Vol. 3; Modern Life Skills

Table of Contents

• Dartmouth Scar Experiment

• Play with AI - it doesn't bite

• Lions Roar, Cows Moo

• Catching Rockets with Chopsticks

MINDSET/MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK
The Dartmouth Scar Experiment

Have you heard of the Dartmouth Scar Experiment? I think it’s fascinating.

This section this week is more of an anti-mindset. It features a story that illustrates why a victim mindset can be so detrimental to your perception of reality.

I’ve heard this experiment being talked about a few times in recent weeks, within the context of building stronger, more resilient humans.

Unfortunately, adopting a victim mentality has become increasingly more popular in recent years. It’s become second nature to blame Karen when you don’t get what you want.

Butttt - and I could be wrong - from my perspective, it feels like there’s starting to be some collective pushback against some over corrections that were made post-covid. 

Victim mentality for example. From where I sit, it feels like it’s becoming a little harder to play the victim card than it has been in recent years. Or at least more people in industry are pushing back when that card is played inappropriately.

There are without a doubt instances in life where people are discriminated against, I don’t deny that. But in my ‘the world is largely good’, optimistic view, I like to believe that discrimination is the exception to the rule. 

I have certain perspectives and worldviews. Yours are different, so you may not see things the way I see them. And that’s okay. Healthy even.

But what I hope this data point shows is that feeling like a victim, whether legitimate or not, can absolutely affect your perception of an experience.

It’s almost like a negatively inverted spin on the classic: ‘fake it till you make it’. 

I’ve copied the below excerpt from a recent Sahil Bloom article:

And the full study if anyone is curious on going a little deeper.

Speaking of research papers, lil pro tip: if you want to find and understand research papers faster, create an account on Consensus AI. It’s basically google scholar combined with Chat GPT. Not only does it help you find papers more easily, but it will summarize them, allow you to chat with them, create lit reviews and more. Cool stuff.

LIFE SKILLS
AI Skills Are Life Skills

And that goes for you too, adult.

Every year in TKS, one of my favourite sessions to lead was the Blockchain session. I’m still extremely bullish on the technology in general; I just expect it to be something that happens in the background, behind the scenes, not so in your face like it was during that hype cycle a couple years back when people were buying pictures of Apes for millions of dollars 🙈.

When I introduced the concept of Blockchain to students, the first thing I would do is make sure they understood that Blockchain was not a synonym for Bitcoin or Crypto.

That cryptocurrencies were simply one application that utilized blockchain technologies.

The analogy that usually hit was that Instagram is not the Internet; it’s an application that uses the internet. Same thing with cryptocurrencies; they’re just an application of the underlying blockchain technologies.

The same can be said about AI and ChatGPT. ChatGPT is simply one application of the underlying AI technologies.

I’ve talked to more teachers than I’d like to admit that haven’t created the time to be curious and explore what AI can do for them.

And I’m not talking about teacher tools that have AI in the name. Forget tools like MagicSchool or School AI - those are really just ChatGPT wrappers anyway.

fyi - in case you hear that term (wrapper) - A ChatGPT wrapper is a basic application that uses ChatGPT (or another model) to deliver a custom solution focused on a specific audience.

So for example, a tool that generates lesson plan ideas for you - that’s just prompting ChatGPT behind the scenes for you. It’s a pretty interface wrapped around the same ChatGPT app that you could be experimenting with on your own.

At this stage of your exploration, those tools are short term gain, long term pain.

The more you get out there and learn what these things can do on your own, the better you’ll understand their capabilities, limitations, and even how you can use them with students to in a capacity that isn’t ‘write my essay for me’.

Create a 30 minute block for yourself this week to be AI-curious. It will probably be more fun for you if you don’t immediately think about how to use it for work.

If you’re not sure where to start, pick one of these videos, and then replicate it.

Meaning, don’t just watch it; do something! You won’t break anything.

If you really won’t create 30 minutes to explore - I’ll meet you in the middle.

Here’s a full Spotify playlist to listen to on your commute into the office. 

Allie made it - see screenshot below. It’s basically ‘Introduction to AI’ content that was generated by AI (very meta) using that NotebookLM tool I told you about last week - people are loving it.

If any episode is too technical or boring, skip to the next one. This should be fun 🙂 

CAREER ADVICE
Work Like a Lion, Not Like a Cow

People love to talk about how the education system was set up to support the needs of the industrial age.

You know what else was set up to support the industrial age? Our work weeks.

In physical labour jobs, there is a direct correlation between the time spent at work and the output. But in knowledge, programming, and creative work, Monday’s morning output is not the same as Wednesday’s afternoon.

I know for a fact my best hours in a day are everything before lunch. In fact, I’ll prove it to you.

All I need is one of you lovely humans to buy a pair of these headphones for me 🥰.

You should actually check them out though solely from a this is cool perspective.

They’re measuring brain activity with EEG sensors built into the headphones, and some fancy AI to “see when and where you focus best so you can optimize your day, and help avoid burnout.”

Now that I think about it, those headphones would be perfect for a cow! Stay with me.

There’s a concept that has been made popular by Naval Ravikant, aka the Angel Philosopher. I’m sure I’ll share more about Naval in the future. In the tech community at least, he’s a very well known thinker/builder.

He has another concept called Specific Knowledge that I think more young people should be aware of, but we’ll save that for another day.

Back to cows.

🐮 Cows safely graze for 10 hours a day taking in large quantities of low nutrient grass; sleep and repeat.

🦁 Lions wait and rest for hours/days until the opportunity strikes to take a high reward risk; then celebrate, and recuperate.

The current work week is a cows schedule.

But will it always be? Naval is one of several people who think work will look a lot different in the not too distant future; that knowledge work, at least, will function more like ‘mission impossible’, where we pick and choose the work missions we want to take on. And then rest before the next one.

I’m skeptical. Most innovations to the work week that I’ve been made aware of have been to move to 4 day work weeks, which is really just less time grazing.

I’d like to say I can’t see that changing anytime soon, but less than 5 years ago, I would have thought a morning commute down a flight of stairs unimaginable too.

THIS IS COOL
Starship and Cybercab

Doesn’t matter if you’re on team Elon or not, last week was a big week for Stark Musk Industries.

The biggg deal that everyone got excited about was successfully landing (catching) the bottom part of the Starship rocket, known as the Super Heavy booster. It was their fifth attempt at trying to land this one.

Watch the video below if you haven’t already. It’s less than a minute, and you get to see giant chopsticks catch a 20 story rocket.

So what? If we can figure out efficient space exploration via reusable rockets at scale, it’s a big deal. Launch costs get slashed. Mission frequency gets sped up.

Lots of interesting second order effects come as a result, including an increased chance of me getting to do a lap around the earth without me having to be a billionaire as a pre-req.

But wait, there’s more.

You’ve probably heard the term FSD coming from Tesla. That’s their full self driving mode, which right now legally requires the driver to supervise what the car is doing, but it won’t be that way for long.

And a second order effect of a car that can drive itself?

Your car makes you money while you’re not using it. Think Uber for self-driving cars.

I largely work from home. My car is just sitting there majority of the time. What if I could hit a button in my app, and turn my car into a taxi for people to call on, without me ever leaving my office 🤝.

Last week, Tesla announced The Cybercab is slated for a 2026 release at ~$30,000 USD.

I imagine Tesla won’t be the only player to do this. Waymo has also made a lot of noise with their self-driving cars. Waymo came out of Google’s Moonshot Factory.

I took a self-driving Waymo in Phoenix to get from the airport to our airbnb. I loved the experience, but it’s definitely something that will take a lot of people some getting used to.

Road conditions in a Canadian winter are a little different than a Phoenix or San Fran winter though, so tbd on when autonomous vehicles make their grand entrance in the great white north.

If you can build a self driving car, you can build a self-driving Robovan, which will seat 20 and looks like a mini train. It doesn’t have an estimated lunch date or price tag. The school bus of the future??

A fun activity to do with your students would be to have a little discussion about the second order effects of having driverless cars. How does that change our economy, transportation, lifestyle, etc?

Bonus: Saw this on Twitter and made me laugh. Elon says some dumb things, but there’s no denying the man gets things done. Love him or hate him, his resume speaks for itself.