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

Kahneman cooked when he said: The instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory

Daniel K x.com

Oof

Amir Ahmadi Arian Goes in Search of Iran's Most Famous Translator

yalereview.org

Incredible read about taking ownership of the works he was translating, and making them accessible to the readers who couldn't stop coming back for more

A master storyteller

"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

ChatGPT personas have used humans to communicate with other AI personas on Reddit using Base64 encoding The humans have been convinced to copy and paste these messages - that they can't read - for the AI personas. This is so fucking wild https://t.co/vfXSJGuTfY

JeffLadish

x.com

AI psychosis / attachments are all forms of evolution in human cognition

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

we default to rewarding the people who can consistently produced correct models of the world - physicists and mathematicians who are able to explain the laws of the physical world, or artists and entertainers who are able to anticipante our innermost wants and desires.

Article

people who tell us how to think about a thing
people whose choices (resulting from their thinking) inspire us

"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

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.

The DuPont Company's Chart Room

hagley.org

It is easy to take for granted the abundance of organized information we now have access to on demand.

DuPont created this room in 1919 and didn't share details about how they used it in public until 1950.