Steven Johnson
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9 October
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9 August
From one piece The Uses Of Terror 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The Sea Peoples did not invade lands to claim them as their own, or extract treasure or slaves to bring back to their homeland. They seemingly torched the great capitals of the Bronze Age just to watch them burn.
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To be a true pirate implies a broader disavowal. The pirate renounces the long-distance authorities of nations and empires.
16 July
From one piece Notebooks And The Extended Mind 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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the most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low.
Notebooks And The Extended Mindadjacentpossible.substack.com
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the external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate-from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM-should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process.
Notebooks And The Extended Mindadjacentpossible.substack.com
2 June
From one piece Cognitive Uploading 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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So often with new software paradigms, what looks like inevitability turns out to be just design failure that can be solved with the right guardrails or affordances or system instructions.
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To a certain extent, the concerns about cognitive offloading are an example of technological lag, where the mainstream discussion of AI and its impact is still framed in terms of the first-generation chatbots.
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I truly believe that following this kind of approach to AI in the classroom would, in the aggregate, produce better learning outcomes than the research and writing workflows available to students pre-AI.
3 April
From one piece The Legible Society 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Writing originated from flattening physical accounting tokens into two-dimensional signs pressed into clay.Their words
By transforming a physical, three-dimensional counter into a two-dimensional sign, these early accountants made a momentous step towards history's inaugural information technology: writing.
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korrents.com
Root crops resist state taxation better than grain because they can be harvested piecemeal and stored underground.Their words
Even other domesticated foods like root crops and tubers proved remarkably resistant to the tax collector, because they grow underground and can safely be left in the soil for months, even years.
2 March
From one piece Back To The Garden 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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That now ubiquitous timeline names eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive in the dirt.
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And what makes a society illegible to the tax collector also makes it illegible to the traditional archaeologist.
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archeologists naturally build their interpretations of human history out of artifacts that survive the passage of deep time.
3 February
From one piece The Architecture Of Ideas 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The purpose of a creative work environment is to produce ideas that would not otherwise have occurred to you.Their words
At the most elemental level, that is the goal of a creative work environment: it should help you have ideas that would have never occurred to you.
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standard word processors are actually comically unsuited for complex, long-form thinking
26 January
13 January
From one piece The Agrarian Fall 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Over the past three decades, scholars have identified a massive, unexplained gap in the timeline between the first domestication of crops and the emergence of the first agrarian states, complicating the narrative popularized by authors like Harari and Diamond.
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But the "Fall" into agriculture turns out to be a much more nuanced-and jagged-story than the standard account would have it.
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