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

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.

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.

The Beginning of Infinity

thebeginningofinfinity.xyz

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.”

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

"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

✨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.

Kahneman cooked when he said: The instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory

Daniel K x.com

Oof

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.... 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…