>>benbre+(OP)
I sat the All Souls exam, taking the philosophy specialist papers, though I'm a math/physics/ML guy. It was a lot of fun, I really appreciate that there's somewhere in the world where these kinds of questions are asked in a formal setting. My questions/answers are written up in brief here [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_so...

* Oops, they link to my post at the bottom. Sorry for the redundancy.

>>andyjo+W53
Not a Brit, but Terry Pratchett's ritual of the Other Jacket told me all I need to know.

https://community.pearljam.com/discussion/71416/tradition-go...

>>benbre+(OP)
Past exams: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers

>>xg15+E83
> Here is an example of how mindless adherence to tradition can get a bit weird and very funny

See also; the King's Remembrancer and the Quit Rent Ceremony and the Trial of the Pyx:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Remembrancer

It is truly strange how my country can create a political and cultural operating system that allows this stuff to just go on and on for almost 800 years, right up to now.

>>lordna+883
OK, interesting hypothesis. So, I wondered how it would do with "Why should cultural historians care about ice cores?" which indeed requires gluing together ideas across areas. I asked ChatGPT 5 on Thinking mode:

https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457...

It does a pretty good job summarizing an abstruse, but known, subfield of frontier research. (So, perhaps not doing its own "gluing" of areas....) It clearly lacks "depth", in the sense of deep thinking about the why and how of this. (Many cultural historians might have reasons for deep scepticism of invasion by a bunch of quantitative data nerds, I suspect, and might be able to articulate why quite well.) It's bullet points, not an essay. I tried asking it for a 1000 word essay specifically and got:

https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c3466...

which seems only superficially different - an essay in form, but secretly a bunch of bullet points.

For a comparison, here's a Guardian article that came up when I googled for "cultural historians ice cores":

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms...

It seems to do a good job at explaining why they should, though not in a deep essayistic style.

>>xg15+E83
a) GNU Terry Pratchett

b) In case you are one of today's Lucky Ten Thousand, this is a reference to the real-life Ceremony Of The Keys[1]

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/ [1] https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/t...

>>munchl+rf3
Useful things to keep in mind about the "Turing test:

a) It was not meant as a "test" by Turing, rather as a thought experiment.

b) It does not require intelligence to pass tests that claim to be it. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goostman

>>hydrog+n43
The list of exam fellows can be found online [1]. Probably their research or any personal blogs would be the closest you can find.

[1] https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people