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27. Naval's Razor: If you can't decide between 2 choices, take the path that's more difficult/painful in the short term. Doing this will counteract "hyperbolic discounting," the brain's tendency to overestimate short term pain and underestimate long term pain. h/t: @naval

My Friends, a New MEGATH...

@G_S_Bhogal on Twitter

ALGORITHMIC BLINDSPOTS Inspiration often comes by accident while searching for other things (e.g. a chance occurrence while strolling). Algorithms give you exactly what you want, so you never need to search, and you never find what you never knew you needed.

New Megathread Just Drop...

@G_S_Bhogal on Twitter

The salient survival advantage of the neocortex was that it could learn in a matter of days. If a species encounters dramatically changed circumstances and one member of that species invents or discovers or just stumbles upon (these three methods all being variations of innovation) a way to adapt to that change, other individuals will notice, learn, and copy that method, and it will quickly spread virally to the entire population. The cataclysmic Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event about 65 million years ago led to the rapid demise of many non-neocortex-bearing species that could not adapt quickly enough to a suddenly altered environment. This marked the turning point for neocortex-capable mammals to take over their ecological niche. In this way, biological evolution found that the hierarchical learning of the neocortex was so valuable that this region of the brain continued to grow in size until it virtually took over the brain of Homo sapiens.

How to Create a Mind

Ray Kurzweil

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