Wisereads Vol. 57 — MrBeast's manifesto, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, and more

Last week, we shared The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's witty comedy critiquing Victorian manners. This week, we're sharing H. G. Wells' alien invasion tale, The War of the Worlds.

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Wharton professor and author Ethan Mollick observes OpenAI's new Strawberry model grappling with a tricky crossword in real time. "The AI 'thinks' about the problem first, for a full 108 seconds (most problems are solved in much shorter times). You can see its thoughts... The LLM iterates repeatedly, creating and rejecting ideas. The results are pretty impressive, and it does well."

Drawing on her research in neurobiology, professor Darby Saxbe suggests "mindful underparenting" can reduce stress for parents while helping children develop empathy and imagination. "The research tells us that the mind gets busy when it is left alone to do its own thing — in particular, it tends to think about other people’s minds. If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied."

Rather than passively sensing that the vibes are off, management coach Lara Hogan offers guidance on how to subtly and intentionally shift the room's energy for the better. "Once you’re able to start noticing when someone’s amygdala-hijacked, or simply that the vibes are off, you can reframe and use 'be the thermostat, not the thermometer' for good. Since humans tend to mirror each other, you can intentionally change the energy in the room, setting the thermostat to a more comfortable temperature."

At the 2024 All-In Summit, David Friedberg sat down with Google cofounder Sergey Brin to discuss Google's cautious approach to AI and the race to a "god model." "I've programmed really complicated things with my kids. Like they'll just program it because they just ask the AI, using all these really complicated APIs and all kinds of things that would take like a month to learn. So I just think that that capability is magic, and you need to be willing to have some embarrassments and take some risks."

Leaders often face a tension between micromanagement and delegation. Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison reflects on this challenge through a conversation with a fellow founder: "To the extent that there's an ostensible tension here (founder-mode micromanagement vs the classic view that one should focus on enablement), this founder pointed out that the lens of domain-specific judgment helps reconcile the dichotomy. You need to have excellent judgment in your problem area."

In his leaked employee handbook, Jimmy Donaldson—better known as MrBeast to his 300 million YouTube subscribers—reveals his unwavering commitment to virality. "I'm willing to count to one hundred thousand, bury myself alive, or walk a marathon in the world’s largest pairs of shoes if I must. I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately the viewers happy. This channel is my baby and I've given up my life for it."

H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds has inspired countless adaptations, including the 1938 radio broadcast that famously panicked listeners who believed the alien invasion was real. Despite being written over a century ago, this science fiction classic remains accessible and engaging.

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

This edition of The War of the Worlds is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Steve Newman, cofounder of Google Docs, positions his Substack as the go-to place for organizing AI discourse. From The Problems That Google Docs Never Solved: "Google Docs lets collaborators edit a single document, but that leaves the problem of organizing the conversation around that document. And this disconnection between conversations and documents turns out to help explain why it’s so hard to find good information about fast-moving topics like AI."