Cognitive Revolutions


How to Invent Everything | Ryan North
youtu.beThis 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.
Amir Ahmadi Arian Goes in Search of Iran's Most Famous Translator
yalereview.orgIncredible 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
newyorker.com • Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter
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. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
"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
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