📚 Quinn's Highlights

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"What Information Consumes Is Attention" and The Thermodynamics of Communication Summary: Herbert Simon's quote about information consuming attention is a crucial point to consider. Emails can be overwhelming, as there is a limit to the amount of time and attention we have. It is important not to solely rely on the internet as a copying machine, but to acknowledge the real material scarcities and limitations. While there is room for improvement, there are still real world limits to communication effectiveness. Transcript: Speaker 3 Herbert Simon's famous 1971 quote that what information consumes is attention feels like such a crucial point that I made it my email signature you know because like you said earlier Glenn that you know the value is really in in the relationships and there are differentially scalable qualities here I think a lot about the way and Doug Rushkoff and others have pointed Out that you can have at least you know indefinitely many emails a day but you only have so much time and attention to read them and that this is part of the argument for the importance of Not just following the sort of logic of the internet as a great copying machine off a cliff right where we're imagining an abundance that is nonetheless still founded in real material Scarcities you know like David Wolpert talks about you know the thermodynamics of communication and there being a theoretical limit to how effective that can be and while we still Have plenty of room you know orders of magnitude to improve on that you know that there are these real world limits that we're eventually going to bump up into

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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

Feeling like a speck in the wind amongst massive Societal systems Transcript: Speaker 1 I mean we have thousands of years of human history where you know since the agricultural revolution and the dawn of city-states it's just been constant change and one could argue that On a longish you know say century timescale we haven't been at equilibrium in 10,000 years what's next right how are all these nested feedback loops churning around between you know Societal structure and environmental structure to change the shape of society in the next couple hundred years Peter Turchin probably knows this better than I do but this is where I think thinking about these things at population scales rather than individual scales is it really helps me because when I think about things at the individual level like what can I do how do I live in the society right I find myself slightly distraught about like well I don't know I'm just a speck in the wind getting blown around by this maelstrom of society by trying To sort of think about the way the whole system is of all thing I can see it's not that I'm hurtling through space it's that we're all hurtling through space together in similar ways and That creates patterns that can then be identified what do you do with those patterns well then you know you get a professorship and you get to talk about it that helps sometimes

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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