These articles are part of an experimental series. We conducted an experiment where we fed GPT-3 all of the articles from the Mindful Productivity category, and trained it to generate new topics to write about.
Many thanks to Marc Köhlbrugge for training the language model to generate the list of topics. The topics were assessed based on (1) whether they made sense; (2) whether they were original enough; (3) whether they would be interesting to the Ness Labs community.
The titles were kept as is, with no modification. In bold are the three topics that were selected to be turned into fully fledged articles:
Writing novel content based on prompts without any prior curiosity or research was much more difficult than practicing idea sex. Perhaps as a consequence, the final articles are much shorter than the usual ones published on Ness Labs.
Nevertheless, GPT-3 could be used as a source of inspiration. About 30% of the topics were interesting enough to potentially write about. As Shane Burkhart puts it: “Probably beats the success rates of most brainstorming sessions.”
You can read the resulting newsletter here and the resulting articles below.
One common misconception about stress is that it should be minimised at all cost—that stress is bad. But stress is just your body and your mind’s response to external challenges. Depending on the particular stressors and your reaction, stress can be detrimental (distress) or beneficial (eustress). While the prefix -dis in “distress” has the same … Read More
Nowadays, virtually anything can be tracked and measured. Smartwatches include a heart rate monitor, can count your steps, and record your sleep patterns. Apps let you log your meals, your fasting zones, your weight, and your calorie expenditure. A timer on your computer can track your productivity. As Gary Wolf, the co-founder of Quantified Self … Read More
“I work best under pressure” is an unsurprisingly common statement in high-pressure work environments. But is it true we work better under pressure, or do we just work faster? Can certain types of pressure be beneficial to fight procrastination and improve performance? Peer pressure and procrastination In a study looking at the social pattern of … Read More