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

tyro

x.com

Best thing I’ve read recently. https://t.co/FOksO0RDkR

John Coogan

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The medium truly is the message

It’s about how we can naturally contextualize information that grows exponentially, how we can create tools that enable us easily organize the information we collected into meaningful structures, how we can provide a space for people to think and imagine more effectively, how we can bridge the gap between thinking and creating, how we can encourage... See more

Alan Chan • My Vision: A New City

✨Metaphors We Build By

Brett Goldstein open.substack.com

Builders build the future, translators get it adopted

Translators use metaphorical (and literal) language, design patterns, workflows, and even entire products that relate to existing paradigms in order to transition users to new paradigms.

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.

Are We Still Thinking?

Simon Sarris map.simonsarris.com

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.

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

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

Simple tools make it possible to create complex ones; this is just as true for cognitive tools as it is for physical ones. Humanity has developed thousands of such tools throughout history, ranging from double-entry bookkeeping to the Cartesian coördinate system. So, even though we aren’t more intelligent than we used to be, we have at our disposal... See more

Alan Chan • My Vision: A New City

✨Metaphors We Build By

Are We Still Thinking?

Article

newyorker.com • Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter