Slow Like Whisky

Tag: Knowledge

  • The Discourse is Getting Both Smarter and Dumber

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    I think that when historians look back on the Trump era, they will be more likely to note the collapse in norms surrounding things like truth and corruption and the existence of a fair justice system than policy changes. Likewise, think about how in late 2025 the most popular podcasts in the country among right-wingers…

  • Velocity Is the New Authority – Om Malik

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity. What looks like cultural choice is often the echo of infrastructure. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is…

  • AddyOsmani.com – 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    Writing forces clarity. When I explain a concept to others – in a doc, a talk, a code review comment, even just chatting with AI – I discover the gaps in my own understanding. The act of making something legible to someone else makes it more legible to me. This doesn’t mean that you’re going…

  • How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction | Open Culture

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    Unlike inno­va­tions today, which we expect to solve prob­lems near-imme­di­ate­ly, the inno­va­tions in map­ping tech­nol­o­gy took many cen­turies and required the work of thou­sands of trav­el­ers, geo­g­ra­phers, car­tog­ra­phers, math­e­mati­cians, his­to­ri­ans, and oth­er schol­ars who built upon the work that came before. It start­ed with spec­u­la­tion, myth, and pure fan­ta­sy, which is what we find in…

  • How harmful is the decline in long-form reading? – Marginal REVOLUTION

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable…

  • DOC • To grow, we must forget… but now AI remembers everything

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    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.…

  • Write to escape your default setting – kupajo

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    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…

  • Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    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…

  • Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    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…

  • Generating an Infographic with Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview

    —

    by

    robert.adlington
    in

    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/