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

Thumbnail of www-x-com-ntfabiano-status-1944060841818533907-f973ceecae644a14

You're not depressed, you just need a quest. https://t.co/Grik2Wj7OS

Nicholas Fabiano, MD

x.com

And it's much easier for the mind to wander these days. Algorithmic feed, so many random opinions and forms of content/news all in your palm

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.

Prehistoric Humans Had ADHD, Too, But the Trait Hasn't Adapted to Modern Life

Gabe Allen discovermagazine.com

Neurodivergence is a tool for improving cognition in hunting and gathering?

The DuPont Company's Chart Room

hagley.org

It is easy to take for granted the abundance of organized information we now have access to on demand.

DuPont created this room in 1919 and didn't share details about how they used it in public until 1950.

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.“

The Beginning of Infinity

thebeginningofinfinity.xyz

I generally believe that traditional conferences are Dead Man Walking Panels are boring, most keynote speakers use dated material, and on-stage interviews don't pack the punch that they used to So there is a good opportunity to re-imagine the 500+ in-person gathering industry, but how?___LIN... See more

Nick Gray / How to Make Friends x.com

Podcasts are more accessible and multimodal

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 f

Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories

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 Capital x.com