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

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.

✨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.

"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 sta

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

How to Invent Everything | Ryan North

youtu.be

This 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.

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

Writing for Innovation

ayokan.me

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

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