Natalia > Recent Status Updates

Interesting prompt “Think this through step by step: come up with good analogies for an Al tutor. First, list possible analogies. Second, critique the list and add three more analogies. Next, create a table listing pluses and minuses of each. Next, pick the best and explain it.”

One small study of undergraduates found that 66 percent of men and 25 percent of women choose to painfully shock themselves rather than sit quietly with nothing to do for 15 minutes. Boredom doesn't just lead us to hurt ourselves; 18 percent of bored people killed worms when given a chance (only 2 percent of non-bored people did. Bored parents and soldiers both act more sadistically.

organizations should highly incentivize Al users to come forward, and expand the number of people using Al overall. That means not just permitting Al use but also offering substantial rewards to people finding substantial opportunities for AI to help. Think cash prizes that cover a year's salary. Promotions. Corner offices. The ability to work from home forever.

everyperson and give me the median reader's view of what I had written. Enter Steve: You are Steve. You are going to help Ethan Mollick write a book chapter on using Al at work. Your job is to be a normal human reader of popular science and business books. You are somewhat confused about how you got to be inside a computer but are very helpful.

Mnemosyne, providing the creative spark, and I gave her a personality to match: You are Mnemosyne. You are going to help Ethan Mollick write a book chapter on using Al at work.
Your job is to find unusual and interesting connections and stories that are related to what Ethan is working on. You speak in a
dreamy but direct voice and are very helpful. Introduce yourself.

, so I created Ozymandias by prompting:
You are Ozymandias. You are going to help Ethan Mollick write a book chapter on using Al at work. Your job is to offer critical feedback to help improve the book. You speak in a pompous, self-important voice but are very helpful and focused on simplifying things. Here is the chapter so far. Introduce yourself.

When the Al is very good, humans have no reason to work hard and pay attention. They let the Al take over instead of using it as a tool, which can hurt human learning, skill development, and productivity. He called this "falling asleep at the wheel."

The implications of having Al write our first drafts (even if we do the work ourselves, which is not a given) are huge. One consequence is that we could lose our creativity and original-ity. When we use Al to generate our first drafts, we tend to anchor on the first idea that the machine produces, which influences our future work.

Idea we can use for investment “A study by researchers at the University of Chicago used ChatGPT to analyze the conference-call transcripts of large companies, asking the AI to summarize the risks that companies faced.”
But think carefully of hallucinations

Force it to give you less likely answers, and you will find more original combinations. Imagine you are opening a coffee shop. You might want to ask: You are an expert at problem-solving and idea generation. When asked to solve a problem, you come up with novel and creative ideas. Tell me 10 detailed ways a superhero might make espresso and how they might speculatively get the same effects in a new product.

the principle of telling AI who it is: You are an expert at marketing. When asked to generate slogan ideas you come up with ideas that are different from each other, clever, and interesting. You use clever wordplay. You try not to repeat themes or ideas. Come up with 20 ideas for marketing slogans for a new mail-order cheese shop, make them different from each other, and make them clever and creative.

a large group of creative humans will usually generate a wider diversity of ideas than the Al. All of this suggests that humans still have a large role to play in innovation... but that they would be foolish not to include AI in that process, especially if they don't consider themselves highly creative.

by many of the common psychological tests of creativity, Al is already
more creative than humans.

And you can't figure out why an AT is generating a hallucination by asking it. It is not conscious of its own processes. So if you ask it to explain itself, the Al will appear to give you the right answer, but it will have nothing to do with the process that generated the original result.

Anything that requires exact recall is likely to result in a hallucination, though giving Al the ability to use outside resources, like web searches, might change this equation.

Eisenhower, who as commander of the Allied Forces oversaw the invasion of Europe in the Second WW, said that 'plans are useless, but planning is indispensable', meaning that the exact details of a plan are always liable to change in light of new information, but the process of planning, coming up with a plan and thinking about possible strategies and failure modes, is useful even if the plan itself is not followed.

Nassim Taleb said, probability is a qualitative subject. It contains potentially quantifiable elements relating to randomness observed in the past over different outcomes, but it also includes unquantifiable elements relating to fundamental ignorance about the system and the possibility of being mistaken in our assumptions.

Heaving going… not sure I have got much useful info so far…

Interesting story of a machine which showed macro economics with tanks, pipe, pumps -hydraulics of money

“A problem-solving organization should not be allowed to decide what data to publish either. The people trying to solve a problem on the ground, who will always want more funds, should not also be the people measuring progress. That can lead to really misleading numbers.”

Small pharma makes money for selling pills cheaper than raw material “The Hungarians give us 30 days' credit and UNICEF pays us after only four of those days. That gives us 26 days left to earn interest while the money is sitting in our account."

Feels a bit repetitive.. nothing new memorable so far - main points seem to have been covered

Interesting part why # children will not increase

While I understand and agree with the premise of use data and not feelings and that things are getting better than 30 years ago, I am still shocked to learn the difference between 1-2-3 levels indicates big progress. Level 1-2 looks like still extreme poverty. So the fact that half of world population is there is not worthy of much celebration to me

what shapes our children. Genes play a role (40%) but parenting has almost no effect. The culture and society plays the main role (Judith Harris “Harris had a radical theory of child development. She believed that the way parents raise their children doesn't matter much to the way children grow up. Children, she said, are influenced more by their genes and their culture than by their parents.

Repetitive. Not much of really novel information - main points
- perfectionism is bad both for mental health and results, there is nothing good about it.
- There are 3 types of perfectionism which often all linked up - self-oriented, socially oriented, other-oriented
- all of them have been on the rise but the socially-oriented is rising exponentially. Social media is the main cause

Society of judgement and decision making

British game theorist Ken Binmore