Charlie Gedeon
@charliegedeon
Reflecting on how learning and creativity are shaped by technology and our interactions with it. Co-founder of Pragmatics Studio, a small digital design studio in Montreal.
charliegedeon.comCharlie Gedeon
A sad irony is that the same cognitive bias that makes people ascribe humanity to GPT-3 can cause them to treat actual humans in inhumane ways. Sociocultural linguistics – the study of language in its social and cultural context – shows that assuming an overly tight link between fluent expression and fluent thinking can lead to bias against people... See more
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) • Mistaking fluent speech for fluent thought
The thing that no one ever tells you about your calling is that it’s boring. Oh, everything is interesting if you’re interested… shut up. Yes, it will be exhilarating and fun and fluid and and natural and meaningful. It will also be tedious. It will hurt. You will encounter obstacle after obstacle until you feel like you’re in a video game with... See more
If you’ve ever felt that you can’t focus on a task when you’re hungry — or that all you can think about is food — the neural evidence backs you up. Work from a few years ago confirmed that short-term hunger can change neural processing and bias our attention in ways that may help us find food faster.
quantamagazine.org • The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses | Quanta Magazine
Excerpt from the lecture referenced in the article:
It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now. - Freddie deBoer You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.
freddiedeboer.substack.comProvocative Teaching Advice and Raising Thoughtful & Curious Kids
Incredible article about the state of the digital world and the necessity for kids to know who they are in the world.
What would a healthy culture and caring parents do for those kids? They would be pulled aside and told: you are you, and you will always be you; we live here, on this planet, in this culture, as this species; you live in the times you live in, and you will never live anywhere else. There’s no escape, for any of us. The world gets better and it gets worse. Your life gets easier and it gets harder. Progress happens. Happiness is possible. But the world is an irredeemably broken place, tragedy is the endowment of our bodies and our gods and our world, and you will always, always, always be you. You can hide in your room, but you’ll still be you. And you’ll still be you when you head off to college and make brand new friends, and you’ll still be you after you come out to your parents, and you’ll still be you after you get that job or that promotion or that raise, and you’ll still be you after you lose those last 10 pounds, and you’ll still be you after you fall in love, and you’ll still be you after the AI revolution or the socialist revolution or the love revolution or any other revolution. The only sensible path forward is to learn to accept the brokenness of human life, to develop resilience in the face of its petty cruelties, and to learn to live with yourself.
Epistemic actions are actions in the physical environment taken with the intent of gathering information or facilitating cognition.
Learning Effectively: Science, Insights and Techniques
Fascinating idea related to learning and the quirks of the brain that make it do seemingly useless things that have so much value.
The direction language models indeed prompt you to follow (pun intended) often leads you somewhere boring — to the land of averages
Alberto Romero • You Are Killing Your Greatest Ideas
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.... See more
David Foster Wallace,