Tag: Knowledge
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DOC • To grow, we must forget… but now AI remembers everything
What begins as personalization can quietly become entrapment, not through control, but through familiarity. And in that familiarity, we begin to lose something essential: not just variety, but the very conditions that make change possible. Research in cognitive and developmental psychology shows that stepping outside one’s comfort zone is essential for growth, resilience, and adaptation.…
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Write to escape your default setting – kupajo
Writing expands your working memory, lets you be more brilliant on paper than you can be in person. While some of this brilliance comes from enabling us to connect larger and larger ideas, much of it comes from stopping, uh… non-brilliance. Writing reveals what you don’t know, what you can’t see when an idea is…
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Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds. Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books — since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull — or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. When…
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Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION
The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge…
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Generating an Infographic with Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview
I’m starting a detailed infographic about the Datasette project. I plan to use Google Search to gather specific information about its core processes, which I will then visualize in a multi-panel diagram. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/
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Edward O. Wilson: The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. — Read on www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente
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ChatGPT Does Not Have Opinions
ChatGPT is not a human, and, unlike teachers & librarians & scholars, ChatGPT does not have a consistent, legible worldview. In my experience, it readily agrees with any premise you hand it — and brings citations. It may have read every article that can be read, but it has no real opinion — so it is not a credible…
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Thinking is not Objective, has a Point of View
The Python developer reads case studies about Go’s performance and their amygdala quietly marks each one as a threat to be neutralized. The Rust advocate looks at identical problems and their Default Mode Network constructs narratives about why “only” Rust can solve them. We’re not lying. We genuinely believe our reasoning is sound. That’s what…
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Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human
…behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an…
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To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity.
To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn’t come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/30/francois-chollet/