Promising autonomy in startup job ads drove away graduate degree holders
In a field experiment with 10,718 job seekers, adding an autonomy pitch to a startup’s recruiting email raised clicks from people without degrees by 69% but cut clicks from graduate degree holders by 25% and their applications by 35%.
Americans can spot a skilled hunter-gatherer from one photo of his face
579 Americans rated face photos of Hadza and Tsimane foragers. Their ratings of men tracked peer-rated hunting ability (r = 0.25), but their ratings of women ran opposite to peer-rated gathering skill.
Students ate about 25% more snacks in front of the TV, but not while on their phones
In a taste-test experiment with 114 college students, people ate about 164 calories of chips and candy while watching a Netflix episode versus 132 undistracted. Using a smartphone made no significant difference to how much they ate.
DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry solved 25 of 30 olympiad geometry problems with no human examples
Trained on 100 million machine-generated proofs, AlphaGeometry solved 25 of 30 International Mathematical Olympiad geometry problems, near gold-medallist level; the previous best program solved 10 and GPT-4 solved none.
Surgeon mothers had 32% more low birthweight babies than other doctors in Texas
Texas birth records from 2007 to 2014 show physician mothers were 15.8% more likely than lawyer mothers to have a low birthweight baby, with surgeons driving the gap, and a 2011 cap on trainee shifts was linked to better outcomes for young doctors.
Time travellers may skip us because we are not worth the energy bill, economist argues
A Leeds economist argues that the absence of time travellers need not mean time travel is impossible: the energy cost would be enormous, and the only benefit worth it, lost but critical knowledge, is extremely unlikely to be something our era holds.
Awe-inspiring ads make limited edition products less appealing, nine studies show
Across nine studies, ads that evoke awe cut interest in limited edition products. In a Facebook campaign, an awe-filled ad for a limited-edition wine drew a 1.04% click-through rate versus 3.07% for a plain one.
Self-described narcissists are more likely to actually run for political office
A large nationally representative US survey found that people who call themselves narcissists show more political ambition and are more likely not only to want office but to actually run for it.
When ChatGPT went down, US stock trading slowed, revealing how investors lean on it
During eight ChatGPT outages in 2023, US stock trading volume fell by about 10% of its average, with larger drops for firms with fresh news and for stocks held by short-term institutional investors.