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

for an idea to shape society it must be communicated. There are many technical challenges to communicating ideas, and one of the more important ones is applying a gears-level understanding of how people evaluate ideas.

Samo Burja • Intellectual Legitimacy | Samo Burja

"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

13th-century parchment Google: the invention of the index

Dennis Duncan

telegraph.co.uk

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

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

⚡️This is the record of a species that discovered a cheat code and has no intention of ever giving it up. Inflation is not an accident. It is not a flaw. It is not mismanagement. It is a civilizational operating principle. And once you see it that... See more

SightBringer x.com

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

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

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

The biggest problem in shipping is plain English

Hrishi Olickel olickel.com

Amazing things happened when geolocation was democratized. What does the future hold when that happens with intelligence?

Excerpt: “When truly transformative technology becomes accessible, it's hard to imagine how things will change - only that they absolutely will. The release of GPS to consumers was a similar moment - it would have been hard to predict Uber, Doordash and the creation of the gig economy from that final piece being unlocked: accurate location finding and routing anywhere in the world.“