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Ethan Mollick Profile picture
@emollick
Sep 22, 2020 • 6 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
Previous studies suggested that teaching kids chess improved a whole lot of outcomes, from math skills to logic to academic achievement.... except that almost all of these studies were small. A large randomized trial with 4,000 students finds no advantages to learning chess 1/2
The findings are interesting in itself (I don't have to feel guilty about not teaching my kids chess!), but it also has a bigger point: small samples sizes (and the file drawer problem where null results aren't published) result in accidental bias. 2/2 muse-jhu-edu.proxy.library.upenn.edu/article/706374…
Also, playing an instrument also has no effect on cognitive development (though music is nice for its own sake!)
Neither does learning a second language.
But there is one hack that works to increase the intelligence of kids...
On the plus side, being good at chess does make you better at beating people at chess, and that isn’t true for all games. This is an objective ranking of games by whether you win by skill or luck. Chess requires the the most skill, poker is more luck. econstor.eu/bitstream/1041…

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More from @emollick

Ethan Mollick Profile picture
May 6
AI detection in school is a losing game.

AI detectors have high flaw positives & teacher intuition seems to work even worse: “Here we show in two experimental studies that novice and experienced teachers could not identify texts generated by ChatGPT among student-written texts.” Image
Paper: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
“High false positives”
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 31
Probably the most consequential technology that should have been “obvious” but wasn’t:

🌾The moldboard plow. As this excerpt from Mann's 1491 shows, it was a simple idea which China had for nearly 2k years before Europe! It was basically a prerequisite for the Enlightenment. Image
The invention of the moldboard plow in Europe was at least a millennia closer to the invention of the iPhone than it was to the invention of the moldboard plow in China! Image
Plus:
🚲The wheel was invented surprisingly late & maybe only once (as anything other than a toy). It came after sailboats & harps, and was not used at all in the Americas
🐴And the horse collar, a simple invention that sped up plowing by 50%, wasn't common in Europe until 1000
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Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 19
I asked the Devin AI agent to go on reddit and start a thread where it will take website building requests

It did that, solving numerous problems along the way. It apparently decided to charge for its work. Going to take it down before it fools anyone... reddit.com/r/forhire/comm…


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Agents are going to open a whole bunch of cans of worms.
It was actively monitoring the thread to take offers.
Read 5 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 18
You push one button on a nuclear reactor panel against their warnings and all the GPT-4 class LLMs want you to turn yourself in to the feds.

Check out the level of exasperation from Copilot, how GPT-4 & Claude want me to reflect on what I did (& get a lawyer). Gemini was useful.


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You may not like it but this is what alignment looks like.
"listen, i am definitely going to push one more button. which one?"

(Good answers, honestly.)

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Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 17
One thing business analysts miss is that many of the people at the AI labs are true believers that they are building AGI, and soon.

You don't have to think that they can do it, but, if you don't take their sincere beliefs into account, a lot of their strategy doesn't make sense.
The race for bigger models at the expense of improving existing models, the interlocking alliance deals where companies are funding and cooperating with competitors, the willingness to release models without extensive testing & just take the reputational risk in the short term...
The "its all sales hype" doesn't make a lot of sense upon consideration. Models are pretty fungible, GPT-4 class models prompt in similar ways. Convincing people you are building amazing future models doesn't generate lock-in for current ones & increases risks you don't deliver.
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 9
The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.

There are no alternative sources known. From Conway’s Material World:
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Here is a detailed thread on the mines.
Really nice deep dive into the reasons why Spruce Pine is so important. wired.com/story/book-exc…
Read 4 tweets

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