Molly Snowden

Errors with high precision are considered ‘ newsworthy ’ by the system, and will therefore drive further processing, while low precision renders errors relatively impotent within the system.

Recent evidence shows that humans are attracted to, and find pleasure in, relatively uncertain and volatile environments precisely because those environments afford excellent opportunities for error reduction at a better than expected rate — i.e. they offer optimal error dynamics that are essential for maximizing learning

Despite its focus on uncertainty minimization, uncertainty itself has been shown to be intrinsically valuable, with agents being shown to seek uncertainty, find pleasure in its resolution, and to aim to occupy a band of uncertainty which lays at the edge of the agent ’ s ability to cope.

We explain below how reward systems in the brain evolved to track and encourage our engagements with information at the edge of our own understanding (at the edge of informational chaos) where we find the most error-reducing opportunities, and how horror content co-opts these systems

“Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder, who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”

There's another more subtle lesson in the list of fields with superlinear returns: not to equate work with a job. For most of the 20th century the two were identical for nearly everyone, and as a result we've inherited a custom that equates productivity with having a job. Even now to most people the phrase "your work" means their job. But to a writ... See more

We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps fo... See more