Spero in Dialogue

4/8–4/12

Each week, we like to share links, books, movies, and content that the team found interesting. Hopefully it helps the world get to know us a little better, and maybe some interesting patterns will emerge.

Sara Eshelman

Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics” (Economist)

Controversial paper revisited. Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”.

Andrew Parker

Notes on how to use LLMs in your product (Irrational Exuberance)

The title really says it all with this one. A terrific, fairly concise summary of the mental model and key decisions you will encounter when incorporating an LLM into a feature in your product.

Marc Tarpenning

Ocean Heat Has Shattered Records for More Than a Year. What’s Happening? (NYT)

Ocean surface temperatures have broken daily temperature records for that date every day for more than year. The graph is rather extraordinary.

Lisa Zieger

What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.? (The Ezra Klein Show)

AI is moving faster than most of us expected, though it still remains to be seen where everything lands. This interview with Dario Amodei is one of the most compelling conversations I’ve heard on the topic.

Shripiya Mahesh

The Gap (YouTube)

I heard this Ira Glass clip after I had started film school and it has stuck with me over the years. Every person starting on a career (creative or otherwise) would find value in what he says

Stephen Wemple

A Psychologist Explains Four Reasons the Internet Feels So Broken, Why School Absences Have “Exploded” Across America (Plain English with Derek Thompson), Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media (Conversations with Tyler), The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? (Nature)

Excuse the multiple links but there has been a great cross internet dialogue largely in response to Jonathan Haidt’s new book that generally hits on why the world just feels so off because — smartphones, the internet, modern culture, the collapse of organized religion, and just how damn fast the world is changing relative to how fast our brains can change. The implications show up in everything from showing up to school to painful politics.