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

The Autistic Half-Century

thediff.co

✨Metaphors We Build By

Brett Goldstein open.substack.com

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

I saw someone saying that they thought scrolling was affecting their memory formation, because it teaches the brain to immediately discard what it just saw to situate itself in a new context, over and over again. Something to this I think

Lauren Wilford x.com

Attention spans and deficits

humanity is still adapting to the fact that ordinary people have broadcasting capability. cultural norms around this are still being negotiated in real time. it’s actually imo more disruptive than promethean fire; you can’t use fire to burn people on the other side of the planet

x.com

They evolved into a variety of hominid species, all of whom have since been discontinued, except one—a saucy one called homo sapiens. For them, the advancements in intelligence proved to be a major survival asset, so their cognitive capacity rapidly increased, developing into an array of shiny new tools that no animal had ever possessed before.... See more

Tim Urban • Page Not Found — Wait But Why

All languages covey information at a similar rate when spoken (39bits/s). Languages that are spoken faster have less information density per syllable! One of the coolest results in linguistics. https://t.co/TUCSiELuUp

Deedy

x.com

I generally believe that traditional conferences are Dead Man Walking Panels are boring, most keynote speakers use dated material, and on-stage interviews don't pack the punch that they used to So there is a good opportunity to re-imagine the 500+ in-person gathering industry, but... See more

Nick Gray / How to Make Friends x.com

Podcasts are more accessible and multimodal

How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think | Kalzumeus Software

kalzumeus.com

I've probably repeated this one enough.

Excerpt: “Companies are legal fictions which we find convenient to use to move capital around and balance accounting ledgers.“