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

Like a raging river, information courses along faster than ever before.The maelstrom will never cease. In fact, her gales will blow harder, her raindrops grow fatter with the bits and bytes that make up our digital deluge.We have too few hours to comb through too much information. Not to mention, it takes real, hard, honest work to separate the... See more

Tom White • Curation as a Cure

"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

They evolved into a variety of hominid species, all of whom have since been discontinued, except one—a saucy one called homo sapiens. For them, the advancements in intelligence proved to be a major survival asset, so their cognitive capacity rapidly increased, developing into an array of shiny new tools that no animal had ever possessed before.... See more

Tim Urban • Page Not Found — Wait But Why

The board revolt at OpenAI reminds me of my favorite idea from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

The idea of the imagined intersubjective order. Companies are concepts of our collective imaginations. We call them legal entities and assign liability to them. They can be a vehicle for capturing value created by humans. They receive tax assessments. They can even be sued — absolving the people in charge of direct responsibility.

Yet, a company can be dissolved and reincarnated elsewhere by having the employees simply say they resigned and have moved to a new company. And that's how we keep lawyers employed. Tricks of our own cognition.

⚡️This is the record of a species that discovered a cheat code and has no intention of ever giving it up. Inflation is not an accident. It is not a flaw. It is not mismanagement. It is a civilizational operating principle. And once you see it that... See more

SightBringer x.com

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.

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

The Beginning of Infinity

thebeginningofinfinity.xyz

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