📚 Quinn's Highlights

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Providing Mental Scaffolding and Tools Drastically Increases Human Cognitive Performance Summary: Scaffolding people's experiences with tools like mind mapping can raise their performance above their innate capacities. Studies have shown up to a 40% increase in cognitive capacity when individuals are taught and encouraged to use tools for problem-solving and understanding. This highlights the significant role of tools in enhancing human cognitive performance, akin to how a computer is described as a 'bicycle for the mind' by Steve Jobs. Transcript: Speaker 1 So but Kotzky was this Russian educational theorist, right? And he and his whole notion was, if you scaffold people's experiences, so just training wheels, right, basically, you can raise the level of their capacity and their performance above And beyond their innate capacities. So mutual friend of Danglish Marktemberg, who's in Jordan Hall's, and I was Zack Stein, as a Harvard psychologist, very thoughtful guy. And he was working with an organization, his whole dissertation was on standardized testing and how whacked it is, right? And how the inequities it bakes into the system and that kind of thing. And they did studies where they would have somebody, you know, fundamentally on an intelligence or cognitive capacity assessment, right, makes sense of your life, makes sense of The world, makes sense of this word problem, whatever it would be. And then, you know, and then someone would score, you know, a 60% or a three out of five on a Leica scale, right? But then they would teach them how to mind map, right, a tool scaffolding, right? And they'd say, okay, so now everything you just said there, now hit the like draw connections, draw bubbles, draw dotted lines, like, sort and establish the relationship here about What you were thinking, and then retested them. And they would score a five out of five. So there's sort of up to this 40% swing in someone's intelligence or cognitive capacity, just based on did you give them a tool, right? It's like Steve Jobs saying, you know, that a computer is like a bicycle for the mind, right? And you're like, oh, okay. So how many bicycles for our minds, right? Can we share and create such that we can all pedal faster?

#11 - Jamie Wheal — Tackling the Meaning Crisis

Win-Win with Liv Boeree

Two Models of Searching for Truth: Unearthing the Truth v.s. Growing Into The Truth Summary: Science is like carving away everything that isn't truth, but I think it's more like an infinite vacuum with trees growing in all directions. The search for truth is complex and ever-expanding. It's like ecology, where species have multiple solutions to a problem, which continually changes. I believe in infinite diversity and combinations, and that complexity can emerge from simplicity. Instead of focusing on the core, we should expect to branch out. Transcript: Speaker 2 One metaphor I like is that I think some people have as their image of science. Imagine we're sitting on the surface of a sphere, and they think they're kind of digging down to the core of the truth. They're discarding the earth beneath them, the falsities, and they're going to hit the truth. Speaker 1 We're carving away everything that isn't science, you're saying? Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that the image I have instead is there's an infinite vacuum outside of that sphere, and there are trees growing out from the surface of the sphere in all directions. And as they grow out, more space is available, and they branch and expand. And that just goes on, and it gets more and more complex the further you get out. And that's kind of how I think of the search for the truth. That strikes people maybe initially is a little bit weird. I guess that's how I interpret like beginning of infinity, David Deutsches' phrase. But another way to see that is ecology, the way the species were. Species are all after some abstracted fitness landscape, I guess is one way to conceive of it. But somehow we don't end up with one solution to that problem. In fact, we get a bunch of solutions to the problem, and as that problem gets solved, it actually changes the problem, because now for all the other species you've got to deal with, and There's other species that you can eat, there's all kinds of stuff going on. That's how I think about it. I eat reflecting infinite diversity and infinite combinations. I think that there's just a lot of things going on, and you can build a lot of complexity from a small set of ingredients. And you shouldn't expect to get down to the core, you should expect to branch out from the core.

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

the depth of social problems is largely derived from the “stickiness” of power. Power is the ultimate positive feedback loop: simply put, people in positions of power use their positions of privilege to stay there.

The Systems Work of Social Change

Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici

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