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

Like a raging river, information courses along faster than ever before.The maelstrom will never cease. In fact, her gales will blow harder, her raindrops grow fatter with the bits and bytes that make up our digital deluge.We have too few hours to comb through too much information. Not to mention, it takes real, hard, honest work to separate the whe... See more

Tom White • Curation as a Cure

An Ancient Art Form Topples Assumptions about Mathematics

Alban Da Silva scientificamerican.com

Mathematics is a an abstraction and it is best broadcast using mathematical notation (a form of writing).

The permanence of sand drawings seem to be the limiting factor here.

Excerpt: “To appreciate how revolutionary Ascher’s perspective was, consider that before her work and that of her contemporaries, scholars generally assumed that only societies with writing could truly practice mathematics. They constrained their investigations of mathematical knowledge to textual sources and ignored many other practices seen in societies with oral traditions that did not use a written language.“

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

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. Thr... See more

Tim Urban • Page Not Found — Wait But Why

When the first steam engines were introduced, the owners had a really hard time finding people to operate them who wouldn't get drunk in the middle of the day, fuck up, and wreck the machine.

Ben Landau-Taylor

x.com

Technological change is only possible with societal (behavioral) change

To use databases, you need to be able to think about your data in a structured way. The people who could do that gained most of the leverage from using databases. The folks who made it easy for people to transition to databases (ERPs and Co) captured the rest.

AI systems are fundamentally scalable decision making engines. And data is the oil required to power it. If you want to properly leverage AI, you need to make sure you're fueling it with the best refined data.

Otherwise, you're no different than the drunk trying to reliably operate complex machinery. The only repeatable part of that is injury.

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

Venkatesh Rao • 5 highlights

ribbonfarm.com

Cover of A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

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.

Thumbnail of www-x-com-dylanoa4-status-1846930474687451575

This Louis CK bit, rent free forever captures the great chasm of our times https://t.co/8AP1e67tkK

Dylan O'Sullivan

x.com

We get familiar with convenience rather quickly

Much of our seeming intelligence actually comes not from raw brainpower or a plethora of instincts, but rather from the accumulated repertoire of mental tools (e.g., integers), skills (differentiating right from left), concepts (fly wheels), and categories (basic color terms) that we inherit culturally from earlier generations.

Tom White • Curation as a Cure

An Ancient Art Form Topples Assumptions about Mathematics

Samo Burja • Intellectual Legitimacy | Samo Burja

Tim Urban • Page Not Found — Wait But Why

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter