Cognitive Thrift 21 – Data
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/31
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We talked about high level theory – communication theory, information theory, cybernetic theory, and so on. You gave examples from American life and politics, and social situations now.
Both have relationships with respect to the empirical and the theoretical. Theoretical coming from me. Pragmatic coming from you. I think some healthy middle ground can be had here. About examples, what can be said here?
Rick Rosner: In my mind, it’s always jocks vs. nerds. As a species, we’re nerdy. We’re physically weak. And with built-in mental fluidity, when a species is successful in surviving in nature in surviving in its niche, it uses its excess abilities to create extra complications to maintain reproductive hierarchy.
I’m not saying everything is because of sex, but humans triumphed over the natural world and now because we have mental fluidity. We’re constantly reshaping the human world.
When we get better and more powerful because we have more powerful tools and because we have the mental capacity once things are reduced to symbols to be able to understand those systems, and it’s not like we’re going to run out of mental power to understand symbols.
And so, we have an endless ability to reshape human society and the reshaping accelerates, which means that there’s less and less room for established rules.
Jacobsen: When I think about that, that seems like the foundation for dynamic thought, non-dogmatic thought.
Rosner: People call it a hockey stick curve or an exponential curve. It’s where things happen slowly for a long time and the various forces amplify each other and the rate of change goes nuts.
And if you look at history, if you look at the curve of human population, probably the curve of productivity, the curve of information, these curves are hockey stick curves speaking to human mastery of change. We’re nerds!
We thrive on flexibility now.
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