Cognitive Revolutions

This is an idea I'm still workshopping. In summary, new knowledge gets created or discovered over time, as long as people seek it. When that new knowledge is discovered, the means for communicating this new knowledge is poorly defined and crystallizes over time. The best example is language. It is one tool that really separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. As Yuval Noah Harari describes in Sapiens, the ability of humans to organize and take action based on things that are not real is not seen elsewhere. People go to war over trivial matters. The ancient Egyptians built pyramids to bury their pharaohs. Language is a cognitive tool. But we have different types of languages now. Languages to express different ideas concisely. Mathematics, musical notation, programming languages, football play calls, internet slang, etc. A new cognitive revolution is brewing - AI. There is a lot of talk about it positive and negative. The risks are real and AI is becoming more accessible. I think it is a democratizing tool. But democracies require participation. We've watched as people have used the internet to leverage themselves to abundance and influence. We've also seen people describe what it's like to be on the other end of that. AI promises to be much more and much faster. What happens when you don't partake in a cognitive revolution? I intended this as an article for my blog a few weeks ago. But I didn't think it was ready yet. I still don't. Hoping to connect the dots here over time.

muizz

Language is our way of giving legibility to ideas.

Only legible ideas survive.

An idea risks signal loss each time it is transmitted. A great idea survives the distance, becoming more legible the further it gets from the source. They survive the common sense test.

Great ideas also retain (or attain) legibility the longer they remain still. An idea at

The mankind’s knowledge lasted better when it was printed on paper. 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. https://t.co/38LFmpgnaS https://t.co/dtxUlX5hhn

@mikko

x.com

QT from below

It’s about how we can naturally contextualize information that grows exponentially, how we can create tools that enable us easily organize the information we collected into meaningful structures, how we can provide a space for people to think and imagine more effectively, how we can bridge the gap between thinking and creating, how we can encourage... See more

Alan Chan • My Vision: A New City

"People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments."

Suhail x.com

The people I admire most have a way of escaping the bubble of culture. Sometimes via religion; sometimes via old books; sometimes via time in nature. Without such an escape, propaganda wins. You stop thinking for yourself. Modern delusions grow into an all-consuming mind virus.

David Perell x.com

Social Technology | Samo Burja

Samo Burja samoburja.com

Coordinating parts of society that are prone to disagreement creates room for variance elsewhere

Are We Still Thinking?

Simon Sarris map.simonsarris.com

Broadcast > Dialog

This article helped me start to connect the dots on how the means of knowledge creation are intertwined with dissemination.

Failing to write down new recipes risks making that recipe short-lived. Why? A lot of the novelty can get lost in translation as people talk because they’re trying to relate the recipe to some existing cooking technique.

Writing it down enables everyone encountering the recipe to carefully compare the recipe against the existing recipes. The novelty is apparent, can be interrogated, and the true novelty in the technique can discovered and be used to update other recipes.

If you want your recipes credited to you (and to outlive you), you need to learn how to write them. Scientists don’t invite every interested scientist to their lab to explain their work, they publish papers with their methods.

Dialog allows people to learn in small communities. Broadcast allows knowledge to travel globally.

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

futurism.com

You cannot outsource your thinking to machines you don't understand

You cannot navigate an increasingly complex world without thinking about things that aren't designed for your understanding

Damned if you do… and if you don't

There is no alternative

Knowledge already exists all around us in abundance. We are changing how people take in, handle, contextualize, and deploy that knowledge at the most practical level. We are building the cognitive infrastructure of knowledge work – not the devices or apps they run on, but the “mental software” running on people’s minds that allows them to use those... See more

Alan Chan • My Vision: A New City

Social Technology | Samo Burja

Are We Still Thinking?

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

Tiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: The 10-Year Vision