Cognitive Revolutions

Memecoins as a measure of attention (+ popularity)
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.
Technology changed how we think and what we think about. But also what we remember and for how long. And perhaps, in the future, if we remember…

Knowledge expands in a fractal manner. All the new knowledge is found in the cracks that are on the edge of the ever-expanding plane.
To study in crystallized fields, seek out institutions. Communities of practice in new fields.
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. 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 f
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories

"Let no damned Tory index my History!” He knew that whoever controls the index controls how readers enter a work.”


"Science also progresses by improved instrumentation and better recordkeeping. Star charts enabled celestial navigation. Gregor Mendel's careful counting of pea plants led to modern genetics. Johann Balmer's documentation of the exact spacing of hydrogen's emission spectra led to quantum mechanics. Things we believed to be beyond human kind—the sta
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