For me it started in 1982, four years after I graduated from highschool, I engineered my return to college. With that, I worked up my ability and willingness to read thick books. And so as a new 21 year old freshman at Cal State Northridge, my head was led by several fat books outside of the Computer Science curriculum. "Goedel, Escher, Bach" was the first. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood the Incompleteness Theorem. "Turing's Man" was the second book, who was that mysterious genius? Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" was book that excited me about work in the industry and its spirit of go big or go home was to set the pace for the insane startup work ethic of Silicon Valley years later. "Megatrends" validated that my obsession with computing had a future, but the book that made the largest impression on me was the legendary collection of essays "The Mind's I".
It was Dennett and Hofstadter who captured my imagination. What is thinking? What can think? The distinction between hardware and software became clear in my mind and I was all about the software. Even years after I was done with school, I still didn't understand hardware and so was captivated by the vision of 'Tron'. And still it was about the programs. In those days, hardware was the constriction. It was all slow and clunky and claustrophobic. Thinking the great thoughts had to take place in larger realms. That is why, I think, six years later my introduction to H.L. Mencken, the bigger world was that of the generation of political ideas, the analysis of history and the combat of philosophy. So I decided for myself to write for people in both essays and in programs. Both were realms of persuasion but the compute platform was more narrow and disciplined. It appealed to a smaller audience, and of course it was an expensive medium. In fact, the compute world was hostile to using too many text strings. Now this is no longer the case. Back in 1987 when my full time employment began at Xerox, my theme song was IGY by Donald Fagen. The lyric went - "Trust machines to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision." I was that fellow.
The fellowship however was weird, and I probably shrunk my balls by straddling so many fences. I was told that I could be in business or computing but not both, not to mention my politics and philosophy. So it is very pleasant, if not entirely rewarding, to have more compute accepted as the medium for politics and philosophy. But the hybrid medium is not quite disciplined enough. That is the audience that I seek to satisfy, those who are entirely disappointed in what social media has become - a ribald public square that obeys no orthodox parliamentary procedure. When I first conceived of 'X Republic' years ago, parliamentary procedure was the first thing on my mind.
Now politics is not so entirely important to me, so much as understanding the semantics of thought itself. But we're clearly going to have to crawl out of the semiotic swamp of populist politics and fake news to get beyond where we are today. And that's going to require some unmediated chaos to make itself popular in the public imagination. It needs the intent of millions to communicate in a new way, something that satisfies both the limbic and the cortical impulses of mankind.
So I am in the process of attempting to get some support for what life has had me thinking. The compute universe is large enough. We can do in text, animation and live action what logic dictates. And ultimately we can do it interactively. The question now is how we use AI to provide the right gating that will help us overcome our evolutionary boundaries in the cortical and limbic schemas when their representations are chock full of overloaded types. It is in that vein of thought that the following article sparked inclusion here:
I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.
I made several different attempts to try to group these 20 or so at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address. Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.
The Cognitive Bias Codex is one of the most exciting maps around. I haven't seen anything so delicious since the publication last year of the Memetic Tribes of Culture Wars 2.0. You can get that map Download Memetic Tribes - Memetic Tribes.
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