Conscious Culture 35: Persuading the Unpersuadable
Aug 12, 2021 4:19 am
Persuading the Unpersuadable
Welcome to Conscious Culture, a weekly newsletter full of interesting reads for curious, intelligent people who want to sharpen their minds
Hi everyone,
I hope you're having a great week.
We're talking about persuading the unpersuadable, how to stop procrastinating, the polymath playbook, blockchain basics, and a lot more this week.
There is a bonus article in Interesting Reads this week on OpenAI Codex, an AI-powered coding assistant.
Feel free to hit reply and let me know what you think.
Interesting Reads
"The first barrier to changing someone’s view is arrogance. We’ve all encountered leaders who are overconfident: They don’t know what they don’t know. If you call out their ignorance directly, they may get defensive. A better approach is to let them recognize the gaps in their own understanding."
"If we cannot be certain looking at the past, then it’s even more difficult to predict the future. All we can do is make decisions based on the information available at the time, and the outcome will be the outcome. The focus should be more on the journey rather than the destination."
"In a world built for specialization, the polymath approach can help us build unique mental models to differentiate ourselves and discover meaningful work...A polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge and skills. Polymaths engage in extended learning across disparate fields, and apply their skills to connect ideas and solve problems in unique ways."
"Procrastination can become a vicious cycle. Trying to achieve something and failing to act on your intentions can feel frustrating and depressing, and this can then lead to even more procrastination. Research on procrastination confirms that it’s related to negative outcomes – people who are inclined to more procrastination tend to have lower life satisfaction, lower achievement and poorer health."
Bonus Interesting Read
"OpenAI Codex is a descendant of GPT-3; its training data contains both natural language and billions of lines of source code from publicly available sources, including code in public GitHub repositories. OpenAI Codex is most capable in Python, but it is also proficient in over a dozen languages including JavaScript, Go, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Swift and TypeScript, and even Shell. It has a memory of 14KB for Python code, compared to GPT-3 which has only 4KB—so it can take into account over 3x as much contextual information while performing any task."
Will Note:
OpenAI started beta testing GPT-3 in June 2020. GPT-3 is a human-like text generator. Those articles you see of people saying "A Computer Wrote This, Are You Scared Yet," use GPT-3. From late 2020 until now, a flood of new products have come out using GPT-3. They pretty much write blog post, ad copy, tweets, and landing page copy for you. Notable products are Jarvis also known as Conversion.ai, Shortly.ai, Nichesss, Copy bot, Copysmith, and Content Bot. It's too many to keep up with now. A new one comes out every week. I think this time next year, possibly sooner we can expect a new group of products to come out that use Codex.
Are you a fan of GPT-3 and Codex? Do you think GPT-3 and Codex will take the jobs of content writers and programmers? Let me know your thoughts on them.
Learning
"This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances."
Tools and Resources
"Mirror is the next big change in the long history of symbolic communication. Through a decentralized, user-owned, crypto-based network, Mirror’s publishing platform revolutionizes the way we express, share and monetize our thoughts."
Will Note:
In my opinion, Mirror is a big deal. Mirror is probably the first decentralized writing platform for writers and joining Mirror does not only make you a community member. It makes you a co-owner of the platform.
Fun Stuff
"Never forget to text your mom again! We'll remind you to text her on a regular basis."
Quote of the Week
“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”
— Alain de Botton
🎉End
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With gratitude,
Will