TODAY: NE&EP webinar: Monday 11; David Lagakos presents
may...@gmail.com
Dear all,
Our next NE&EP webinar will take place TODAY on Monday May 11th at 5pm Paris time (11am EDT).
The speaker is David Lagakos (BU). He will present:
American Life Histories (abstract below)
You can join the webinar with the following link: https://uio.zoom.us/j/66236400739
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Maya Eden and Paolo Piacquadio
Title: “American Life Histories”
Abstract: What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,300 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on sources of meaning, purpose, and overall life satisfaction. After the appropriate adjustments, LLM can provide responses to complex questions that are indistinguishable from those of human readers. We find that sources of life meaning are more varied than previous research suggested, underlining the importance of work and community contributions in addition to family and close relationships. The majority of narrators found satisfaction in what they produced or contributed to society, consistent with the idea that humans need to produce and create — not just consume — in order to thrive.