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

Simple tools make it possible to create complex ones; this is just as true for cognitive tools as it is for physical ones. Humanity has developed thousands of such tools throughout history, ranging from double-entry bookkeeping to the Cartesian coördinate system. So, even though we aren’t more intelligent than we used to be, we have at our disposal... See more

newyorker.com • Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter

The board revolt at OpenAI reminds me of my favorite idea from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

The idea of the imagined intersubjective order. Companies are concepts of our collective imaginations. We call them legal entities and assign liability to them. They can be a vehicle for capturing value created by humans. They receive tax assessments. They can even be sued — absolving the people in charge of direct responsibility.

Yet, a company can be dissolved and reincarnated elsewhere by having the employees simply say they resigned and have moved to a new company. And that's how we keep lawyers employed. Tricks of our own cognition.

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

Thumbnail of www-x-com-mitopsychobio-status-1907383255877247105

Switching brain state costs energy "Stable" brain states exist in local energy minima, so there is an energy barrier to overcome to switch from one state to another Nice summary of relevant papers and work by @DaniSBassett here: https://t.co/wanGBIwpoX... See more

Martin Picard

x.com

On the efficacy of multitasking

Order is important. Better to perform tasks requiring lower activation energy before more demanding ones. Build into it. Switching is expensive.

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

Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories

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

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.“

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.“