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

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.

Zero Knowledge Proof

Arthur Hayes open.substack.com

Memecoins as a measure of attention (+ popularity)

How to Find the Frontiers of Knowledge | Samo Burja

Samo Burja samoburja.com

Knowledge expands in a fractal manner. All the new knowledge is found in the cracks that are on the edge of the ever-expanding plane.

To study in crystallized fields, seek out institutions. Communities of practice in new fields.

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.

Random thing I keep thinking about - the way (Sur)names have been decoupled from professions should be a bigger deal than they are. It's the tradeoff from writing down names but it's too much of a tradeoff.

tyro

x.com

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

I built and sold a business that allowed me to retire at age 44. It was called Data Storage, Inc., information, knowledge, and records management is my jam. 10 Years ago I gave a speech about the half life of knowledge to a bunch of MBA aspirants at a university business school. This is the Twitter synopsis. The half life of knowledge is the ... See more

Scott Hambrick

x.com

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…

for an idea to shape society it must be communicated. There are many technical challenges to communicating ideas, and one of the more important ones is applying a gears-level understanding of how people evaluate ideas.

Samo Burja • Intellectual Legitimacy | Samo Burja

Social Technology | Samo Burja

samoburja.com samoburja.com

Coordinating parts of society that are prone to disagreement creates room for variance elsewhere