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

An Ancient Art Form Topples Assumptions about Mathematics

Alban Da Silva scientificamerican.com

Mathematics is a an abstraction and it is best broadcast using mathematical notation (a form of writing).

The permanence of sand drawings seem to be the limiting factor here.

Excerpt: “To appreciate how revolutionary Ascher’s perspective was, consider that before her work and that of her contemporaries, scholars generally assumed that only societies with writing could truly practice mathematics. They constrained their investigations of mathematical knowledge to textual sources and ignored many other practices seen in societies with oral traditions that did not use a written language.“

Thumbnail of www-x-com-mitopsychobio-status-1907383255877247105

Switching brain state costs energy "Stable" brain states exist in local energy minima, so there is an energy barrier to overcome to switch from one state to another Nice summary of relevant papers and work by @DaniSBassett here: https://t.co/wanGBIwpoX https://t.co/SVnpKl3ATc

Martin Picard

x.com

On the efficacy of multitasking

Order is important. Better to perform tasks requiring lower activation energy before more demanding ones. Build into it. Switching is expensive.

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

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?

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... See more

Nick Gray / How to Make Friends x.com

Podcasts are more accessible and multimodal

The Beginning of Infinity

thebeginningofinfinity.xyz

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

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

13th-century parchment Google: the invention of the index

Dennis Duncan

telegraph.co.uk

"Let no damned Tory index my History!” He knew that whoever controls the index controls how readers enter a work.”

Social Technology | Samo Burja

Samo Burja samoburja.com

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