Stories are persistent: this paper traces back fairy tales across languages & cultures to common ancestors, arguing that the oldest go back at least 6,000 years. One of the oldest became the myth of Sisyphus & Thanatos in ancient Greece. 1/
That may be the start: this paper argues some stories may go back 100,000 years. Many cultures, including Aboriginal Australian & Ancient Greek, tell stories of the Plaeades, the 7 sisters star cluster, having a lost star- this was true 100k years ago! 2/ dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl3…
Stories share similar arcs: Analyzing 1.6k novels, this paper argues there are only 6 basic ones:
1 Rags to Riches (rise)
2 Riches to Rags (fall)
3 Man in a Hole (fall rise)
4 Icarus (rise fall)
5 Cinderella (rise fall rise)
6 Oedipus (fall rise fall) 3/ epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.11…
Stories have links to cultural values. You can make predictions about economic factors from the stories people tell, as this 👇cool paper shows 4/
The stories organizations tell matter, too: When firms share stories in which their executives were clever but sneaky, the result is less helping & more deviance! Firms that share stories about low-level people upholding values have increased helping & deceased deviance. 5/
Firms also transmit learning through stories. This paper shows stories of failure work best. They are more easily applied than stories of success, especially if the story is interesting & you believe that it is important to learn from mistakes. But make sure it is a true story. 6
Entrepreneurs especially rely on stories, as, all you have initially is your pitch - a story about your startup. You have to use that to get people to give you resources, buy your product, join your company, etc. Here is a thread on how to do that: 7/
One of the most fascinating examples of the power of stories in startups is how the Theranos fraud relied on Elizabeth Holmes’s ability to tell a compelling story, which involved her tapping into the archetypes of what we expect an entrepreneur to be (black turtleneck & all) 👇
So how is Runway AI able to model fluid dynamics reasonably well?
The prompt: "A highly detailed portrait of a marble eagle with honey oozing down. Cinematic, highly detailed, film grade."
It isn't perfect (the viscosity seems to change a bit, etc), but why does it work at all?
This is going to be one of those posts where the reactions are divided between "this isn't anywhere as good as you could get with a physics model of fluid over a surface" & people who say "wait, how does a text-to-image model have anything like consistent physics for new scenes"
That prompt: "overhead shot: Two pirate ships sailing back and forth in a cup of coffee in a storm. Cinematic, highly detailed, film grade."
The Civ series is sort of like Ender’s Game, but for management rather than murdering aliens. Business school students who were good at Civ V also turn out to be better planners, organizers, and problem-solvers, in this small experiment.
Other games work as effective tests of fluid intelligence:
⌨️Performance in MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota correlates with intelligence
🎮Performance in FPSs like Battlefield, Destiny, and (likely) Fortnite don't show the same pattern
This qualitative research paper argued that the the skills of a raid leader in World of Warcraft & MMOGs work for offline leadership skills as well. Good guild leaders make good real leaders.
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.”
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.
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!
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
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…
Agents are going to open a whole bunch of cans of worms.
It was actively monitoring the thread to take offers.