Think you have a good sense of humour? So do most people…

Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing [email protected]

Funny feeling

Scientific papers don’t usually hit their readers in the feels. It’s hard to become emotionally entangled with transcriptional regulators or muon neutrinos. But this week, Feedback was sent a study that made us feel positively queasy.

Assistant news editor Alexandra Thompson had spotted a paper by social psychologist Paul Silvia at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his colleagues. It’s called: “Who laughs at their own jokes? Metacognitive judgments of self-rated funniness in creative humor production tasks”.

Oh no, Feedback thought. We do tend to think we’re funny – at least some of the time and not always on purpose – but what if we’re kidding ourselves? What if this paper shows that people of Feedback’s ilk are liable to laugh at their own jokes even if nobody else does?

The paper opens in confrontational style: “When we imagine someone who thinks that they’re hilarious and laughs at their own jokes, we might have someone specific in mind, for better or worse, like an insufferable ex-boyfriend [or] a parent armed with a book of dad jokes.” Feedback instantly had a mental image of David Brent/Michael Scott (delete as appropriate).

Silvia and his team go on to inform us that “most people view themselves as having a better-than-average sense of humor”. They offer some stats to support that, like a classic study where fewer than 2 per cent of participants rated their sense of humour as below average. Then they go for the jugular: “The concept of a ‘sense of humor,’ however, is so abstract, ill-defined, and difficult to disconfirm that it is a perfect vessel for someone’s unrealistic and self-enhancing beliefs.”

At this point, Feedback started to feel like something nameless and malign was gnawing on our spinal cord. Are we funny? Have we ever been funny?

Silvia and his team later describe a series of experiments in which they gave people prompts and asked them for humorous responses, then got them to rate how funny their responses were. The prompts were things like: “Imagine you and a friend are ordering something to eat at a new food truck. After the truck’s cook hands over your food, you and your friend walk off to a nearby bench to eat. You take a big bite – and the food is totally disgusting. You turn to your friend, and say, ‘….’ “

It turns out that people rate their ideas as funnier if they have higher confidence, if they believe they are generally funny, if they scored higher on personality traits like extraversion and narcissism and – readers may feel there is a certain inevitability to this last one – “when they identified as male”.

How reassuring: Feedback is nothing like that, so if we think we’re funny, we probably are. We’re still not telling you what we would say to that prompt, though.

Satan versus gravity

In “The death of the author”, Roland Barthes argued that individual readers’ interpretations of books are just as valid as those intended by the authors. George Orwell may have intended Animal Farm as a parable about the Russian revolution, but if Feedback reads it as meaning that pigs are sneaky, we are not wrong.

We were reminded of this essay when reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan sent us a press release about Timothy Burbery’s talk at the European Geoscience Union’s annual meeting in May, titled “Meteoritics and Dante’s Inferno: Examining Satan’s fall as an impact event“.

Burbery, who is at Marshall University in West Virginia, has taken a fresh look at Dante Alighieri’s classic poem The Divine Comedy. Prior to the events of the story, Satan has fallen from heaven into hell. Burbery is interested in “the geophysical elements of Satan’s fall from Heaven”.

The press release goes into more detail. “Dante envisioned Satan as a high-velocity impactor hitting the Southern Hemisphere and tunnelling to the Earth’s centre,” it says.

“Burbery suggests treating the Prince of Darkness as an oblong, asteroid-sized body… Like the Hoba meteorite, which remains a 60-ton intact mass, Dante’s Satan is modelled as a physical, un-vaporized impactor that permanently restructured the Earth’s architecture.”

This allows for a radical reinterpretation of the poem. “In this light, the nine circles of Hell are no longer merely symbolic tiers of sin, but rather a remarkably accurate description of the concentric, terraced morphology found in multi-ring impact basins across the solar system, from the Moon to Venus.”

Feedback isn’t entirely sure, but we think the circles might actually be symbolic tiers of sin, and that this is all taking the death of the author a little bit too far.

Waymo out of line

“Empty Waymos invade Atlanta neighborhood, keep circling cul-de-sac,” announced The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on 15 May. Waymo said the driverless cars had experienced “a routing problem”, causing them to get stuck in a loop that was both figurative and literal.

Footage on BBC News showed the cars endlessly puttering around a cul-de-sac, getting in each other’s way, reversing, getting in another Waymo’s way, and so on for hours. Feedback can generally get out of a cul-de-sac in two or three attempts, but maybe that’s because we’re not artificially intelligent.

Full marks to the anonymous Bluesky user known only as “Capitalist with a heart of gold” who described the self-driving cars as “traffic without transportation”.

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