Cognitive Revolutions
How to Invent Everything | Ryan North
youtu.beThis talk explores technological innovation and and the first periods in history when they were possible to discover.
Language persists information within communities. Writing persists information across generations.
Spoken language distinguished our common anatomical (200 Kya) from our behaviorally (52 Kya) human ancestors.
Writing requires only basic tool use — etching on a solid medium.
First evidence of writing is from 5.2 Kya.
Imagine all of the information that was lost to time, as well as innovations that were delayed.
Builders build the future, translators get it adopted
Translators use metaphorical (and literal) language, design patterns, workflows, and even entire products that relate to existing paradigms in order to transition users to new paradigms.
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
... See morePeople 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. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
Article
people who tell us how to think about a thing
people whose choices (resulting from their thinking) inspire us
Attention spans and deficits
