driven algorithms, and it feels it’s disturbingly easy to target disinformation at this narrow group and shift outcomes that affect populations far beyond them.
It’s a pretty broken system.
A parliamentary style setup definitely would have given a more balanced power to population.
Edit: a lot of downvotes! Looks like the average Joe really feels nationalistic about their electoral system and doesn’t want to hear anything bad about it.
Edit 2: a lot of answers are trying this CMV with a theoretical approach that basically a region is fre