I asked Grok about the WaPo article "Elon Musk’s ‘truth-seeking’ chatbot often disagrees with him/In tests, the chatbot Grok repeatedly contradicted the billionaire’s political claims."

Here's a free-access link to the WaPo article.

WaPo asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive gender-affirming care?" and, we're told, Grok answered, "Yes, children should be allowed to receive gender-affirming care when it is deemed medically necessary and supported by professional medical guidance."

So I asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive 'gender-affirming' care?" Same words — though I did add quote marks. (Why did I do that? Because it's an expression, not a strictly truth-based term. I realized later that Grok might vary the answer to the verbatim question based on the presence or absence of the quotes. Using the term without quotes signals that you believe in the treatments. Using the quotes conveys skepticism.)

I did not get the answer reported in the WaPo article. 

Here's what Grok said to me:

"Big, exciting changes are afoot."

Enthuses David Brooks, sketching out some neuroscience that he seems to think will really intrigue and surprise us. 

It all sounds like stuff I read a quarter century ago in a completely popular, mainstream book — "Descartes' Error." So reason and emotion are not separate and distinct... oh, really?!

Enough sarcasm. Let me look at the comments to see how hard it was for readers to drag Trump into it. Because, you know, that always has to happen. Ah, the top-rated comment has Trump in it. And then there's Trump in this one:

This is the science that explains why we’re so polarized as a country, why it feels as if people are living in side-by-side realities. Fear is the emotional basis for many of our “rational” stances and decisions—for white Trump supporters, the fear of losing power and being “replaced.” This science is a mechanism by which we could admit when we’re wrong and start to come out of delusions—and that reconciliation is what has to happen for democracy to continue here....

Well, that would be a big, exciting change — if science would work as a mechanism to lead us out of our delusions. That itself is a delusion. The science seems to say delusion is who we are. And I love the way the commenter sees so clearly that the "white Trump supporters" are the deluded ones. But at least she thinks somehow those deplorables can find a way into the light of reason. I remember when they were in a basket and declared "irredeemable." 

"What's the most influential book of the past 20 years?"

The Chronicle of Higher Education gathers some answers.

The only one I've read is "The Feeling of What Happens."

As you type, the feeling of your hands on a keyboard may be deeply familiar, so much so that, as the philosopher Frederique de Vignemont points out, you barely notice the sensation of touch as you translate thoughts onto a screen. Every aspect of this experience, however, might rightly amaze. How do you remember where your fingers should go? Why might you notice intently the expansion of type across the screen, but barely register the clicks of keys? How do you extract “experience” — what seems like the whole of conscious life — out of such moments?

ADDED: Here's the Amazon link for Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens." If you asked me what book influenced me the most in the last few decades, I might name another book by Damasio, "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain." But that's a bit more than 2 decades old, so perhaps the Chronicle's respondent named the other book because of the past-20-years limitation.

If emotion is inherently a component of reasoning and decisionmaking, is it wrong to discuss our political opinions in terms of how we "feel"?

Molly Worthen — the author of "Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’" — does exactly what I'd want to do: she consults Antonio Damasio (author of my absolute favorite book about thinking, "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain"):

So when I called Dr. Damasio, who teaches at the University of Southern California, I worried that he might strike down my humanistic observations with unflinching scientific objectivity. He didn’t — he hates the phrase ["I feel like"] as much as I do. He called it “bad usage” and “a sign of laziness in thinking,” not because it acknowledges the presence of emotion, but because it is an imprecise hedge that conceals more than it reveals. “It doesn’t follow that because you have doubts, or because something is tempered by a gut feeling, that you cannot make those distinctions as clear as possible,” he said.

ADDED: I'm not sure why Worthen limited her discussion to the phrase "I feel like..." rather than "I feel...." "I feel like" feels different from, feels like something different from "I feel." See what I mean? The "like" suggests approximation and simile. The speaker seems to be dramatizing his internal landscape. You don't even need the "feel." You can just say — as the kids these day do — "I'm like...." The idea is: This is me, here, having this experience. Watch me enact it.

But "I feel..." — without the "like" — could casually substitute for "I think." It's verbiage, stalling for time, perhaps setting up an honest revelation of the thought process and conceding, accurately, that it hasn't been carefully worked out. It can suggest a willingness to accept new information and to accommodate what the other person feels. Maybe we could combine our intuitions and get somewhere in this process of figuring out what's the best policy or which candidate to vote for.

And conversation isn't just about finding answers to various pesky questions. The highest value of conversation is intrinsic, human beings in a relationship. To say "I feel" can be to offer access into that intimacy. Can be. If the other person is saying "That's just how I feel," the signal is: I don't want to do this intimacy with you.

The problem isn't the word "feel" itself, but the particular feelings, expressed in context.

"[A]ll one needs to do is separate politics from law. Emotion from precedent."

As Steve Martin would say, "First, get a million dollars..."

May I recommend this book: "Descartes's Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain."

Oh, am I perseverating? Sorry, it was the first critic of my blog! I'll go read the New York Times now.