This paper poses a puzzle about what we think makes us human.
Before I give the answer, try it: You & an AI that looks like a person are in front of a human judge. You can each say only one word. The judge then kills whoever they think is the AI
What do you say? (Don’t peek)
The most common answer was “Love" but that really didn’t help the judge. The best answer was 💩
If someone said 💩 and the other said "love," judges would assume that whoever said 💩 was the human 69% of the time, and kill whoever said "love." "Banana" is also a good choice.
The graphic shows all the words given by at least one person, clustered by semantic similarity (yes, that means at least two people chose “moist” and two chose “bootylicious”). Here’s the paper: cocodev.fas.harvard.edu/publications/a…
Our intuitions about creativity are very different than reality. In this survey, most people didn't know:
🧠Group brainstorming generates less ideas than individuals working alone
📦Constraints increase creativity
👩👦Kids are not more creative than adults sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Here's a thread on the myths of group brainstorming, which people keep getting wrong...
This is the second high quality study in the past week to show that incentivizing vaccines through lotteries or other rewards does NOT work. The concept is good, but it doesn’t have the desired effect.
Alternatives to mandates don’t seem to move the needle, literally.
These are also good examples of social science at work: nudges, lotteries, and other incentives have proven useful in many other situations, so they were reasonable to try here. And now some very impressive & rapidly-conducted studies are showing that we need to change course.
One key distinction in reading academic work is whether a paper can make causal claims - that can it show that changing one thing will definitely change another? “Correlation isn’t causation” is not actually a useful rule to figure this out, this thread has more 👇
I hadn't heard of the "twisties" before, but it turns out to be a known & not well-understood risk for elite athletes, like the "yips" in 🏌️♂️& "target panic" in 🏹 (except much more dangerous!) - a sudden loss of elite skills. This was a helpful overview: frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
Also, to be clear, I am not a sports psychologist, so my reading suggestion could be wrong- more expert people should please feel free to correct me! But it does highlight how incredibly complex true mastery and expert ability is (and how little we really understand it)
I like this classic description of how experts differ from non-experts. Making it harder: experts have trouble explaining the principles behind what they do in a way that non-experts can usnderstand. They just operate at a different level.
You have probably heard the argument that we might be living in a simulation, but no one asks the next obvious question: if we were, when would someone turn it off? Well, this paper decided that the answer is "soon" - either out of boredom or to save money arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pape…
Seven classes of strategic errors:
I Misinformation: claiming a data relationship that isn’t there
II Misinformation: missing a relationship
III Vision: Solving wrong problem
IV Innovation: Not generating alternatives
V Inaction
VI Action: Acting when you shouldn’t
VII Cascade!
This paper outlines 7 classes of errors that affect strategic decision makers, ending with the epic-sounding Type VII Iatrogensis Cascade. Also, there’s a list of questions to ask yourself to avoid cascades. The paper is readable & full of examples. semanticscholar.org/paper/Decision…
Many of these are warnings for entrepreneurs. Positives about founders (bias towards action, willingness to experiment) can become negatives if not also tempered with a little planning & patience. It is why having a formal business plan increases a startup's chances by 10-20%.