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

In a world transformed by the widespread use of networked technologies, humanity faces a significant divide between those who can access and use new technologies and those who cannot, counterbalancing the considerable opportunities that are being created in new economic sectors.

L'Atelier • Economic opportunities for our avatars | Social Mobility in the Digital Age | L'Atelier

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

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

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.“

All languages covey information at a similar rate when spoken (39bits/s). Languages that are spoken faster have less information density per syllable! One of the coolest results in linguistics. https://t.co/TUCSiELuUp

Deedy

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Montessori’s influence on the world is in some ways quite small and specific, and in other ways so utterly victorious that it is invisible by virtue of being taken for granted. https://t.co/GkgRFyx3bE

Matt Bateman

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when physical labor became optional we invented the gym. we’ll need the same thing for the mind

runaway_vol x.com

Reading habits. Book clubs?

It's far easier to automate tasks than it is to automate jobs. Tasks (ex: creating a status report) tend to be specific, self-contained and legible in nature. They can be seen as discrete and atomic units of work. In contrast, jobs tend to be broad webs that span a multitude of diverse tasks. These webs are threaded together with amorphous things... See more

Waqas x.com

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?