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

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

Names like Hunter, Cooper, Tanner become appealing as those professions become alien to us, more symbolic than real; after the collapse, our children will be named Recruiter, Codeninja, Webdev, out of the same abstract nostalgia

neoltitude x.com

This actually wouldn't surprise me

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

Daniel K x.com

Oof

How Social Engineering Drives Technology

Palladium Editors open.substack.com

A good passage in continuation of the note on collective imaginations.

Responsibility that should be borne by an individual is dissolved amongst a group, who rely on the process of deliberation, passing on the responsibility to the organization.

Excerpt: “Committees are commonly used in our society because they create the illusion of avoiding risk. They are a wonderful device for avoiding responsibility while making the institution seem more rather than less accountable. Modern institutions have overloaded on actual risk while fleeing the appearance of it, especially if you count “failing at core mission” as a risk. Such aversion to the appearance of the unusual can’t be justified on economic grounds. Rather, it is a socially driven aversion.“

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 https://t.co/SVnpKl3ATc

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.

How to Invent Everything | Ryan North

youtu.be

This talk explores technological innovation and and the first periods in history when they were possible to discover.

Language persists information within communities. Writing persists information across generations.

Spoken language distinguished our common anatomical (200 Kya) from our behaviorally (52 Kya) human ancestors.

Writing requires only basic tool use — etching on a solid medium.

First evidence of writing is from 5.2 Kya.

Imagine all of the information that was lost to time, as well as innovations that were delayed.

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

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.”

Random thing I keep thinking about - the way (Sur)names have been decoupled from professions should be a bigger deal than they are. It's the tradeoff from writing down names but it's too much of a tradeoff.

tyro x.com