📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

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

Ambiguity in Communication is Both a Feature and a Bug Summary: In 1984, Eisenberg proposed that ambiguity in communication is important and influential. This idea suggests that being too clear can limit interpretation and hinder coalition-building. Ambiguity can be used to evade accountability, but it is also a general principle of communication. Transcript: Speaker 1 It's Eisenberg in 1984 in communication monographs or something. It's this great rambling paper and this idea has been massively influential to me, but he's basically arguing that it would seem like the point of communication should be clarity, To be as clear as possible. For me to say, I mean this and you do know exactly what I mean and that's the goal and ambiguity is therefore a bad thing. He argues that actually no ambiguity is a really important thing and other people have expanded on this. Now the way I think about this is like a blend of Eisenberg and then other people who've come a bit later, but that in a lot of ways if you're trying to get let's say a coalition, you don't Want to say this is exactly what our goal is and this is what we're trying to do. You want to use vague terms so that a bunch of people can sort of map whatever they think that the goal is onto and say that's consistent. It also leads to a reduction in accountability because after you do something and someone says, you said you were going to do this and you say, nah-ah listen to what I said, it's consistent With what I did because what I said was ambiguous. So it's pernicious in a way too. It's used nefariously in a lot of ways by let's say politicians and other kinds of leaders to avoid accountability, but it's also just a general principle of communication I think.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

While Algorithmic Decision-Making Does Suffer From Bias, It Offers the Potential for Unparalleled Transparency In the Decision-Making Process Summary: Algorithms offer a transparent and accountable way for decision making. They can detect bias and perpetuated patterns, but must be transparent, independently audited, and not proprietary or snake oil. Transcript: Speaker 1 And then the response comes back saying yes but if you're basing it on historical data then you're feeding in biases of the past which you're going to propagate into the future there Is a kind of new attitude about all this which is kind of orthogonal to these two axes which I personally find pretty compelling and it's come up in from a couple of different places independently I could drop a few names but let me just say that the attitude is that algorithms at their best offer a new way for decision making to be transparent and accountable that's at their best So you know if an algorithm is something that everyone understands how it works everyone understands why we are chose to use this algorithm how it was trained and it's something which Can be independently audited it's even something which could be tinkered with to see if it could be made more fair and more accurate that kind of algorithm could raise the standard of Decision making in many areas and let us detect bias where it crops up and also help us detect where historical patterns are being perpetuated and what we might do to fix that but the big But is they have to be transparent they have to be independently audited they can't be proprietary and opaque and hidden behind veils of intellectual property and they also can't just Be snake oil right so there is a lot of snake oil out there there's a lot of products being put out to market which have not in any sense been independently verified or validated and where Their users and customers frankly don't really know whether their results ought to be interpreted the way they ought to be interpreted and so there needs to be a lot more critical thinking Aimed at these

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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