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.
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... See more
Tom White • Curation as a Cure
Can someone explain to me like I’m 5 how AI will replace the 30-40% of workers who have fake email jobs? The last time we had a wave of automation in office work (rise of the computer) - we just created a lot of new busywork. How is AI any different?
Wild West Capitalx.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 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 Wilfordx.comAttention spans and deficits


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
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
