Cognitive Revolutions

Podcasts are more accessible and multimodal

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.

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…

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.“

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.

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.