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

Thumbnail of www-x-com-mbateman-status-1825562944052359434

Montessori’s influence on the world is in some ways quite small and specific, and in other ways so utterly victorious that it is invisible by virtue of being taken for granted. https://t.co/GkgRFyx3bE

Matt Bateman

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.”

Writing for Innovation

ayokan.me

How to Find the Frontiers of Knowledge | Samo Burja

Samo Burja samoburja.com

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.

An unofficial history of forms | fdiv.net

fdiv.net

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 how? Audience attention spans are too short for the typical stack... See more

Nick Gray / How to Make Friends

x.com

Podcasts are more accessible and multimodal

"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

In a world transformed by the widespread use of networked technologies, humanity faces a significant divide between those who can access and use new technologies and those who cannot, counterbalancing the considerable opportunities that are being created in new economic sectors.

L'Atelier • Economic opportunities for our avatars | Social Mobility in the Digital Age | L'Atelier

Are We Still Thinking?

Simon Sarris map.simonsarris.com

Broadcast > Dialog

This article helped me start to connect the dots on how the means of knowledge creation are intertwined with dissemination.

Failing to write down new recipes risks making that recipe short-lived. Why? A lot of the novelty can get lost in translation as people talk because they’re trying to relate the recipe to some existing cooking technique.

Writing it down enables everyone encountering the recipe to carefully compare the recipe against the existing recipes. The novelty is apparent, can be interrogated, and the true novelty in the technique can discovered and be used to update other recipes.

If you want your recipes credited to you (and to outlive you), you need to learn how to write them. Scientists don’t invite every interested scientist to their lab to explain their work, they publish papers with their methods.

Dialog allows people to learn in small communities. Broadcast allows knowledge to travel globally.