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

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.

"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

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.

An unofficial history of forms | fdiv.net

fdiv.net

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

I saw someone saying that they thought scrolling was affecting their memory formation, because it teaches the brain to immediately discard what it just saw to situate itself in a new context, over and over again. Something to this I think

Lauren Wilford x.com

Attention spans and deficits

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.

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.“

I built and sold a business that allowed me to retire at age 44. It was called Data Storage, Inc., information, knowledge, and records management is my jam. 10 Years ago I gave a speech about the half life of knowledge to a bunch of MBA aspirants at a university business school. This is the Twitter synopsis.... See more

Scott Hambrick x.com

Technology changed how we think and what we think about. But also what we remember and for how long. And perhaps, in the future, if we remember…