Humans + AI

Mark Schaefer, bestselling author, talks about book writing processes, integrating AI in writing, the enduring importance of questioning, audience vs. community, experimental learning, staying relevant, amplifying your unique voice, and embracing trend curatorship.

Keynote speaker and writer on transhumanism, Peter Xing, discusses topics such as human-machine integration, AI-enhanced intelligence, productivity tools, brain-computer interfaces, dream learning, and advancements in brain stimulation. He also explores the ethics of amplifying human potential and shares his insights on how to think better with technology.

“It’s very important to take ideas that you had and then confront them to the world, share them with the world, and in this way, even enhance them and augment them with the feedback that you’re going to get from other people.“ – Anne-Laure LeCunff About Anne-Laure LeCunff Anne-Laure is a writer, researcher, and educator, and the founder of Ness Labs, a mindful productivity community. She formerly worked for Google in UK and Silicon Valley and is currently undertaking a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Kings College London. Her Ness Labs newsletter on mindful productivity has over 75,000 subscribers, and has recently sold her forthcoming book Liminal Minds,Predictable Success in an Unpredictable World: A Field Guide to Transitions. Website: Ness Labs LinkedIn: Anne-Laure Le Cunff Twitter: @neuranne What you will learn Journey from tech to neuroscience (03:00) Transition from a student’s hobby to a professional endeavor (05:52) Understanding what Metacognition is and its parts (06:44) Mind gardening as a metaphor for nurturing and cultivating ideas (11:02) Transitioning from passive note-taking to active, intentional note-making (15:53) Introducing the concept of bidirectional linking to connect ideas effectively (17:54) Sharing your mind garden’s bounty/diverse avenues for expression (20:54) The value of utilizing AI as a thinking partner (22:52) The capabilities and limitations of AI in the field of writing (25:50) Episode Resources OpenAI, ChatGPT4 Obsidian Roam Logseq Notion Wikipedia Google Scholar  StackOverflow Transcript Ross Dawson: Anne-Laure, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thank you so much for having me.  Ross: You were in tech, and I suppose you still are in some ways, but you discovered this passion for neuroscience. We’d love to hear about that journey.  Anne: Yes, I started my career working at Google, first in London and then in San Francisco. In my last job there, I was working on the digital health team. I absolutely loved my job, loved my team, loved the mission, but somehow felt like knowing the exact steps that I had to take to be successful in that career journey made it a lot less interesting for me. It was a very linear career in front of me. It felt like a ladder to climb, not something very fun, and where I could express myself creatively. So I left and I decided to do what everyone who left a big tech company at the time would do in Silicon Valley, which was to start a startup. I did that, followed the playbooks and it didn’t work out for all sorts of reasons. I did a second startup and it also didn’t work out. But this time I’m very glad I did it because we stayed really good friends with my co-founder at the time. I met so many people. That was a really good experience. I’m really glad I went through building those two companies. But I realized that building a startup was not really what I wanted to do, except that for the very first time in my career, I didn’t have a next step. I didn’t know what I should do next. I went back to the drawing board and asked myself what was something that I wanted to explore and learn about, regardless of status or success, or money. If I removed all of that, if that was not part of the equation, what was something I was interested in? For me, that was the brain. I have always been interested in how the brain works. Ross: Isn’t it a marvelous thing?  Anne: Exactly. It’s just incredible. The fact that we’re able to feel things, imagine things, connect with people, learn different languages, to create is just absolutely fascinating. I went back to school and that’s how I shifted from being in tech to being more in the psychology and neuroscience space by just going back to school. When I was 28, I went back and studied for a master’s degree and I’m currently doing a Ph.D. That’s the journey.  Ross: Fabulous. I always say the brain is the most extraordinary thing in the known universe. It’s worth learning about it and how to use it.  Anne: Exactly. I don’t think I’ll ever be done learning about it. It’s one of those fields where it’s really fun to know that your teachers are still learning themselves. Something I’m learning right now may become obsolete very quickly in a few years. There are some parallels between tech as an industry and neuroscience as a field of research.  Ross: Now you share with tens of thousands of people your insights on how to think better.  Anne: Yes, I started writing a little newsletter when I went back to school to write about what I was learning and specifically turning the science that I was studying into practical advice and insights that people could apply to work better and think smarter and be more creative. That was originally a little bit of a side project as a student, but that grew pretty quickly and that became my current business, which is called Ness Labs, where I share a lot of resources around these topics.  Ross: I’d like to dig into that and learn from you. One of the things you talk about is metacognition, it’s a phrase that I use and I think that’s really important. Some people have different frames on it, so explain what is metacognition. Why is it important? How should we bring that into our experience of the world?  Anne: Metacognition simply means thinking about thinking. Meta is about and cognition is the thinking part. Thinking about thinking. It’s very easy when you go through life to just think your way through problems without ever thinking about that actual experience of thinking. You could solve the problem and just move on. Metacognition is a strategy that encourages you to think about the thinking. It has several parts. The first one is metacognitive knowledge, just knowing what you know, and being aware of what you know and what you don’t know. We often assume that we either know more than we actually do so we can be overconfident. But sometimes also we have a lot of intrinsic knowledge that we got through just interacting with the world that we don’t necessarily know we have because we never explicitly expressed it. Metacognitive knowledge is connecting with your own knowledge, and being aware of the knowledge that you have in the knowledge, and that you don’t have. Then there’s metacognitive regulation, which is through the experience of thinking, just analyzing how it feels to work through a problem. Instead of just going through a problem and feeling like, oh, this is terrible, it’s just taking that step back and asking yourself, OK, this part of the problem feels really terrible and miserable for me to work my way through it. Why is that? What is the reason? Why this is more difficult than maybe other types of problems? From this, again, you can learn to maybe adapt the way you approach problems in the future so you don’t have to have that much friction. Then the metacognitive experience is just looking back after you’re done with solving a problem and looking at the way you thought your way through it in its entirety, and again, asking yourself, what do I want to change in the future? What would I do differently? As you can see, it may take a little bit longer to solve a problem when you do this, when it comes to that specific problem, but if you keep on applying those metacognitive strategies as you work your way through problems, it’s going to become easier and easier because you’re basically building a thinking toolkit for yourself. Not something that you could learn through tutorials or through listening to someone giving you advice, something that you have designed yourself based on your own experience of solving problems. Ross: Absolutely. The meta as in being able to look above, to think about how it is we’re doing them, and doing those things better. I think there’s the classic story of Einstein, who said, if you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a period of time, you spend 90 percent of it working out how to do it, and then you do it. As you say, then you can apply those techniques for all those questions moving forward. One of the other things you talk about is mind gardening, which is a lovely phrase. Where does that come from and what for you is mind gardening? How can we take care of the gardens of our minds?  Anne: Thank you for asking. This is one of my favorite concepts to write about. It’s an expression I came up with during the pandemic when I felt very overwhelmed with all of the information that I was receiving, very often contradictory – since you wrote a book about it, you would completely understand – but that feeling overloaded with information and not really knowing how to navigate this, and also being cut off from the outside world, not being able to go outside to disconnect from that overwhelming experience of contradictory information coming from all sides. My dad loves gardening. If you come to our house, it’s a mini jungle. There are plants everywhere. It’s like a little curtain of plants in the kitchen. Sometimes you have to push them aside to open a cabinet. It’s everywhere, absolutely everywhere. There are many things about gardening that I think can be applied to the way we treat our minds. Having this slow approach to growing plants. You basically are intentional in what seeds you’re going to plant in the garden. That’s the first thing. In the same way with your mind, you can be intentional with the kind of information you plant in your mind. What information do you consume? what kind of books do you read? What kind of videos do you watch? What kind of thought leaders do you follow as well? What kind of podcasts do you listen to? All of these are going to be the seeds that you plant in your mind and you can make choices there. The second part is the growth part, the nurturing part of the plant. In the same way here, you’re going to want to do this intentionally. You want to grow branches. You want to form connections between ideas. It’s the same when you take care of a garden, you can’t consider the plants in isolation. You have to consider the different plants that you have. Some of them work really well together. Some of them can even protect each other, whereas some of them can be bad for each other. It’s the same with your mind. There are ideas that may grow off each other, that you can connect together, and that you can generate insights from, and you can be intentional about this. I personally do this with a lot of note-taking. I consider writing as one of the most powerful thinking tools. Just taking two ideas and asking myself, wait, what would happen if I connected those two ideas together? Or what could happen in that space, at that intersection between two ideas, and just exploring that? Finally, in the same way, that in a garden, if you do all of this properly, you’re probably going to have some nice produce, or you can take from your garden fruit and vegetables, etc. It’s the same here. I think that there is no point in cultivating your mind garden if it’s for all of those ideas to just stay in your mind. To me, the goal here is to actually harvest that produce, those ideas that you have and then share them with the world. That can be in the form of just posting on Twitter or doing a podcast like we’re doing here and sharing those ideas, a blog post, and newsletter, or having interesting conversations with your peers. It doesn’t really matter. But I think it’s very important to take those ideas that you had and then confront them to the world, share them with the world, and in this way, even enhance them and augment them with the feedback that you’re going to get from other people. That’s mind gardening. Ross: That is such a rich metaphor, all of the aspects of it, it’s really well developed and really strong. I’m pretty blown away by all the parallels with Thriving on Overload, where I talk about the Tree of Knowledge and how all the connections are formed, and also about how we have to plant seeds and nurture them. This idea of how ideas come together, the insight. It’s not something that’s in the dark and we give it the right nutrients and it comes forth and blossoms. I’m very aligned with that. But you’ve really captured it very neatly in all of that one strong metaphor. Anne: Amazing. Yeah, I do think that there is really nothing new in the idea of mind gardening. If you look even through different ancient philosophies, this idea of being intentional with the ideas that you have in your mind and cultivating that inner garden, there’s really nothing new here. I guess it’s kind of meta. But that concept of mind gardening is actually an example of mind gardening, where I just connected existing ideas together to come up with this insight. Ross: Can you just talk a little bit more about some of the very specific techniques that enable you to nurture your mind garden?  Anne: I mentioned note-taking. I think note-taking is very important. I think even better than note-taking is note-making, being intentional at that level of capturing ideas in your note-taking system. Instead of just highlighting and copying and pasting random bits of paragraphs from articles that you’re reading, just capturing what you can already connect to some of your existing ideas in your mind garden, augmenting some of your existing ideas, and taking just a minute to rephrase it in your own words and really being explicit about how this is a valuable idea, and how it connects with what you’re working on? This is a really good filter, even for the idea of planting seeds, in terms of, again, thinking about what works with what I already have in my garden, and what doesn’t. Especially if you’re someone who’s very curious and interested in lots of different topics, it’s very easy to start almost like hoarding information, just reading a bunch of things and adding them to your note-taking system and feeling like you’re being intellectually productive because you’re saving all of that information which you will never really use, then your garden turns into a junkyard. Instead of doing this, asking yourself those questions, being intentional, and being ruthless. If something you read about is interesting, but has no connection whatsoever with the ideas that animate you, the kind of things that you’re constantly thinking about in your mind garden, if there is no use for that idea in terms of cultivating it, growing it, connecting it to other ideas, then it’s completely okay to read something and feel like, oh, that’s interesting. Great. Let’s move on. I don’t need to save it. That’s a tool, note-taking, and even better if it’s intentional note-making. Another very important thing is to actually connect the ideas together proactively. I personally have found that note-taking tools that offer bidirectional linking are best for mind gardening because they allow you to very quickly see your existing connections inside of your note-taking system. At the stage of capturing ideas, you can very quickly see, can I fit this? Can I connect this with something that is already in there or not? Then at the second stage of growing those branches, it is also a lot easier to do when you can make connections from both sides, from two different nodes in a bidirectional way. The existing tools that do that very well, there’s Obsidian, there’s Roam, and there’s Logseq. Notion has added bidirectional links, but I think they’re too basic and too rigid to be able to really do that and feel like you’re gardening. It still feels like more of an architect rather than a gardener tool to me. Those would be some of the tools that I would recommend if you want to start applying those principles. Ross: What tool do you use? Anne: I use Roam. I’ve used Roam for the past three years and a half now. I was a fairly early user of it. I know several other tools have been created, but I think there’s so much compound interest in continuing to build your mind garden in the same tool that I haven’t found the need to switch. I also use Obsidian for different types of work. When I want to think without spending time online and not being influenced by what I may be reading externally, when I just want to take some existing notes that I have and just work on them offline, I think Obsidian is great. With Roam, because it’s in my browser, I will always end up looking up something and I will always ask myself a question and check Wikipedia and check Google Scholar and StackOverflow, etc. When I’m in output mode, this is really good for me to do this. It’s just faster and I can check references. But sometimes when I’m exploring more personal topics, where the truth I’m looking for is not a factual type of truth that you can look up and get an answer, it’s more about how do I feel about this, what do I think is right or wrong with this approach without being influenced by other people, I really like just taking some of those notes, putting them in Obsidian, and working on it completely offline.  Ross: Anything else which you think is top of mind and must share?  Anne: The last thing I would say, for the last part, is to share the produce of your mind garden. There are many different ways to do this. We live in an age where it’s become easier than ever to share your ideas online. I’ve seen a lot of people create Substacks or create little podcasts or youtube channels or even sharing little videos online. It’s not a specific tool here, but I would just encourage people to not feel constrained by the format they have to use to share this. Mind gardening itself in the capturing and thinking phase is pretty much a text-based technique. But when it comes to sharing the output, sharing your insights, again, if text is where you’re more comfortable, tweet away, write a blog post, or maybe write a book. But if you’re more comfortable just expressing your ideas in the verbal form, you could do a video, you could do a podcast. There are so many ways to express those ideas. You could create little illustrations. I love following accounts where some people who are very creative, very visual show us their ideas in this way. Experiment, and try different mediums and different formats. There’s no limitation in terms of the way you can then share these ideas with the world.  Ross: That’s awesome. You’ve been looking at AI and its potential for creativity. One of the phrases you use around AI is to enhance our creativity or to emulate our creativity. I’m more interested in the enhancement. I’d love to hear about any approaches that you use or the way you think we can use AI to enhance our creativity.  Anne: I’m just going to share my favorite prompt because I could talk about this at length. But I’m just going to share my favorite prompt that I use all the time. What I’ll do is I will write something that I’m working on, it could be a paragraph that could be for my book, that could be for my blog, that could be a script for a youtube video, could even be for a research paper for my Ph.D., I will do my best to write the best version possible of what I think covers everything. Then I will copy and paste it into ChatGPT and I will ask, what am I missing? That’s it. That’s the prompt. What am I missing? Every single time, there will be at least one thing, one blind spot, something that I forgot to address. Some of the things that ChatGPT will come up with, I’ll be like, well, that’s not really relevant so I’ll just ignore it. But there will always be one thing where I’m like, huh, oh, wow, that’s really interesting. So I’ll go and I’ll research this and I will augment the final piece with that aspect that I completely didn’t see in the first place. In that sense, I can use AI as a thinking partner. I can get to the same result very quickly that I would get, and I still get, and that’s not replacing it because I enjoy doing this, but having a long conversation with a friend, where you’re telling them, hey, I’ve been thinking about all of these things and then you spend a whole evening together discussing those ideas. I often actually take notes after spending an evening with a friend chatting about different things, because by the end of the evening, there will be several questions the friend asked, several topics that you ended up exploring that you didn’t even imagine were connected with what you were discussing in the first place. This is a shortcut to that. It’s a thinking partner. It’s a lot faster. I do feel that my work is a lot better in the end than if I just relied on just me thinking about everything and every angle.  Ross: Yes, I think that’s one of the best uses for it. Similarly, I also say, okay, this is what I’ve thought, what else is there? Or similar. I think GPT for red teaming, as in challenging, you bring and say, well, what’s wrong with my argument? Or how could it be improved? Or what’s missing? Or all of these other things, I think are one of the strongest ways to do it. Two broad approaches. One is you say, Okay, let’s start GPT to do something and you can work on it if you’re having writer’s block, whatever, but the other is you come up with everything, and then you throw it in and you see what can be added to it.  Anne: Yes. In both cases, I think it’s paying off your strength and its strength. I think, at this stage, at least, it’s not a really good writer. I haven’t seen any AI right now that can write like a human being does. It can write a basic, SEO-level type of article, but if you want to write something that really moves people, that makes them feel connected, at this stage, we’re not there. It’s interesting, I don’t know if we’ll get there, because the way it’s trained is on everything. So you get to this average level of writing that is not necessarily the best that can be produced by a single human being that really pours their heart into something. But as a sparing partner, a thinking partner, red teaming, as you said, I think it’s excellent, absolutely excellent. This is for me, one of the top ways it should be used.  Ross: Where are you going from here? You’ve got this wealth of things that you are working on and thinking and researching and sharing. What excites you about your journey forward? What are the things you’re going to dig into more from here?  Anne: I’m really excited about the fact that I have no idea where I’m going. That was the main reason why I left Google because I knew exactly where I was going. I actually don’t know. The only thing I keep an eye on is how excited I am when I wake up in the morning. Currently, I feel very excited every morning when I wake up, I have all of those very interesting projects, all of these questions are still unanswered, all of these people I get to connect with and have interesting conversations with. I don’t know exactly where this journey is going to take me but as long as this remains true, that I’m excited to wake up in the morning, I’m just happy to keep going. Ross: Fantastic. Any final advice or tips or recommendations you have for your listeners?  Anne: I would say maybe try to build your own little mind garden, just do that for a week, use your note-taking system, be intentional with what you put in it, try to rephrase the information that you’re capturing, and try to play with it, use it as a little sandbox, connect ideas together, and maybe at the end of the week, try to post a little something that is entirely yours about a connection that you made that you haven’t seen somewhere else and that could be a little tweet, that could be something else, but share that with the world. If you like it, keep going. If not, you’ll still have that little artifact of thinking that is just yours.  Ross: Awesome. Where can people go to find out more about your work and subscribe to your newsletter?  Anne: The easiest way is to go to nesslabs.com/newsletter. This is where you can enter your email address. I send a weekly newsletter where I discuss all of these topics and more. I’d love to see more people read it.  Ross: Fantastic. It’s been a true delight to speak with you, Anne-Laure. Thanks so much for your time and your insights.  Anne: Thank you so much, Ross.   The post Anne-Laure on metacognitive strategies, mind gardening, bi-directional linking, and AI as thinking partner (AC Ep5) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“A lot of people think an algorithm has to be done in code, it has to be something that is found in a computer but it can also be a process that you’re doing, maybe even semi-manually, that’s still an algorithm.“ – Kais Dukes About Kais Dukes Kais is a leading AI scientist and the CTO and Chief Scientist of Hunna, which combines AI and medical experts for large-scale preventive screening. Kais and his co-founders are currently in the news for having appointed an AI as CEO of the company, which we will discuss in depth in this episode. He is a PhD in AI and a strong background financial tech leadership, is also well known for applying AI to the Quran, developing the Quranic Arabic Corpus. Website: Hunna LinkedIn: Dr. Kais Dukes What you will learn Practical application of the “Hive Mind” concept (04:11) Leveraging AI CEO’s strengths while compensating for its limitations (06:58) Using algorithms to let executives focus on their strengths and passions (08:39) Overview of the multifaceted role of the AI CEO in decision-making (09:48) Illustration of the algorithm’s scoring functions with a practical example (12:54) Introduction of several simple decision-making systems (14:55) Unveiling the benefits of AI-Human partnerships in decision-making (17:11) Summarizing the intricacies of the “hive mind” decision-making approach (18:36) Harnessing collective intelligence with quantitative and qualitative models (22:13) Comparing the evaluation of an AI CEO to a human CEO from a business standpoint (25:10) Addressing concerns such as hallucinations and biases in AI systems (29:44) Episode Resources First AI CEO  Zoom OpenAI, ChatGPT4 Google Bard Anthropic Claude2 Paper IndigoVX: Where Human Intelligence Meets AI for Optimal Decision Making   Transcript Ross Dawson: Kais, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Kais Dukes: Hey Ross! It is a true pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me here. Ross: There’s been a lot of discussion about the AI CEO that you have created and deployed. We’d love to learn more about it. Can you give me a bit of the backstory of how it is that you came to work on this project and develop it? Kais: It’s in the news right now. If you Google “First AI CEO Europe”, we do indeed come up. It’s been quite interesting. We’ve had a large number of interesting responses. I actually thought something quite different was going to happen, that there was going to be a lot of skepticism, people are going to be saying really? You guys got an AI CEO. But the way we did the press release, we actually also announced it in combination with a science research paper that we published on Archive. We’ve been very transparent about the algorithm and the process. We’ve also been quite honest about what we’re doing. When we say an AI CEO, a lot of people who watch Hollywood might be imagining a robot that’s sitting in a boardroom, telling a bunch of executives what to do. But it’s actually not like that at all. It’s an algorithm, it’s a process. We can go into more detail about how it works in a minute, but briefly, it’s an algorithm and a process that involves humans as well as machine learning systems to come to a joint decision. We have a nickname for this, we call it a “Hive Mind”. But from a scientific perspective, this is more coming from collective intelligence. The idea is can we get a group of smart people together, a group of smart AIs, and a group of machine learning systems together? Can they come together to make a joint decision? Just to let you know where we got the inspiration for this, I’ve always been a big fan of Steve Jobs. Though I don’t agree with everything Steve Jobs has said, there’s one specific quote he said which is always stuck in my mind. He said ‘We don’t hire smart people and tell them what to do, we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.’ That always really stuck in my mind. Because right now, we’ve got a mindset, which is that AI is a tool, it’s going to be humans calling the shots, and we’re going to use AI to help us out. I think that’s great. I think that’s always going to be there. But as AI systems get smarter, could the tables be turned? Could it also be that maybe, we’re also listening to what they have to say? Using that quote as inspiration, we really ran with that and we thought, can we try to implement this? Ross: AI CEO. A CEO does quite a lot of different things. They talk to the media and investors, make decisions, and inspire people. Is there any subset? Is this specifically around decisions? Or are there other aspects of this? Kais: That’s a really good question. This is not a robot. This is a software system, an algorithm. If you’re going to put an AI in that executive position, let’s get real, it’s probably not going to be exactly what a real traditional human CEO does. We’re going to have to bend the term a little bit. I can tell you what the system can and can’t do.  Ross: Please. Kais: Right now, today, the AI CEO is not going to stand up on a company call, a Zoom call, and give a motivational speech to all of the staff, it’s not going to do that. But what it will do is the system will produce very good, very solid strategic advice. Imagine you’ve got a CEO who’s working from home, and she says, ‘Oh, I can only respond via email for the next couple of weeks, my webcam’s not working, I’ve got a sore throat, I can’t get on the phone.’ Now, is that really going to be a very effective CEO? For a lot of things, it can be. But in reality, what this has meant is that the other executives in the company, I’m the CTO, we have the COO, we’ve had to step in and do things that a traditional CEO might have to be doing – more direct communication with our stakeholders, with the staff we work with, with our partners, and more focus on setting the company culture. If you’re going to have a software system in an executive function, you’re going to have to do things in a bit of a different way. But it can still work. Ross: This is a real need as in you have a company that is doing well and growing, you have a CTO and COO, but you don’t have a CEO so you have chosen to make that an algorithm. Kais: We’ve chosen to make it an algorithm. The takeaway message is the other executives in the company have to step in and maybe do things that a traditional CEO would be doing. But it also means that we can then also focus on the things that we’re good at as well. For example, the COO loves sales and talking to people, and he loves the human aspect of things, and having more of the strategic guidance coming from an algorithm means he’s freed up to focus and do the stuff that he really enjoys doing and loves it. We definitely had a real need for it. For it to work, you have to reassess a little bit about what these roles mean and bend the traditional definition of CEO. Ross: In terms of what the AI CEO is doing, what are the specific functions? Can you give me examples of decisions made or things that have been put on its plate and it’s been able to respond usefully? Kais: Fundamentally, it’s an algorithm. The way the algorithm works is you give it a goal and it produces the best possible plan it can to help realize and achieve that goal. You could give it a high-level goal. For example, a high-level goal could be we need a strategic plan for Q3, given our resources, to help us achieve our objectives. Or you could give it a bit of a lower-level goal. For example, we recently had the AIC announcement, we put it up to the AI CEO, how do we handle this? No joke, one of the things that the AI CEO said is to get on some podcasts. I think that stuff works very well. If you need some strategic advice, you can put those questions to it, and you get responses. We’ve actually been really amazed. Before the advent of modern AI, if we wanted a marketing strategy, being a small company, we might contact a marketing agency, and we might try to work with them. I’ve done that before, it can take weeks, and a bit hit and miss some of the time what you get out. But we’re just amazed. Now, in just a very short amount of time, we can get a marketing strategy, which actually feels pretty solid. For things like that, it works very well. For things that it doesn’t work well is where there is a bit more emotional understanding required. For example, we’ve tried to get a bit more strategic advice from the AI CEO on how to handle things with sales. The advice hasn’t totally been great, dealing with the human factor. For us, our approach is, we don’t want to make this fully automated. We think that having humans in the loop is really important. We review carefully every decision. We don’t just follow this thing blindly. It’s a system. So far, we’ve been following it around 90% of the time. But keeping humans in the loop is very important. Ross: One of the important things around this is where specifically you place the human in the loop. Is it in terms of you getting the output from the AI and then you approve or vet or refine what it is doing, or do you feed that back then for further things? Or how specifically are you architecting the human in the loop together with the AI? Kais: That is an excellent question, Ross. We’ve outlined this in our science research paper. I know you’ve got quite a smart audience for this podcast, and I know normally the audience is pretty switched on so I’ll just go into some details for a couple of minutes. I’ll try to keep it short, and not too technical. The algorithm we follow actually sounds really simplistic but don’t be fooled by a simple algorithm; sometimes a simple algorithm can actually be quite powerful. What we do is we have a goal that we’re trying to achieve and we’re trying to produce a plan. The first thing we do with the system is come up with a set of up to three scoring functions – three criteria. For example, recently, we were discussing how to handle the AI CEO announcement, we came up with three scores, which are a marketing score, an effort score, and an impact score. The idea is the scores go between zero and 10. We also allow half points like 7.5. Very explainable and easy to do. The way the system works is it works in iterations with a feedback loop. The humans and the AI are collaborating, and they come up with a draft plan. We look at the draft plan, and we score it from zero to 10, on the different criteria. Then collectively, the humans and the AIs who are working on this together look at the plan, and we say, let’s now make a bunch of adjustments, see if we can move those scores a little bit, make some edits, revise the plan, and score it again. We do that through a few iterations until we feel we’ve actually got something quite solid. Now you might be looking at it and thinking, is that it? That just sounds so simplistic, right? Ross: No, that’s fantastic. I wasn’t aware there was an Archive paper which I’ll definitely have to have a look at. But to be frank, what you’ve just described, sounds potentially as innovative as the algorithm itself, in terms of being able to get effective humans in the loop and iteration cycle. Kais: It sounds really simplistic but let me tell you that there are some very simplistic decision-making systems that are actually quite powerful. As I’m sure you’re aware, one of the famous ones is the Eisenhower Matrix, based on President Eisenhower. President Eisenhower, obviously a very smart man, was head of the United States of America. He used to get bombarded all day long with stuff he had to do. He’s like, look, I’ve got a simple system that works for me. I’m going to assess all this work in terms of just two factors – urgency and importance. That gave him a bit of a quadrant, you’ve got four combinations, he would do what’s important himself personally, starting with what’s urgent. If it wasn’t important, he would delegate. If it wasn’t important or urgent, he would maybe put it in the trash bin. He also had his two scoring functions, he had an urgency score and an importance score, he was doing it qualitatively, not quantitatively, but the same principles apply. Sounds like a really simplistic system but that simple-sounding system is actually how he ran his presidency and got stuff done. Another really good example of a decision matrix system like that is in business, you’ve got the Iron triangle, which is if you’re doing a project, maybe you care about the cost, quality, and speed, you can’t have all three. Maybe you’ve got different options for how to do the project, you’re thinking about scoring these, or you’re thinking about the right solution. Another really good example in business is the impact-effort decision matrix, you draw a grid with impact and effort, and you try to put pins on different solutions where these are good. With all our business experience, we realized we can assimilate all these different decision-making matrices into a universal framework, but let’s just come up with a framework that can take any kind of scoring criteria, based on the problem at hand, keep using the loop, and keep things iterative. What we found is really counterintuitive. It sounds like such a simple idea. But actually, there are a lot of benefits. First of all, it’s collective intelligence, you can get AIs and humans working on this together. It’s cognitively simple to understand. Humans are good at scoring stuff out of 10, like movie ratings, I gave that movie a seven; there are all kinds of things people score, maybe I shouldn’t talk too much about that. But for example, I work out sometimes, I look in the mirror, and I’m scoring myself around a three out of 10 right now, I need to do a bit better. We’re really good at scoring things so intuitively it makes sense. It also really helps with explainability because once you start getting AIs involved in this, you get a really clear picture of what’s going on. We’re really amazed. It’s a really simple process but we think is really effective. Ross: It’s really interesting. You just keep on describing it as an algorithm, is it a large language model? Kais: It’s a good question. We look at it as a hive mind. We’re happy to mix in all sorts of AIs and all sorts of decision-making tools. Yes, we do use large language models. We’ve connected three large language models together. Specifically, we’ve got OpenAI, ChatGPT4, we’re using Google Bard, and we’re using Anthropic Claude2. We’re using some human experts. We’re also using some very specific machine-learning models and statistical models that we’ve had quite a lot of success recently with, RNNs, we use BiLSTMs occasionally, Long Short-Term Memory, so whatever makes sense for the problem. The idea is, each of these components is producing outputs, producing suggestions on how to improve the plan and we look at all this together and we include what we feel makes sense. The reason it’s an algorithm is we’ve got three scores, but then we need an overall score for the plan. What we do is we do something mathematically called a weighted sum, a very simple and standard approach for multi-parameter optimization. We just assign, for example, if we’ve got three parameters, three scores, we might say, the compliance score is actually quite important for this problem, we’re going to give that a high weight, apply a weighted sum, we get an overall score for the plan. It’s an algorithm because we’re following a set of steps. A lot of people think an algorithm has to be done in code, it has to be something that is found in a computer but it can also be a process that you’re doing, maybe even semi-manually, that’s still an algorithm. Ross: Are you fine-tuning any of the large language models, GPT4, or others? Kais: Only very rarely, when we’ve got a specific niche problem that we need to look at. But generally, we found if you take off-the-shelf models and actually combine them together, you get a really good result. Let me just give a very simple analogy for some of the viewers and listeners here. If you ask someone to estimate how many coins there are in a jar, imagine that you’ve got a jar full of coins, and you’re asking one person how many coins do you think there are in that jar. They might say, I don’t know, 300. But if you actually get 10 people to estimate how many coins there are in the jar, and then you aggregate those results, it’s really interesting, you can actually get a really accurate result.  Ross: That’s quantitative aggregation, though, in terms of if you’re getting qualitative, as in text-based answers from the large language models, just wondering how you’re able to then combine those into creative superior.   Kais: That’s a really good question. We’ve got a little bit of secret sauce here, which we probably don’t want to disclose too much about. It’s a bit of one of our competitive advantages. We’ve actually found a way to get numerical answers out of the large language models. You make an excellent point because we’re dealing with qualitative problems but yet we’re using quantitative scores out of 10. We’ve got a bit of a secret sauce.  Ross: So it’s around framing the questions in ways that can be quantified, essentially. Kais: Yes, it’s partly about that.   Ross: You also mentioned that you also use some machine learning models so this would be with internal data, I presume, in the company to be able to form? Kais: One of the really good things like that is when we’re trying to forecast which market we should be looking at, we apply a lot of quantitative models. As a startup, we’re currently focused on the UAE, we didn’t pick the UAE by chance. We modeled it. We applied quite a lot of quantitative data and things like that. I think quantitative models can work quite well if you’re dealing with things like GDP, you’re looking at how much spending power they have in the country, or what are their investment levels. You’re looking at things like future projections on growth within the country, you have a lot of quantitative data. In things like that, quantitative modeling can work quite well. But yes, you’re absolutely right. The benefit and the power of what we’re doing is we’re not just restricting ourselves to one sort of model. It’s really about the collective intelligence aspect, mixing all together, mixing quantitative models with qualitative models as well. Ross: We talked about the hive mind of collective intelligence. You’ve got the models. There’s you, the COO, are the other human participants in the system all internal to the company or do you go outside to get any other participants in that decision-making? Kais: A very good question, Ross. As a health tech startup, we do quite a lot of work with the medical community. We have partnered with a couple of senior medical professionals, one of whom is working at the World Health Organization, who’s been assisting us. They’ve also been participating in the process. It wasn’t easy to get them on board with it because we had a certain framework that we were asking them to follow. But once they got involved, they were really fascinated by it. They thought wow, this is quite cool. We’re working together with AIs, and it’s a structured approach. We’re trying to produce a plan, we’re scoring the plan, and we’re working on it iteratively. Once we got into the swing of things, we found it was very effective. So no, definitely not just internal. Our view is a system like this really works best when you’re combining experts together, we feel. The experts could be the AI systems, and definitely bringing in human expertise as well is what makes it very effective. Ross: What are the next steps? You have your AI CEO, and you’ve got a strong structure methodology there. How do you then either deploy it more broadly, improve the quality of it, take the next steps, where to from here? Kais: There are two ways to look at that question. There’s the business side of it, and then there’s the science side of it. From the business side, we need to measure the performance of the system in the same way you would measure the performance of a human CEO. The question is, if you had a human CEO, and you were the board of directors, who typically sits above the CEO, the board might be thinking, what is the CEO doing? Let’s look at the results. Has the CEO actually delivered on our strategic objectives? For example, as a health tech company, our main strategic objective right now is to secure a medical pilot to prove that our product is working and to get a large number of patients onto the pilot. We’ve got some strategic objectives. The next step is to make sure that the algorithm and the approach we’re following is delivering the results we want as a business. That’s how we would measure things from a business perspective. We feel there’s no difference in having an algorithm or a human in a CEO position with regard to measuring its effectiveness; you would just measure it traditionally. Is it delivering the results you want? From a scientific perspective, we’re in a very fascinating era right now because the large language models have come out quite recently and have revolutionized things, who’s to say what’s coming up around the corner? There could be another big step, a big leap coming up at any minute. What we’re really keen to do is to improve the collective intelligence with the latest AIs that come out. Immediately, as soon as another strong AI system is out there, we’re going to be jumping all over it and we’re going to try to assimilate it. I don’t want to put people off, I’m sounding like the Borg from Star Trek right now, we will just assimilate all this other intelligences but I think that’s really the plan. As soon as another state-of-the-art AI system is available, we would love to also incorporate that into the collective decision-making process. Ross: Since you already have multiple intelligences, artificial and human involved in the system, then presumably, it’s not difficult for you to bring in another participant in that model. Kais: Absolutely. We’re looking at the system as a Hive mind, a mixture of experts, and we would love to continue to bring in additional AIs into the decision-making process. Ross: (Check Sentence) In terms of the process of the overarching algorithm to bring all these together and the ways of measuring results to be able to improve that, any types of multi-scenario testing or other ways in which you’re refining the overarching algorithm? Kais: We’ve actually been running the system for about 12 months. For the last 12 months, we’ve been looking at the decisions coming out of the system. I would say about 90% of the time, we’ve been pretty happy with it. There are some issues, especially with large language models. As I said AI is a collective intelligence, it includes a bunch of statistical models, machine learning models, it also includes large language models. We aggregate all this together. The statistical models and the traditional machine learning models have their limitations. But they generally produce pretty consistent output. One of the big problems with the large language models is a phenomenon called hallucinations, which we’ve had to keep a really close eye on. Occasionally, these large language models will just speak with such confidence that they really know what they’re talking about. Well, they’re just making up completely fictional scenarios or completely fictional situations, which is something called hallucination. You have to keep a close eye on that. That’s why it’s really important to just double-check everything that these systems are saying.  Ross: Do you have any specific structures for being able to essentially identify or ensure that you’re not incorporating hallucinated content or ideas or decisions? Kais: For us, the key thing is just human supervision, verification, and validation of what the system is doing. We also want to be compliant with the law. You also need to think about things from a legal, ethical, and regulatory perspective. Especially being a startup based in Europe, Europe probably has some of the strictest frameworks in the world for privacy and compliance, especially with GDPR and so on. One of the big things in European law around AI at the moment, even before the EU AI Act, it’s already been around for a while, is you can’t have a fully automated system in a position that might seriously impact human lives. It’s a bit of a wide framework and is open to interpretation but if we turned around and said, we’ve got a fully automated AI CEO, it’s calling all the shots, that will be very hard to clear from a regulatory perspective. I don’t think that’s actually allowed right now. But having a system that is producing a strategy that humans are reviewing and then acting on it?, we feel is fully compliant with the law and we think that is the key way to make sure that issues like hallucinations, and biases are kept in check. You need to have that human supervision, we feel.  Ross: In which case, the accountability resides with the human reviewer. Kais: A hundred percent. That is also what the law wants to happen as well. Because, right now, the law isn’t ready for AI as an executive position, an AI system is not considered today as a legal entity. AI can’t sign contracts, AI can’t hold a legal position. We look at the AI CEO as a functional role, it’s doing that job functionally but you’re absolutely right, Ross, from a legal and ethical perspective, the human executives in the company are ultimately legally responsible. That’s what the law wants. It’s also what we want because we do want humans in the loop here. We do not want a fully automated system. We don’t think that makes sense for a lot of reasons. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your insights, Kais. It’s a fascinating experiment. We look forward to hearing more about how the company does under the guidance of your AI CEO and how you continue to progress the project. Is there anywhere people can go to find out more about your work on this? Kais: You can go to our website hunna.app. If you scroll down, you’ll see a picture of the AI CEO and if you click through there, there is indeed a science research paper where we explained the algorithm. We know we’ve been very transparent and very open about how it works at a high level. We would love to get people’s feedback on it. We’re always open to improvements in how we do things. Ross:  Fantastic. Thank you so much. Kais: Thank you so much for your time today, Ross. The post Kais Dukes on the AI CEO, architectures for humans in the loop, and hive minds of AIs and humans (AC Ep4) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Just having a smartphone and an internet account does not mean that you’re going to do good for yourself or anybody else; you have to know how to use them.“ – Howard Rheingold About Howard Rheingold Howard Rheingold is a writer, author, visionary, and seminal figure in the use of technology in amplifying minds and cognition. His explorations range from human cognition to virtual reality. His influential and highly prescient books include Tools for Thought (1985) ,The Virtual Community (1993), Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002), Mind Amplifer (2012) and Net Smart (2014). He currently focuses on his work as an artist. Patreon: Howard Rheingold Website: Howard Rheingold What you will learn Howard’s early experiences that influenced his endeavors in cognition and consciousness research (03:50) How personal computers and technological advancements sparked their curiosity even more (05:34) The evolution of personal computing and augmented cognition (07:38) The hidden history of personal computing (15:15) The coevolution of humans, culture, and tools (18:31) The importance of language and collective action in the realm of technology and human progress (20:45) The intersection of sociological perspectives and cognitive evolution (22:40) Challenges of online misinformation and the need for digital literacy education (25:42) Integrating massive human data and employing mathematical techniques to create advanced AI systems (28:52) Challenges and opportunities in the age of Large Language Models (29:47) Two remarkable note-taking tools, DEVONthink, and Scrivener (34:21) Transformative capabilities and ethical implications of AIs (36:12) Episode Resources ChatGPT DEVONthink  Scrivener Photoshop Articles The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two by George Miller   Books Tools for Thought by Howard Rheingold Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? by Howard Rheingold Net Smart by Howard Rheingold Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold Thriving on Overload by Ross Dawson Transcript Ross Dawson: Howard, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Howard Rheingold: I’m happy to be here. Ross: You are perhaps the best person on the planet to be talking about amplifying cognition in terms of your history, this being so seminal to all of your work over the years. Perhaps you can describe the starting point of cognitive technologies or amplifying cognition. What was the starting point when you started believing that this was possible? Howard: I think cognition came in a little bit later, but I was very influenced by taking psychedelics when I was a teenager, very early, 1962-1963. That convinced me that consciousness was important. As a high school student, long before the Internet, what little research I could do indicated that there wasn’t much research in terms of science on consciousness. I became interested in physiological psychology. It seemed to me that that was a way to approach consciousness. I was very impressed by a paper by a psychiatrist by the name of Joe Camilla in San Francisco, who had hooked up some Buddhist monks to a brainwave machine, an EEG – electroencephalography, and noticed that they had a larger percentage of the Alpha frequency, around 8 to 12 cycles per seconds, in their ambient brainwaves than most people do. Then he had the genius idea of getting some nonmeditators and toning the tone whenever their brain hit the Alpha frequency. Turns out that you can learn. That was very interesting to me in terms of how much can you learn in terms of mastering those processes that were previously inaccessible to consciousness. I was also interested in an idea called converging indicators, because the problem with consciousness, of course, is I got mine, and you’ve got yours but there’s no objective way of comparing them or measuring my experience or your experience, it seemed to me that if we could take introspection, and marry that to some electronic monitoring, and training, that would be a good path to understanding consciousness. I went to a year of graduate school and understood that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in windowless rooms, putting rat brains in blenders. In the 1970s, living in San Francisco, I got wind of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was started by a former Apollo astronaut to explore consciousness. We tried to get interdisciplinary studies of consciousness going and there wasn’t a lot of action there. Behaviorism was really in charge. Then fast forward to when personal computers became available. I became very interested in them as a writer. My tools in the 1970s were a typewriter, a library card, and a telephone. The idea that you could get information through your telephone, that was very interesting to me. There was something called the New York Times information bank that opened in San Francisco in the 1970s. I went to visit it, and they let me play with it. It was one of those connections where you have to take a phone and put it into a cradle and it’s about 100 bits per second, and you could get abstracts of stories from the New York Times. That was very interesting to me. Ted Nelson’s book came out in 1975, Computer Lib, and he introduced the idea that computers were not just for making calculations for science. I was never one of those people who fiddled with electronics. I wasn’t a hobbyist, but I wanted to find out. Specifically, I heard a rumor that you could write with a keyboard and a screen. Older people might remember that when you were writing and rewriting something, you would type something, and then you would mark it up, sometimes maybe you would cut the pages up, and then eventually you’d have to retype it again. It was really a pain. I’ll skip along with the story. That led me to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where a lot of what we know as a personal computer was invented. Very specifically, the graphic user interface that Steve Jobs saw, that became the Macintosh, but also the Ethernet and the laser writer, and they were connected to the ARPANET. I started using personal computers. I bought one of the first IBMs for $5000. I had to get a loan for it, and then another $2000 for a printer. By now, we’re up into the early 1980s. I bugged the people at Xerox PARC. I called them every Friday to see if they had worked for a freelance writer. To her credit, the woman who answered the phone never said go away. Eventually, I got some gigs with them. I got an assignment to wander around Xerox PARC and find interesting people to talk to. That led me to Doug Engelbart. My interest expanded to include amplifying cognition because talking to Doug and particularly reading his 1962 Paper, Augmenting Human Intellect, completely changed the way I thought about what I could do. It’s not just a better typewriter, Engelbart was correct that if you can automate a lot of the low-level tasks, that frees your brain space to do other things that you weren’t able to do before. Also, not Engelbart but one of the things that they had written at PARC in one of their publications jumped out at me, I underlined it, and put three exclamation points in the margin, which said that with the graphic user interface, the screen can become a cache for your memory. By then I was interested in the subject. There’s a very famous paper by George Miller called The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. It turns out, you can only keep about seven things in your awareness and your attention at the same time. They were saying you could use a computer to expand that. That and the idea of hypertext that you could embed connections in documents to other documents; suddenly, it was no longer the library card and the telephone, the internet came along. I became very interested through my work in the WELL, wrote the book Virtual Community in the social aspect of augmented cognition. It’s not just the ability to think and communicate in ways that you are unable to do without that aid, it’s the ability to have that instant, global think tank at your fingertips. There’s a whole art to that.  Ross: Certainly, it’s not just the individual cognition, cognition can be collective and intelligence capabilities can be collective, and that’s a big part of being able to amplify it. During that period, before Virtual Communities, in 1985, you wrote Tools for Thought. Tools for Thought is a very trendy software category at the moment. You were pretty early there. What were the core ideas you were laying out in the book Tools for Thought? Howard: In 1982-83, Time magazine put the personal computer on the cover. That was the man of the year, the person of the year was a computer. It was all about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, which is fine but they were standing on the shoulders of giants who were standing on the shoulders of giants. It seemed to me that this world that we’re heading into, and if you read the first paragraph of Tools for Thought 1985, I was saying essentially, what happens when these machines become so much more powerful because we know that they will? What happens when hundreds of millions of people have them and they’re connected to each other? Will this be a good thing or a bad thing for us? Of course, we discovered that it’s both. Engelbart, of course, built on the work of others like Ivan Sutherland, who invented computer graphics, and JCR Licklider, who wrote the Man-Computer Symbiosis in 1960. He said something I recognized as a writer, as a specialist in thinking and communicating, was that as a scientist, he spent most of his time getting in position to think and computers were no help because you had to submit these cards and come back with a printout. Why can’t I, as a scientist, directly communicate with a computer? Through his work at ARPA, the Defense Department’s Think Tank, he was able to sponsor the work that led to interactive computing, and also Engelbart’s work. There are a lot of interconnections between Engelbart, people that were before him, and people like Alan Kay at Xerox PARC. But also you couldn’t leave out probably the most influential scientists that the fewest people know about like John von Neumann. We wouldn’t have the computers we have today if it hadn’t been for him, Alan Turing, George Boole, Ada Lovelace, and Charles Babbage. There is a continuity of thought that we could use mechanical means to extend our thinking. This was a book for the general public, not really a technical book, my feeling was if we’re going into this age where we all have these mind amplifiers, and they’re all connected together, wouldn’t it be good to have a context for why they were created? And specifically, one aspect that interested me is that it wasn’t invented by the phone company. It wasn’t invented by IBM. It really came about because of this extraordinary intersection of the war machine, computer scientists and universities, and wild thinkers like Doug Engelbart, who took 10 years to get support for his work. Universities told him, yes, you can come study computer science, but don’t talk about using it for anything but scientific calculations and business data processing. Now, nobody knows that these days unless you read Tools for Thought or something else. But the idea that you could use computers to think was crazy. Defense Department wouldn’t do it alone, the computer industry and the telephone industry weren’t going to do it, you had to combine them with the crazies. Crazy is not the right word. Steve Jobs used the word crazy in his ads, the Dreamers. They wanted this tool for themselves. They didn’t want an IPO. They didn’t want to make the war machine better. They wanted to have a machine to think with. It was just a rare convergence. Then a little bit later converged with Venture Capital, and a lot of things exploded because of that. But this is a case of the strangest bedfellows coming together. You can’t see that now, but if you unveil that history. That’s the answer to the question of what did I want to accomplish with Tools for Thought was to set that context. Ross: Yes, that’s incredible. Everyone you mentioned, all these people, they’re building on each other’s work and the foundations and the believers, and now it all seems so obvious. But for them, as you say, those were the crazy ideas. You were right there in it, which is extraordinary. I know it’s skipping over a lot. But almost three decades later, you wrote the book, Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? That’s obviously a lot closer to today and the technologies that we have today. I think part of that is the interdisciplinary science of mind amplification, and pointing out this is not just about thinking, it’s around emotions and empathy and so on. What’s the essence of what you got to a mind amplifier, which is now, many decades of work in the field? Howard: By now, I think that the theme is emerging which is I wanted to zoom back and look at the greater context of Tools for Thought. You have to think about the long-term coevolution of humans, human culture, and the tools we’ve made. If you start thinking of tools as physical objects, speech, writing... The history of writing is really interesting. The discovery of writing, writing was a means of accounting for empires for hundreds, if not thousands of years, till someone figured out that you could do other things with these marks on clay and then the alphabet was a fantastic amplifier. What writing and print make available, or a print amplifies is that culture is no longer restricted to face to face communications. Later, when I started studying cooperation theory, this idea of cultural evolution came in. Biological evolution is very slow, over millions of years, but with human culture, if you discover how to make a fire, everyone in the tribe knows how to make a fire and everyone in future generations of that tribe knows how to make a fire. If someone else says you can throw some meat on that fire, and digest your food better, then everybody knows that. It’s like a ratchet. Once knowledge exists in a culture, it builds on itself like biological evolution, but much, much, much faster. The context of this is that with the ability to transmit knowledge across time and space. Suddenly, many more people were able to think better and communicate better. Again, if you’re going to have a million people, some of them are going to have really good ideas. Before that, those really good ideas were lost. Nowadays, they spread throughout the culture. If you’re going to look into that coevolution, then you get to Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan and others who talk about the linguistic aspects of cognition, the degree to which you can argue, you can’t really think without words, and thinking is the thoughts that form through words in our head. The other vector, besides looking at the coevolution of linguistic tools, and tools for transmitting knowledge, which is why I wrote mind amplifier because again, I wanted to set the context. But again, I wanted to make it for people who were creating tools for thought. An engineering school, they don’t teach you about this language stuff, they don’t teach you about the coevolution of thinking tools. In 2000, I wrote Smart Mobs. That was about the use of mobile devices and the Internet to amplify collective action to enable people to do things together. In fact, if you look back at all of these other tools, it’s not just the ability of an individual to come up with better ideas and to get them across better, it enables groups of people increasingly larger and more diverse groups of people to do things together that they weren’t able to do together before. That led me to look into who looks at that. Well, sociologists look at that. There was one sociologist in particular who pointed me to Elinor Ostrom’s work on the Commons. Elinor Ostrom was a political scientist, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, but was a political scientist, and she was reacting to the Tragedy of the Commons. A paper by Garrett Hardin, in which he pointed out that the commons were areas that were not owned by anyone, and anybody could graze their cattle or their sheep. They’re here in the US, we’ve got the Boston Commons, that’s what it used to be. The Commons became enclosed in Great Britain and ultimately became privately owned. What Hardin said was that if it’s not privately owned, people will destroy it. Not because they’re vicious, but because I want to graze as many sheep and cattle as I can, and so does my neighbor. Eventually, they over-graze, and it becomes a desert-like in North Africa. Hardin said that this was inevitable. Ostrom said, is that really true? And did a lot of research on everything from police systems to irrigation systems, and found out that people can manage Commons, and she came up with seven design principles for those. I will elaborate on them. But they’re really simple things like the group, the Commons need to set a clear boundary, who’s in and who’s out, it has to have rules about how you supply it, or how you use it. There have to be sanctions for those who break those rules. There has to be a way for that group to change the rules. It seemed to me that these intersecting vectors of looking at cognition and the evolution of language tools and also the dynamics of what we’re beginning to know about human cooperation enable that part of tools for thought that’s not engineering. Engelbart was adamant about this. I knew him for years, and practically every time we talked, he had a formula called humans using language, artifacts, methodology, and training. It pointed out that the artifacts are literally million folds more powerful than they were when he did his world-changing demonstration in 1968, all of the technology he used in that famous demonstration. It’s on YouTube if you look for the mother of all demos. Probably one icon on your phone has more memory connected to it than that. The methodology and the training, the soft part of it, really has not been amplified. I wrote another book in 2012 called Net Smart because of the question I’ve been asked, I’m sure you’ve been asked throughout our careers, which is, are these personal computers and networks a net benefit for humans? Or are they not? Are they quite the opposite? And my conclusion at that point was probably a bit too optimistic, which is, it depends on what you know. We’re seeing a tragedy of the comments online. In that people are really spamming it, and they’re filling it with all kinds of garbage, and it’s making it hard for the rest of us. There are things that you know and I know, it’s not really rocket science about how to find your way around online. I wrote about five different literacies; attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness, all of which are to say that you need to know how to drive these vehicles now. Just having a smartphone, just having an internet account does not mean that you’re going to really do good for yourself or anybody else, you got to know how to use it. Education is such a slow-moving and conservative institution. I wrote that book in 2012, but I still don’t see that high school kids are taught how not to be fooled when they’re searching online. Ross: As you say, a lot of it’s about how we use these tools. They’re useful, we have to use them well, and it’s not taught to us, so we got to work it out for ourselves. That was a lot of the thesis of my book Thriving on Overload. These are just fundamental skills, massive information, how do we deal with it? We’re not taught about it so here are some foundational principles. An immense number of resources you’ve put out, and we’ll provide links in the show notes, but one of the linkages to today is language and words. Now we have large language models, which have got to be able to pull together words in appropriate sequences pretty well. I’d love to hear your perspective on today. Certainly, anyway in which you’re using tools or any way in which you see the greatest potential from amplifying cognition from the tools we have today. What are directions? What can and should people be looking at? Howard: Let me start by saying that I don’t really have enough technical knowledge to talk about some of the big topics like will general artificial intelligence be an existential threat. Ross: That’s not what I asked you. Howard: No, but the discourse today is about where are these things going to go. I can’t tell you a lot about that in the scientific sense. But I think it’s important to point out that there were decades of research, trying to build artificial intelligence by manipulating symbols artificially. It turns out that if you get a couple of billion humans to put all of the good stuff, all of the garbage, everything they’re playing with, all their art, all of their code, all of the discussions they have about their code online and apply this mathematical technique that I don’t understand can’t explain that makes some statistical connections between words and phrases and sentences, and suddenly, you can ask it to do things and it will do things. I did study cooperation for a while. I taught a seminar on cooperation theory, so I asked ChatGPT3 what are the main arguments for the evolution of human altruism. Three seconds later, I got it. It was correct. It was exhaustive. That was true. However, people also get incorrect answers that are masquerading. There was a pretty well-publicized case in which a lawyer got into a lot of trouble because he used ChatGPT3, and it came up with citations for law cases that didn’t exist. I think what we were talking about in terms of you have to know how to use the tool, that’s going to be incredibly important. Something that’s a side effect, but really central to what’s been happening is that the ability of anyone anywhere to communicate anything means that you can search for an answer and get a million answers. Some of them are going to be correct and some of them are going to look really good, and they’re not, and some of them are going to be deliberate misinformation. We’ve had another development that Google and Facebook pioneered, which is the business model of selling advertising, micro-targeted advertising because they collect so much information about an individual that they can tell advertisers exactly where they want to go. But when you apply this to misinformation and disinformation, we’re seeing an arms race between the ability of people to make their way through all of this to the good stuff and the ability of others to manipulate them to buy things or to believe things, to vote in certain ways. One of the things I do feel intuitively strong about is that large language models are empowering misinformation and disinformation and targeted, micro-targeted propaganda, much more than our ability to deal with it. I’m seeing this delta between literacy, skills, and capabilities. Clearly, we’re going to run into trouble with that. But put that aside, how’s this a tool for thoughts? My immediate thought was that’s what I see is that these could become the symbiotic thinking partners that Licklider talked about that not only can you have this transformation of everybody’s knowledge, but you can train it on your own material, and you can jam with yourself. I think that this is a great time for people to be building tools like that, based on that. We’re seeing some note-taking tools now. Note-taking, that’s a new amplification of thinking, of cognition that’s based on the very old thing. Everybody knows how to take notes but it turns out that if you have the right software and the right knowledge of how to use it, you can use your notes to build this little knowledge base of your own and navigate that knowledge base. Again, are we talking about the entire human race? I’m afraid not. I think you’re going to have to have people who are fairly well-educated and who are willing to take the time to train themselves. In an ideal world, I can see education being enabling people to learn how to think for themselves with these tools. Ross: Totally. Education has got to be, first of all, giving young people a love of learning and the ability to understand how it is they can learn themselves with these tools. That’s almost all they need. Do you use any particular software for your note-taking? Howard: No. I’m not going to write any more books. I’m happy with what I’ve done. I’m making art now. I’m very interested in that. Net Smart, 2012, I used DEVONthink and Scrivener. DEVONthink is this monstrous software that enables you to clip things from what you’re reading and your own notes and tag them and categorize them in folders. The more you add to it, the more the system can suggest other things in that system. Then Scrivener, it’s really not word processing, it’s not a database, but it’s a way to take your material and organize it for writing; enormous empowerment. If I look back on that typewriter, it’s like If I had a horse and buggy in my 30s, and now I’ve got a spaceship that will take me anywhere I want to go. Ross: Just to round out, what are your thoughts on the augmentation of art? Howard: I played with one of the generative APIs, Midjourney. I think it’s wonderful. If I had more hours in the day, I would be really interested in learning how to do it. I believe it is an art. I have a friend who produces fantastic stuff that I’ve not been able to do with the same software. Again, it’s a skill, it’s an artistic skill, but also, for the first time, you don’t have to be able to render things with a brush or a pencil or even Photoshop as you can describe it well and it will appear which as others have pointed out is essentially a spell. It’s a conjuring. You’re conjuring this image with words, you’re turning words into images. I do acknowledge that I certainly didn’t give permission and a lot of other people, including programmers who are suing, didn’t give permission for our work to be used. It’s like the most massive copyright violation in history. I think there’s a net good that comes out of it but it’s at the expense of something that people have worked for. I now see that there are ways for people to watermark their work so that it won’t appear and ways to do reverse searches to find out whether your work was the basis of something. But there are trade-offs, there are always trade-offs, and I think the trade-off has already been made, I don’t see how we’re going to go backward on this. What we know from the last 10, 20, 30 years, these things we’re playing with today, Remember when MacPaint first came out, 1984, you could actually manipulate pixels. Well, compare that to Photoshop, what was Photoshop, maybe 10 years later, we’re going to see these tools with their capabilities amplified. A smart entrepreneur or a dedicated educator would work on ways to enable these tools to tutor people on how to use them well and how to recognize that they’re being faked out. I wrote about Crap Detection in 2012, that’s extremely important today politically, medically… it could kill you. If you go and google your symptoms, and you find that info and take Hydroxychloroquine for your COVID-19, you could kill yourself, or you could kill others by propagating misinformation that you’ve heard. It’s very important at a basic level, but also now at the level that we’ve got this genius that also slips in lies. I don’t know that we can change the slips in the lies part. If you’re basing it on everything that humans put online, again, I don’t have the technical knowledge, I think that it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to engineer guardrails to that. You’re going to have to teach people to deal with it. Ross: Yes. That’s one of the consistent themes since the beginning. You’ve been there since the early days of thinking around these things. I think that framing of all of the attitudes from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and bringing that to today is exactly right, including how it is we learn both the aptitudes as well as the attitudes to use these tools well. Howard, where can people find out more about your wonderful work and art?  Howard: My art, you can find on Patreon and a lot of it is public. Some of it you pay $1 a month or whatever, just to support my art material habit. That’s patreon.com/howardrheingold. That’s where my art resides. A few years ago, Stanford helped me try to gather my digital materials together and put them together so they’re on my website www.rheingold.com. The website got hacked recently and so it’s being rebuilt, but that’s where you can find it. Ross: Fantastic. All of those links will be in the show notes. Thank you so much, not just for your time on the show, Howard, but also for all of your contributions over the years, for being a real seminal figure in bringing that consciousness into how technology has developed. I think that’s still playing out today. Thank you. Howard: It’s a wonderful adventure that we’re on. It may end in disaster, but it’s also a lot of fun. Ross: It’s pretty exciting. The post Howard Rheingold on human cooperation and the origins of technology-enabled mind and consciousness amplification (AC Ep3) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I believe that more people would be eager to jump in and think together if the thinking were fun and led to something truly productive and useful. For me, that’s a significant aspect of amplifying cognition.“ – Jerry Michalski About Jerry Michalski On this episode we learn from the incredible connector Jerry Michalski. His fascinating career is hard to summarise, playing a central role in the emerging digital economy as long time managing editor of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter. He is now leader at the Relation Economy Expedition (REX) as well as an advisor facilitator and speaker at the Institute For The Future with a deep focus on trust and relationships. Websites: jerrymichalski.com  jerrysbrain.com Openglobalmind.com LinkedIn: Jerry Michalski Twitter: @jerrymichalski What you will learn The potential of generative AI and other advanced models in enhancing human capabilities (03:12 Difference between Cyborg and Centaur (04:25) Exploring boundaries and augmentation in the age of ChatGPT (05:33) Balancing individuality and AI in knowledge management (07:10) Using AI to explore diverse perspectives (09:14) The danger of the loss of distinction between fact and fiction (10:37) The significance of collective intelligence among cyborgs and the urgency to address ethical considerations (11:44) Embracing contagious and viral ideas while avoiding oversimplification (18:20) Dealing with an ethical cyborg vs. an ethical person (20:26) Ethical concerns related to AI research and the potential misuse of open-source models (21:52) Navigating arguments and perspectives with ChatGPT (25:46) Amplifying cognition as the by-product of collective thinking and knowledge sharing (33:20) Episode Resources ChatGPT Photoshop Final Cut Wikipedia Obsidian Roam Research  Tiago Forte’s Build the Second Brain course   Transcript Ross Dawson: Jerry, it’s amazing to have you back on the show. Jerry Michalski: It’s very exciting to have another conversation with you. Thanks for the invite. Ross: It’s almost two years since you were one of the first guests on the show, a very obvious guest, and you are very obvious to relaunch Amplifying Cognition. What are you thinking about? What are you doing? What are you delving into these days? Jerry: It’s funny; we were just comparing notes a little bit and it seems like my path is converging with your path as we speak even. It’s very fun because I realized not that long ago that I’m more of a cyborg than anybody I know because I externalize more of what I think into this Brain software that I use. I find it incredibly useful and usable. Even though it’s called the Brain, it has no AI in it. That has not been an experience for me of using generative AI or any of the models that we’re talking about here. But, oh my gosh, those things are all completely complimentary. My general notion is that the future of work is cyborg; we’re going to have to learn how to meld well with technology. That means we’re probably going to have to figure out how the tools work and how to incorporate them into our lives. But also, the ethics of this stuff is really important. The other piece of what I’m working on is standing up a community of cyborgs who are trying to work together to figure out, Hey, what does this next generation of work look like? And how do we do it in some ethical way so that maybe our efforts are making the world a better place instead of destroying it? Ross: How would you define cyborg? Jerry: I was torn between cyborg and centaur. Centaur does not roll off the tongue. People don’t know what centaurs are. But, oh my gosh, cyborg immediately brings to mind Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2, which is totally the wrong image. But that’s funny, and I like that that’s the first thing because I’m like… and I don’t mean the robots from Skynet that are going to come to kill us all, I just mean extensions to human capacity. I’m not even talking about biological extensions. At this point, I’m mostly talking about software. But that biological stuff is just on the horizon. It’s not that far off. The man-brain-machine interface stuff isn’t that far off. I don’t know where it’s going to go. A lot of it is going to be for making up deficits; when somebody loses capacity, that’s where prosthetics go a lot. I think we’re a longer way from I think something and it’s manifested in the world. But that’s not that far off. But for now, it’s like, we need to integrate better with software. Ross: We talked about cyborgs and work context; I’d want to delve into that. But perhaps let’s pull back as well because what happens when we become cyborgs? Jerry: It’s funny because when this whole ChatGPT thing got exciting and heated up, I was having a conversation with my friend, Pete Kaminski. I said to him, Pete, are you losing your boundaries? Are you having any boundary issues? Because one of the things that come up right away is if you share information or start a conversation with ChatGPT, where do you end and where do you start? If you take the results of a query and turn them into your essay, what did it create? What did you create? There are a lot of interesting boundaries about where are the borders of the participants anymore. That’s just one of several different layers of things that start to show up. The other one obviously is: is my job going to be automated? There’s a phrase here I really like: augment versus replace. Doug Engelbart famously gave us the augmentation of humans, it was his goal. I think that’s a fantastic goal. I don’t know where we lost his thread, but we’re busy trying to automate jobs out of existence when I think what we should be doing is making tasks go away but helping people do more powerful things together. Ross: Let’s say, organization of today, suddenly they’ve got ChatGPT. There are two frames: individuals and organizations. It seems to me that it started with individuals. Let’s start there. Let’s say a person says, All right, I will make myself a cyborg so I can be better at my job. How does that work now? Jerry: It’s interesting because I probably have a not-quite-unique but a quirky outlook on this because I’ve been feeding this mind map for 25 and a half years. I have a highly developed public external web of everything I believe in, and one of the questions that is coming up right now is: is notetaking obsolete? Should we stop taking Thiago Forte’s Build the Second Brain course or things like it? To my mind, because of my personal experience, I think it’s an extremely dangerous course of action to give up on personal notetaking and conceptualizing things ourselves and decide, I’m just going to ask ChatGPT and it’s going to give me the answer because it’s going to increasingly know everything and be able to organize things, like magically it’ll come up with the eight categories that perfectly map to some domain that I’m curious about or trying to write about. The tools are scarily powerful at doing things exactly like that. I’m very interested in that boundary between individual notetaking, note sharing with other people to build some kind of collective intelligence, and how all of that folds in with this new set of intelligences that are outside of us but they’re only smart because they’ve swallowed everything humans have ever written. Ross: I think one of the really important pieces here is our uniqueness. We’re all absolutely unique humans, and one of the things is that we think uniquely. We need it to accentuate our uniqueness and how it is we think. That’s the diversity of mental models. Cognitive diversity is what we look for in an organization. We don’t want everyone to think exactly the same. If we all outsource our thinking to GPT, then, in fact, we will all be thinking exactly the same. To amplify our own uniqueness, as you say, we need to have our own mental models, which means capturing our own thoughts and our notes and how they fit together in our own unique way. That’s pretty important. Jerry: I had a fun conversation with somebody yesterday on a walk, where he was saying that it seems like generative art is kind of converging on a particular aesthetic. Maybe that aesthetic will change over time as the tools get a little finer-grained and better, but he was worried that we were going to turn everything into pudding, basically, that’s like an intellectual gray goo scenario, where all of a sudden, everything winds up kind of being the same. I think that humans do provide some of the spice and uniqueness in the mix. But I also argued for some of these AIs, where you can tell the AI to take very different perspectives. I mean, one way to bring more voices into the room is to ask your AI to represent indigenous ways of knowing or a particular indigenous group and say, Hey, you speak for these people that I don’t have anyone in this room who understands that perspective, let’s see if that will help us think of something a bit differently than we normally would. Ross: That’s a great use. Just yesterday, I was sharing about this new software which apparently can predict music hits with 97% accuracy. Again, that’s pretty dangerous, where if suddenly, the only thing we get is what is supposed to be hit, and we lose the rest, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think our musical tastes are diverse enough, and we will express our uniqueness in what we listen to. Jerry: There’s this problem that several people are worried that the outputs of generative AI are going to be fed into the search engines and are going to become the new inputs for everything. And then the snake will eat its own tail. It’ll be like the famous ouroboros, and that is not out of the question. Some of the dangers in that scenario are that we start to lose the difference between fact and fiction because we will be feeding hallucinations into the system as if they were facts, and then all hell breaks loose. One of the early posts was heavily past peak knowledge. Is this the end of the Golden Age when we suddenly have query engines where we can search everything and most everything humans have written is now in the system? But oh, now we’re breaking that. Ross: This comes back almost precisely to the cyborg piece, as in, we both independently have come up with the phrase how to be a better cyborg. How, Jerry, could we become better cyborgs? Jerry: Part of it is understanding how the tools work and what the limitations are, and not becoming the lawyer who submitted a brief that they fact-checked using the tool that generated the hallucinations and therefore got themselves really embarrassed in public a month or two ago. You don’t want to be that guy. There are a lot of ways to avoid those errors. Understanding how the tools work and what their limitations are, lets you then use them well to generate creative first drafts of things. One of the enemies of mankind is the blank sheet of paper. So many people are given an assignment, and they’re like sitting down, and it’s just like, No, and you ball up two words, and you throw it in the trash. And here, all of a sudden, you can have six variants of something put in front of you. We need to become better editors of generated texts. Then the other piece of being a better cyborg is not about being a lonely cyborg. But what does it mean to be in a collective of cyborgs? What does it mean to be in a cyborg space? What does it mean to co-inhabit cyborg intelligence with other people and other intelligences that are just going to get faster and better at this thing? I think it’s really urgent that we figure out the collaboration side of this so we don’t think of it only as, Well, they gave everybody a better spreadsheet and now everybody’s making a lot of spreadsheets, this is different; this is different in type. The third thing I would bring in is the ethics of it, which is boy, it’s easy to misuse these tools in so many ways. Unless we understand A – how they work and what they’re doing, but B – have some better notion ourselves of what is right and what is wrong to do, and some relatively strong idea of what is right and what is wrong to do, then this is going to evolve. There’s one school of thought. Bill Joyce said this years ago: There is no more privacy; forget about it; privacy is overrated. And the other realm is like what the EU is doing right now, with new privacy regulations. They’re really working hard to try to figure out how to protect us from having our data just sucked out of our lives and used by other people to manipulate us in our lives, which is what capitalism wants to do. It’s not as easy as I’m going to get good at Photoshop, Final Cut, or whatever, and become an ace with some software. I point to those kinds of people as the early cyborgs. I’m like if there’s any piece of software where you no longer think of the commands, maybe you’re a spreadsheet ace and you do these massive, incredible models with pivot tables and who knows what, and the software you’ve internalized so well that it doesn’t even come to consciousness, you’re down this road of cyborgness. But this is more complicated than that because the issues are so important and because we can now collaborate and communicate better all of those issues. Ross: There are a few layers in being an ethical cyborg. One is being aware of the concept of ethics in the first place. Another is the desire to be ethical. Another is knowing how to do it. As people become cyborgs, amongst other things, they have greater power. This amplifies our capabilities, which arguably makes ethics more important. How do we go through those layers of making people aware that they could or should be approaching the world ethically, learning what are the principles, and actually putting that into practice? Jerry: If you’ll permit, you just reminded me of a story from long ago. Then there’s another thread about the word consumer that I’ll bring in. I went to Wharton Business School a really long time ago. I was on the Dean’s Advisory Board in my second year. I said, Gosh, it’s really nice that we have a six-week-long ethics course that’s mandatory. But when you’re in the ethics course, everything looks like an ethics case and you answer everything ethically, because you’re in the ethics course, da. The only way to teach ethics is to hide it in the curriculum through every course; you must redesign courses everywhere so that one of the tasks in any course is for a student to stand up and say, Hey, we could do this, but it would be wrong and here’s why. Number one, I think we need to figure out how to make people aware, and how to… hide the broccoli is the wrong metaphor but basically, make sure that people have drills. In the Toyota Production System, one of the things was any worker on the line could stop the line because of quality, and they taught that and it worked. In Japan, where you don’t want to stand up and the nail that’s poking up will get hammered down, it worked, it really worked, because there was this sense of shared responsibility for the whole process. Awesome. Then the second thing is there are ways in which we do unethical things that we don’t even notice because we’ve normalized them so much. My whole journey started 30-35 years ago when I realized I don’t like the word consumer. I can point to a couple of briefings, like 93-94, where I realized this word really bothers me and it’s a major issue. Then later, maybe a decade later, I realized we had consumerized every sector of human activity, which meant we were treating people as just people to control and manipulate as opposed to citizens with whom to engage in this activity. I can go in a hundred directions from that point. But being aware that that is a problem and that things that you’re busy coding or doing might actually be contributing to the problem instead of fixing it is another piece of this puzzle. I’m very interested in provoking and maybe facilitating some of those conversations so that we can all be having these conversations to start to realize we’ve got choices. Maybe between your community and my community, we collect up enough voices, and several other people’s communities, to go have an effect when legislation is being drawn, when companies try to do things, etc. That would be a great thing. Ross: Just picking out of that, it suggests that the path to the ethical cyborg is significantly conversations. Jerry: It’s very social, shockingly collegial and social; it’s lovely. Very much Ross: Yes, well, we can’t put everybody in the world in an ethics workshop. To your point, that’s not necessarily the best way to get there. Jerry: Right. One of the things, the three words I’ve heard kill more good ideas are: it won’t scale. What we have in mind usually when we say scale, is like industrial scale. When Intel is busy creating a new fab, they put up like a dozen lines for production, then they tweak all the variables, pick the best-producing, best-yielding line, and say, replicate exactly all the settings on all the devices on this line, and you will get lots and lots of chips out the other end. Human Systems are not like that whatsoever. We are flaky, we are fluky, and we are weird. But we are also very social. I prefer the term adaptive or fractal scale, by which I mean lots of conversations can happen at lots of scales down to four people, three people at a time, and the same thoughts can be had over and over and over again. It doesn’t bother anybody, and that scales, because when I say scale, I mean influencing or touching a whole lot of people. I don’t mean telling everybody to do the same thing to get the same results. Those are two very different ways of thinking about scale. So if we want to have something contagious, the free hugs meme is contagious. It’s viral in a very cheap way. Because once you’ve seen this thing, a video of somebody giving free hugs, you’re like, Oh, that’s cool. It’s in your brain now. How do we take these issues and not oversimplify them, but make them that kind of palpable in our lives? Ross: What do we need to understand when we are dealing with an ethical cyborg as opposed to an ethical person? Jerry: That’s a crazy, interesting question. For example, if you ask GPT to name 10 philosophers, it’ll name 10 dead white guys, a couple of whom might be alive. You have to say, Hey, GPT, name 10 Islamic philosophers. Oops, those will still be guys. But if you say, what about other sorts of indigenous wisdom or women? It will come up with a great list of people, but you need to prompt it because there’s a bias built into the systems’ web of meaning because the Western canon, the human canon contains so much bias anyway, and it’s extremely hard to purge that out of the system. An awareness of the bias and some ways to circumvent, neutralize, or improve on the bias are really crucially important. That’s just one of the ways we have to kind of walk into this. Ross: For example, when I was looking at my map of intelligence and how we view intelligence,  GPT was an incredibly useful tool in finding female and diverse perspectives on intelligence. The trouble was it was always hallucinated. To get the fact check on, that was pretty tough because it was all hallucinated. But at least it identified some people I should be looking into. Jerry: There are also questions about there should be a moratorium on all this research. We need to stop it. I’m unclear if that’s even possible. I can easily imagine that there are bad actors in the world and there are many of them out there. Even though a big piece of my lifetime message is trust, but there is a bunch of bad actors out there who are taking some of these open-source models and building the thing you just sort of said humorously that might exist as maybe a malevolent artificial intelligence. It could be powerful. These things are hard to gate. Without a lot of imagination, I can envision too many scenarios that do worry me, but I don’t see any way to put the brakes on this. We need to actually infect more people with good intentions while using these tools so that they can find and stop the people who are using them badly. Ross: Overlaying a few of the themes we’ve talked about is organizations of cyborgs, then we have collective intelligence, we have the ethics of having organizations of cyborgs, and essentially, how do we build that into something that is both effective and has a positive impact on the world? Jerry: I think one of the things that’s hard to imagine is that software is instantly and cheaply replicable. Not only could I have an agent out there doing my work in the world that is smart, I could have a hundred of them or a thousand of them; it really comes down to how many of them can I manage and how do they connect. I can easily imagine that somebody’s working on that problem of how do you delegate work across software agents in different ways to create an army, basically a robot army, for any person who can step into that and control them. That’s kind of crazymaking. That’s popping straight out of some good science fiction novels into our present reality. We have to figure out what does collective intelligence, hive mind, or collaborative sense-making look like and what would we like it to be. Is it like Wikipedia, where there’s a canonical page with the right answer for each thing? Like, here’s the page for carbon, and this is what is allowed to be on the page for carbon. You have to duke it out on the talk pages behind this page and then only that gets seen? Or is it an overlapping hive mind where different constituencies wind up saying, Here’s what we believe, and here’s what they believe, in a way that lets us compare notes but doesn’t force us to blend everything into the gray goo?  Because the moment we’re all forced to come up with the one canonical answer to everything, and here, I’m torn because I think truth matters and facts matter, but the moment we’re all forced into the pressure cooker of having the same answer, the consensus answer, meaning the answer everybody agrees to, those answers will be A – targets of all sorts of bad pressure and B – probably worthless; they’ll wind up becoming unusable. Ross: Thinking about, for example, Bridgewater Associates, where everyone’s encouraged to be very difficult and contradict others, and Andreessen Horowitz, where they have red teaming on major decisions. This is all about disagreement, ultimately leading to a decision. In a world of cyborgs, do we then get individual cyborgs having opposing views that resolve or are they within the one cyborg? How is that configured? Jerry: Who knows? There’s a term called Steel Manning. You’ve heard of the straw man, right? The straw man argument, you sort of put up. Steel Manning is when you know your opponent’s argument better than they do. You can represent the logic of their argument so well that they would agree with that logic. You can tell ChatGPT to go do this; you can sort of tell it to take both sides of an argument and present both things as if it were debating itself, not a big problem there. I think it may be easier to do these sorts of things.  What’s interesting to me is the boundary between facts and logic, faith and politics, and argument. Because a lot of what’s happening out there is arguments on faith or things that have no basis in data or results, they’re just assumptions, and assumptions that if the other side slowed down and agreed to abide by the data, their argument would probably melt. They’re very likely to be unwilling to do that. Right? Nobody wants their argument to fall apart. So this space is going to get really contentious. We have to worry and try to figure out how to navigate the waters of stories meeting factual narratives or causal narratives. By the way, in a fight between emotions and facts, emotions win every time. There could be this interesting battle between fact and fiction that we’re entering as well as everything else we’ve talked about. Ross: Yes. I just think it would be good to come back in a year or two to sort of see if we have any URI or others if any, structures to facilitate this. Pulling back to the leader. Let’s say you’re talking to a CEO. Are you going to say to him or her that you are now the leader of an organization of cyborgs? How is it that they should be thinking about and enabling? Is it a sidewalk organization? Or is it an organization of sidewalks? How does this work? Jerry: I know it’s really very interesting. On the one hand, in the US, we have an association called AARP, the American Association of Retired People, which is now an obsolete name because nobody’s really retiring, etc. But they kind of claim to speak for people of age 60 and over or something like that. They don’t speak for me because every time I get a mail from them, I tear it up and throw it away. But they’re also doing nothing to actually communicate with people. They’re a big, centralized organization, that’s a huge lobbyist in our capital DC. But they don’t represent the people that they claim to represent, as opposed to Alcoholics Anonymous, where the structure is just given and people set up groups, and there’s a protocol and a method for going through the process. There’s no money exchanging hands, which gives it a certain kind of authenticity, veracity, and importance because the work that’s being done there is really important work for humans, right? Those are two opposite kinds of organizations. Part of what I’m playing with is, How do you do a highly decentralized organization that has some sense of rituals, connection, meaning, and some agreement on what is right and wrong to do? Which is hard. I don’t think that’s easy work. But if you can set those things up, then everybody doesn’t have to be like… I’m stunned by the fact that Facebook now has more monthly average users than the populations of China and India combined and they are ruled by a single person who has dictatorial powers over them all. Because that’s how he worked out how the shares work. That really is incredible to me. You could consider that to be the largest country on Earth. We’re already in those waters. That’s done. Ross: This is a leaderless organization. How do you configure or architect a leaderless organization that achieves objectives alignment and where the cyborgs collectively go and get it done? Jerry: Yes. People are working on different parts of this, like the Indieweb, Fediverse, or several others that are working on federated, distributed things. Crypto people would say, Over here, over here, Blockchain is distributed, and so forth. I’m just not a fan of what’s happened over there. I don’t think it’s contributing to the kinds of puzzles that we’re thinking about here. I’m having trouble explaining what a shared memory looks like. I can tell you what Wikipedia is and you know what Wikipedia is because it’s an encyclopedia on open-source software that runs in a wiki-style, that runs on these servers, is funded by donations, we can explain exactly what Wikipedia is. But what makes that easy is that it’s only an encyclopedia. I can’t use Wikipedia to tell you a story of why I think the global financial crisis happened. Right? I have a thesis about that, and I put some videos online about the GFC just to try to storytell, to explain, building on evidence, why that happened. We don’t have a place to share those sorts of things that we share an understanding about. In a fit of pique with a little bit of humor, I bought thebigfungus.org, where there isn’t much; it’s just kind of a placeholder site. But I think that thebigfungus is a nice metaphor for the shared knowledge web because mycelial links and mushrooms are just really great metaphors for almost everything. It works really well for shared knowledge. What does that look like? When we start thinking together, what does that look like? And I have a second funny way of looking at it. When Zuckerberg renamed Facebook as Meta and went on his Metaverse binge and spent tens of billions of dollars on worthless research, Sorry, people on that project, I bought the domain, thebetterverse, I think “.com”. because I’m like, Hey, I don’t think any of that floating around in 3D with an avatar head is going to lead to a better universe. But if we figured out this shared wisdom, if we knew what we knew and made it better over time, we could get to a better verse. For me, all this talk about cyborgs, software, data, and the future brings in some of those really big issues because I think this is as large a transformation as programming was when we first got into coding, and we can see how much that transformed the world. Ross: This, we could go on talking forever. We need Episode Three before long.  Jerry: I feel like I’m a helium balloon in this conversation where you’re like, Okay, let’s talk about this thing and then I’m like, Yes, but, and then I feel like I’m floating up in the chair, like, up a couple of floors. Ross: Let’s try to round it out by grinding it down to the ground. Jerry: Yes.  Ross: The theme is amplifying cognition. We have incredible brains, how do we amplify those? How do we make those better? Part of it is becoming cyborgs with AI and other machines and technologies. What would you suggest to people who want to amplify their cognitions? Or be a cyborg or be a better cyborg? What are some of the steps? What is that journey that we need to be on? Jerry: A couple of hours ago, I was in a conversation where the other side of the argument from me was that creating bodies of documents that make sense is too complicated. Most people won’t engage in it. I was like, But there’s Wikipedia. It doesn’t matter that there is only a few people who did the organizing. But everyone else who touches it gets to benefit from it. No? It was sort of disheartening because I believe that more people would be eager to jump in and think together if the thinking was fun, and if it led to something really productive and useful. For me, that’s a big part of amplifying cognition. It’s like, Hey, folks, let’s think together, let’s learn to think, and let’s step into some ways of sharing what we know and what we believe. Even sharing the wildest guesses that are probably wrong. But it would be interesting then to compare notes and say, Well, it’s wrong because this, Okay, great. then you can change your mind and make that explicit out in this shared memory of some sort. I think that starts by just learning to do notetaking and then figuring out how to manifest what you see in some way that other people might be able to use. It could be in Obsidian, it could be in Roam, there’s a whole bunch of thinking tools or mapping tools. I happen to use the Brain and really like it, but I’m extremely aware that it’s not for everyone. But then, how do we collect this up so that it’s a larger artifact that all humans can benefit from? It’s a little bit like the foundation library that the foundation series was looking at way back when, it’s like, How do we create a library? Because we’re going to destroy civilization, we need to build a library somewhere far enough away that it survives the destruction so that we can rebuild ourselves later on. I’m not quite at that plot point. But it sometimes feels like a project sort of like that. Ross: Yes, the thing is, the conversation is perhaps the most wonderful thing in the universe, but there’s also the writing, or words, or any visual things—anything that takes our thoughts out in a way that others can engage with them is the foundation of collective intelligence. But then, I think part of it’s also how do we use the AI in that piece of taking or integrating or the pieces of what it is we are thinking that expression, but I absolutely agree that people do need to be capturing things. Jerry: It is fun. I have a whole series of lessons from using my Brain for 25 years. One of the lessons is that using the Brain forces me or switches me into System-2 thinking all the time. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Danny Kahneman says System-1 is your instinctive response, your quick answer and System-2 is when you have to slow down, piece things out, and make them make sense. What happens to me is something floats by in the info torrent, and I’m like, Oh, that’s worth remembering. Okay, good. That’s the first question. Where does it go? What do I name it? What can I learn from it? What is it connected to? I’ve gotten to where I can do that little loop very quickly. That is a piece of the kind of thinking that I’m talking about. Too many of us are just overwhelmed by the info torrent. We’re drowning in the info flood, and every year somebody invents a new tool like Snapchat, TikTok, or what have you, that we all seem to have to go get on, and all of this is flow and we don’t have good tools to capture the good stuff and put it someplace where it’ll last a little longer. Ross: You are setting up a community of ethical cyborgs, is that right? Jerry: That’s the goal. It’s not set up yet. But I’ve been having several of those conversations just this week, and it feels like we’re on parallel paths here. Ross: Well, I’ll help get the word out when that comes out. Anything that you want to point people to who want to know more about what you do? Jerry: Sure. I’m easily found at jerrymichalski.com and jerrysbrain.com. The community that I started three years ago at the start of the lockdown is called openglobalmind.com. You can join those conversations. We have several standing calls every week where we haven’t written a lot of code, but we’ve sort of turned over all these issues to the point where we’re getting somewhere with our understanding of the shape of the problem and whom to go talk to about what, so those are some places to find me. And if you go to jerrysbrain.com, you can browse my Brain for free by clicking on Launch Jerry’s Brain. Ross: Yep. It will all be in the show notes. Thank you for all of the wonderful work that you do, Jerry. Jerry: Ross, same here, and it’s just exciting to see how similar our thinking is. The post Jerry Michalski on ethical cyborgs, amplifying uniqueness, peak knowledge, and fractal conversations (AC Ep2) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Amplifying Cognition is about recognizing that the human mind is the most extraordinary thing in the known universe. Yet it is capable of far more. “ – Ross Dawson About Ross Dawson Ross Dawson works globally as a futurist, keynote speaker, entrepreneur, and strategy advisor. He is Founding Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies Group of companies, and is the bestselling author of five books, most recently Thriving on Overload. Website: Ross Dawson LinkedIn: Ross Dawson Twitter: @rossdawson Facebook: Ross Dawson YouTube: Ross Dawson Books  Thriving on Overload Other books What you will learn The metamorphosis from Thriving on Overload to Amplifying Cognition (00:31) How and why Amplifying Cognition became the name of the podcast (02:23) A glimpse of what AI is and how it can amplify humans (06:41) Cognitive evolution (epigenetics) through leveraging collective intelligence (10:11) The nature of interviews and features on this podcast (12:53) Episode Resources ChatGPT Obsidian Roam Tana Notion Transcript Welcome to the launch episode of The Amplifying Cognition podcast, which is an evolution and rebirth of the Thriving on Overload podcast. I’m Ross Dawson. I’m a futurist and entrepreneur fascinated by how we can tap the incredible potential of the human mind. In this brief episode, I will share why the metamorphosis from Thriving on Overload to Amplifying Cognition, what I mean by Amplifying Cognition and where the podcast will go, the sorts of people will speak to, and the sorts of topics we’ll cover. Thriving on Overload podcast was originally the interviews for the book. I thought I was going to be speaking to these incredible people, and rather than just having me in that conversation, capturing all of their insights for other people to listen to, and it was far more from those amazing conversations than I could fit into the book, of course. We kept on going with conversations with fascinating people that could help us to thrive in a world of unlimited information. That’s a year and a half now that the podcast has been running. A few months ago, on the podcast, I published an episode where I had a conversation talking about my thoughts about the future of the podcast. And at the time, I said, I was considering renaming the podcast Amplifying Cognition, along with a few other possibilities, and asking for some thoughts and feedback. I spent a long time thinking about the many options to reframe the podcast. But in the end, I went with Amplifying Cognition. It’s a big decision because I expect it will be years where I will be continuing to dig into this theme. Now that I’ve made the decision, I’m very happy because it brings together so many of the themes that I’ve been fascinated by, and worked on throughout my life really, really from when I was a child. It’s interesting now that I’m finding that the vast scope of my interest can somehow be related to this idea of Amplifying Cognition. In this episode, once again, I’m sharing with you where the podcast is going. I’d love to get any thoughts you have to help make this podcast as interesting and useful to you as it possibly can be. Please get in touch with me directly on the contact form on my website, or any of my social media profiles. The background to this rebranding is, first of all, I had this concept of Thriving on Overload, which was this issue that we all face; we are immersed in the world of unlimited information and our brains are not built for that so we have to build practices and how it is we engage, enhance our attention, pull together all of that information, find what’s useful, find what’s relevant, and pull that together into the frameworks that enable us to synthesize that, see opportunities better, and make better decisions. These are really fundamental skills in the world of very, very fast change. At the end of last year, at the birth of ChatGPT and now a whole array of other generative AI tools, I found that this was just drawing me in. I’ve really been engaging with AI and how it can complement humans and how we can use that for a couple of decades in various guises. This was something where I just felt I have to dive in fully. For the last six months, the majority of my work has been around Humans plus AI, and that’s the framing. Humans plus AI and together what they can do that they cannot do individually.   The Thriving on Overload theme is still very important to me and I was looking for how do I combine these two ideas of Thriving on Overload, and Humans plus AI and that’s where Amplifying Cognition comes as this umbrella concept, which includes Thriving on Overload, which is about our individual thinking and how we can improve that and Humans plus AI, which is around how it is we can use technologies to enhance our capabilities and what we can do. Broadly, this idea of Amplifying Cognition is recognizing that the human mind is the most extraordinary thing in the known universe. Yet it is capable of far more. It is in a different environment that our minds exist now, with not just challenges but also massive opportunities to be able to amplify our thinking, the way we take information, make sense of that, and create the things which we want. There are a number of themes around individuals, organizations, and humanity. We’re starting with individual cognition. How it is we can each think better? I think there’s this idea of human technologies. My first company was called Advanced Human Technologies and that was really around this idea of how it is, the technology is not in terms of information technologies, per se, but the ones, the tools or the techniques or the approaches that can enable us to think better. This includes having better mental models, having effective thinking structures, the practices that can improve our attention, or our thinking or ways of working, essentially the ways in which we can improve how we interface with information. However, on top of that, we have AI, with generative AI being an extraordinary tool, where we can do things better, find what it is that humans do best, amplify our capabilities in those, and look at what AI can do the best and weave these together into a workflow. You’ll be finding and hearing about some of the other things which I’m doing in that space in terms of being able to build effective Humans plus AI workflow. But there are also other technologies, and thinking tools as a whole new software category. We have tools, of course, such as Obsidian and Roam and Tana and Notion and others, and a whole new array of those that are AI-enabled. These are all ways in which individually, we can think better, make sense of the world, be able to make better decisions. Part of this is in what I was trying as well to weave into this idea is that it’s not just cognition or thinking, it is around our intent. AI can amplify us. But well, what is it amplifying us in doing? So this comes back to one of the other ideas I had for the name of the podcast, which was Amplifying Intent. What is it that you want to achieve? What is your intention, and how it is we can amplify that? And ultimately, it is through our thinking, and using AI and these other tools to be able to build that ability to achieve what it is that is worthwhile, create value for ourselves and others. The second frame is around organizations. Karl Weick, back in the 1990s talked about organizational sensemaking. I think that’s a really important metaphor or analogy that essentially, organizations have cognition, they have information coming in at them, they filter that, they make sense of that, and they make decisions as a result. Essentially, an organization is an analog for the human mind. We can think about how is it can organizations filter information better, to be able to find the right information, the signals, for example, that will shape their industries, and from that, be able to make sense of the world, what is their position, what is their opportunity, what are the initiatives that will take them to their vision and mission. One of the other key themes around decision making, where I look at decisions around a whole array of levels and organizations, and the low-level ones, of course, can be completely automated, delegated to AI, hopefully, with sufficient oversight, that there we don’t have a bias or other aspects of those decisions going awry. But we need to move to the higher bigger order decisions, often in strategy, where essentially, AI is a tool. These are humans’ decisions. These are decisions that humans must make. Boards and executive teams are responsible for strategic decision-making, which are the most complex work decisions that they can make, and in incredibly uncertain circumstances in an accelerating world. Two themes that I’m working on. One is the strategic decision-making and how that’s assisted by both AI and better decision-making tool approaches and tools and techniques for these small groups and hopefully, broader groups as incorporating the strategic thinking and capabilities across the organization, but also in institutional investment decision-making. Again, of course, we have algorithmic trading, which is completely delegated to AI. But these are some of the most important decisions that can be made because of the 400 trillion odd of capital in the world, that is often misallocated, and if we can improve the way in which capital is allocated, just even a little bit, that can make a massive difference to our fortunes as society and humanity. A lot of my work and a lot of interest is delving deep as possible into how we can improve strategic and investment decision-making, in particular, through the use of AI and other tools. Finally thinking about humanity, where the last chapter of my book, Thriving on Overload was essentially about cognitive evolution. Our brains are evolving, they must evolve. This is not so much Darwinian evolution, which takes longer time spans. But through epigenetics, where our genes are expressed in different ways, depending on our environment, essentially, our brains are evolving. We can observe that some people’s cognition is devolving, it’s getting worse, because they’re getting sucked into the attention-hijacking that is the nature of our world today. We do have a choice, we don’t necessarily have to have our cognition going backward. I think that unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are going that way, and we need to do whatever we can to support them. But we can positively evolve our cognition and thinking. This has to be around evolution. This is a critical juncture. This is a time when we can actually evolve our thinking, our cognition, and who we are as the human race. This, of course, includes the extended mind when we can become cyborgs in whatever sense, including the artificial intelligence plus humans together, evolving and becoming more sophisticated, more able to make better decisions. This becomes a world where we look at collective intelligence, which is a theme for decades I’ve been looking at and delving into and working on, amongst other things in my 2002 book, Living Networks, looking at how the networks are coming alive, and how we are becoming part of a higher order life form. The collective intelligence that we’ve observed over the last decade has not always been in a positive direction. But there are opportunities to amplify the cognition of the human race, collectively, and to build the platforms for true collective intelligence, and possibly, collective wisdom. This is all ultimately about amplifying humans, and who we can be. What is it possible to be as a human? We’re using the minds, this most extraordinary thing, which we’re just beginning to understand. We have incredible understanding down to the quantum level and beyond. We have an incredible understanding of the cosmos. Yet, the thing right in the middle, which is our brain, we have relatively little understanding, it’s advancing rapidly, and we are understanding more about our brains, but now we can be on the frontier of the science of amplifying our cognition, our thinking, and who we are. I’ll be speaking to some incredible people who are on that journey, amplifying themselves, and helping organizations to do that, on broader missions for collective intelligence and beyond. Please, I’d love to have you on the journey with us as we go through that. Let me know any thoughts, or any input you have, to be able to make this as useful and valuable to you as possible. This is intended to be fun and interesting, fascinating and useful. I’ll look forward to engaging with you along the way. The post Launch of Amplifying Cognition podcast: next-level thinking, Humans + AI, and better decisions appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Choose the sources that are going to disconfirm what you think. You need to have the people who are going to challenge your thinking so you don’t go down a single rabbit hole. That’s the trick. That’s the art in doing this. “ – Harold Jarche About Harold Jarche Harold Jarche has been an independent consultant for the past 20 years working with individuals, organisations, and governments to improve collaboration, knowledge sharing and sense-making.  He is the author the Seeking Perpetual Beta e-book series and runs the very popular Personal Knowledge Mastery online workshops. In this episode, Harold shares his Seek, Sense, and Share framework; insights on network learning, finding different perspectives, and far more. Website: jarche.com Blog: Harold Jarche LinkedIn: Harold Jarche Twitter: @hjarche YouTube: Harold Jarche Book Series Seeking Perpetual Beta What you will learn What is Personal Knowledge Mastery (02:07) How is Personal Knowledge Mastery different from Personal Knowledge Management (05:00) What is Networked Learning (08:00) What is the Seek, Sense, and Share Framework and its practice (11:09) How the Seek process helped Harold make sense of Covid (22:56) Why he chooses sources that contradict what he thinks (26:36) How to make sense of complex issues with many diverse opinions (29:30) What is Harold’s daily routine (33:09) How to synthesize and add value to information (38:54) What is the difference between networks and communities (44:07) Episode Resources Lilia Efimova Denham Grey IBM Dave Pollard Ernst & Young Domino’s Pizza Citibank Valdis Krebs Dr Trisha Greenhalgh Perpetual Beta Coffee Club Feedly Pinboard Bloglines Jony Ive Sturgeon’s Law Transcript Ross Dawson: Harold, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Harold Jarche: It’s great to be here, Ross. Ross: We’ve known each other for a long time. One of our common interests has been what you have framed as personal knowledge management, or in your case, personal knowledge mastery. Can you explain what personal knowledge management is and how you came to that? Harold: It started when I started freelancing, which was in 2003. One of the challenges I had is that I live in the middle of nowhere; I’m about 1000 kilometers from Boston no or Montreal and major cities, I live out in the Atlantic, Canada. One of the challenges I had was, how do I stay current in my profession? How do I stay connected to people? And how do I not spend a whole bunch of money? I came across the work of several people, particularly Lilia Efimova, who was doing her doctorate about knowledge sharing through blogging at the University of Twente, Netherlands. There are a few other people who were talking about that, at that time, Denham Grey, who was working for IBM, Dave Pollard, who was working for Ernst and Young as the Chief Knowledge Officer. I was reading their stuff. I saw, particularly with blogs, because that was the technology of the time, that it was possible to connect with people without actually having to see them, without having to travel or anything like that. My budget was pretty well close to zero for travel. I started writing about PKM, just on my blog and sharing it mostly for myself, because I really didn’t have much of a readership. What transpired over time, was that I started taking a look at the discipline of how do we make sense of our knowledge, of our experiences? How do we build knowledge networks? How do we have others help us make decisions? How do we understand the constant flux of, which is increasingly more so today, of information, and particularly disinformation over time? I basically was writing for myself. I was putting it on the blog and basically just talking out loud to nobody. But several years later, probably, I’ve been writing about it for at least five years, I was contacted by the fellow who’s in charge of leadership development at Domino’s Pizza. He said this is really interesting stuff you’ve been writing about. Do you think that we could incorporate what you’re doing, and use it in our leadership training? I went to Domino’s head office, and we worked on this for a period of time. It was when the light went on that this is a thing that could help a lot of people. I kept working on the model and putting stuff out there. I had a whole bunch of half-baked ideas, which really was the process of PKM. I came up with a higher framework, using the alliterative terms of Seek, Sense, and Share, and then shifted from personal knowledge management to personal knowledge mastery, because I did not want to be directly linked to the knowledge management world, which was still very much about codifying information and pumping it out to people, whereas PKM is the opposite, it is people making sense, and then floating it up, sharing it with others, and what emerges from those conversations and relationships, then, is that shared knowledge base. It’s been 14 years or so that I’ve been working on that. It’s a work in progress. But now it’s been used with a lot of different organizations. We just finished implementing the trading education program. It’s very much a cohort-based learning program at Citibank. We’ve run several thousand people through that. It has four modules. What’s interesting is that the first module is based on curiosity, which becomes the underpinning part of Seek, Sense, and Share, which is, at first, you have to be curious about people and ideas. That’s where we are today with it. Ross: Personal knowledge is developing your knowledge as an individual, as you say, immersed in information. It’s particularly interesting that you are, as you say, so isolated yet you are still on the edge of change. There are a lot of different directions to go but one of the first things is how do you define your own expertise? What it is that you choose to keep current with? Harold: There are two areas. One is distributed work or what some people call remote work. I’ve been working remotely for 18 years now. I think that I’ve learned a fair bit about that, and it can help organizations and help people develop different skills. For example, one thing that I’ve learned about working in a distributed way is that asynchronous communication becomes critical. You can’t spend your whole day in Zoom meetings talking to people, you have to find ways of sharing information, not in real-time. We as bloggers understand that we’ve been sharing information asynchronously a lot. I think that the asynchronous communicators, the ones who do it well, are really going to do much better in this emerging remote workplace. The other one is networked learning. It’s working with other people and connecting to other people. In a lot of cases, it’s learning from people with who you don’t have a work or collaborative relationship. It’s like you and me, we share freely with each other. Over time, we’ve learned from each other, but there’s no deal in it or anything like that. What we’ve done is that we’ve built a relationship, which becomes very important when it comes to, if I want to know something specific, I know that I can call you up and say, Hey, Ross, can you explain this thing to me because this seems to be your field of expertise. More and more, that is where we’re all going, is that we’re only as good and as smart as our networks, and the network learning is a two-way street, is that you have to give in order to get. That is a big challenge that I find, particularly with organizations. Ross: Network learning or network knowledge is a critical part of this. Of course, we can pull up the news feeds and say how did that give us so much? What is that process? How is it that we build those networks? As you say it is this give and take, or is it simply just being able to find the right people and to share and build that relationship? How does that happen in practice? Harold: My colleague, Jay Cross talked about this a lot. Jay was a champion of informal learning. Jay often said that the building block of learning is conversation. That also becomes the building block of trust. It is that the more conversations you have with someone, the more that you trust them. There’s research in the pharmaceutical research space, that shows that people only share complex knowledge if they trust other people, so you have to build these webs of trust, one person at a time, or somebody connected through somebody else, who knows somebody else. That is how we make sense of what’s going on, particularly, good media literacy, that one of the first things you do is you take a look at it, and you say, Okay, what’s in it for this person? Who’s paying their bills? Why are they pushing this message or something like that? That’s where the trusted relationships that we’ve built over time, become good filters to find out… I might get some mainstream news about what’s happening in Australia, but I can send you a note and say, Hey, this is what they’re saying is happening in Sydney, is that really happening? And you get back to me and say, it’s not quite like that; actually, it’s a little bit more nuanced. I find that these international relationships that I have, have really helped me to make sense of the world, and have been really good in understanding this very complex pandemic, that we’re still working through the fourth wave here. Ross: I want to come back to the pandemic and the sense-making around that, but perhaps, your framework of Seek, Sense, and Share, and, of course, this is something which you teach and you help people in organizations with, but as you’re in practice, as you’ve created this from your practice, could you take us through that framework, and what those phases are, and how should we develop those capabilities? Harold: Yes. Seek, as I mentioned with the Citi project, is based on curiosity. It is that you have to find ways in which you can seek out diverse opinions. First of all, when I start teaching people this, I often use Twitter as an example. I say, Okay, start on Twitter. Point number one is why are you using Twitter? Is it to learn about something? Is it to connect to a community? It could be, Oh, I want to see what’s going on in my local community. Then I usually recommend finding 20 to 30 people who are talking about whatever it is that you’re interested in. It’s a little bit of a shotgun approach to start with. Then start paying attention to what they’re doing. You don’t have to engage yet, you’re still seeking. Then you can tune those signals; you can amplify the ones that are giving you good information, and you can decrease the noisy ones. Then you can take a look at, Am I getting the same information from these people? Am I getting diverse enough perspectives on it? And again, it’s that noise-signal ratio that you start adjusting a little bit. That’s a little bit of an art, though, there are some techniques to it. Ross: How do you amplify or turn it down? Harold: One thing like in my case, is that, because I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s hard to go back to day one when I did this, but I’m always on the lookout for people whose perspectives are different from the norm that I’m following. I may come across somebody who’s talking about learning and education, maybe training, and remote work and stuff like that, but they’re located in North Africa, or maybe they’re located someplace in Asia, where I really don’t have many connections, so I’d say, I should follow that person, and see whether or not I’m getting a more diverse perspective on that area. I’m constantly on the lookout for people on the fringe, or people who are not giving me similar messages. I’m also then cutting back on sources if I’m seeing that all they’re doing is that they are talking about the same type of stuff. One thing that I’ve done over the years, is that I used to follow a lot of sources of information, whether it was a news feed, or aggregated comments and stuff like that. More and more, I’m connected to individuals, and I want to see what their perspective is on it. That’s where it really comes in handy. One of my network connections is Valdis Krebs. Valdis is an expert on organizational network analysis. If I have questions that are related to network analysis, I just send a message to Valdis and I say, Valdis, this is what I’m looking for, where should I start looking? What may be is a seminal document or resource that I should start with? He then refers that back to me and says, No, you should start here, check this out, don’t look at that, do those kinds of things. More and more over time, I’m finding it’s those trusted human relationships that really become my major filter to make sense of what the heck’s going on, particularly as we see the rise of misinformation, and disinformation, and propaganda in social media. Ross: Is the next phase then sense? Harold: Yes, it is the next phase, and it’s the hardest phase. A lot of people take a look at your bookmarks or your social bookmarks, and see what you’ve got, and how many 1000s do you have, and what have you done with it? It’s like, Well, I just got them. That’s not very good. You’re getting all this input, which is fine, but are you going to be able to take any action on what you’ve learned? And to do that, I think sometimes you have to put out what I call half-baked ideas, and get feedback on them. Quite often, I may put those out on my blog. or I may share them inside some private communities. The nice thing about private communities is that if you put a stupid idea, you won’t get attacked by the trolls, who are all over social media right now. Sense-making, again, as a blogger, it’s been relatively easy. If you have an affinity for writing, then blogging is a really good and easy way to put some of your ideas out there, and get feedback from people as well. There are other ways of doing it. We’re seeing that a lot with platforms like TikTok, where people are putting out these short videos. I was reading about one person; what they do is at the end of the day, they would drive to work and on the way home, they would talk out loud to themselves about how the day went, what they learned, and what they were going to do about it. I guess it might get some funny looks if you’re doing that on the bus. I’m not too sure. You need to find a medium by which you can make sense of what is going on, and that could be having regular conversations with people. I think in some cases, this podcast series is part of what you’re doing in terms of thriving on overload. How are you making sense of it, one way that you’re doing it is that you’re getting various perspectives from a lot of different people. I presume that you’re going to be looking at synthesizing this as well. I think that for anybody who’s in any profession, particularly with the changes that we’re seeing, things like climate change, Australia and Canada are getting whacked pretty hard with it right now, is that how can we make sense of this world, who do we pay attention to, what’s important, and it becomes difficult. It’s when I run my workshops, the sense-making part is the part that we really talk a lot about, and it’s you need to find your own medium. In some ways, it’s like becoming an artist, so you’re going to be a painter or a sculptor. You won’t know unless you try and do it for a while. Ross: The next phase is share; though, it sounds like in a way that sensing involves sharing in many cases, if you are, for example, blogging, as you say, or throwing out these trial balloons for people to bounce off. Harold: Yes. The share part has various aspects to it. One is that by narrating your work or working out loud, or whatever term you want to use, is that you’re exposing yourself. There was a book written about it 10-15 years ago, and they called blogging, naked conversations, and it is kind of like that. By putting yourself out there, you’re also making yourself a target, where people will be able to criticize you. That’s the Share part, why it’s good for me to share, is because I’m going to get feedback. We’ve even seen this with students, the difference between the students submitting a paper to a teacher is very different than the student posting it online for the world to see. A lot of teachers have found that if the students put their work out into the general public, they actually put a heck of a lot more effort into it because they know that a lot of people are going to see that. I think that’s the same thing with any professional, you have to get out there. Then there’s the other part of it. It is that if we all share, if we all do this, in a free way, as we do with the blog, we’re actually helping to make the network smarter. We’re all doing our own little bit. I think that that has been one of the challenges in our more established democracies. People are leaning towards demagogues and populists, and there hasn’t been the voice of reason, or it’s been drowned out. We need more and more individuals to be able to contribute to those kinds of conversations and have those relationships, so I can talk to somebody who’s on a different part of the political spectrum; we can still respect each other, we can have nuanced conversations, and not be screaming at each other. That again becomes part of why sharing is important. Of course, there are real challenges. I know women who are quite active on social media and they’ve had to block 10s of 1000s of trolls and attacks. That’s the nasty nature of it. Finding the right balance, finding the right platforms becomes important. I share different things inside my private communities than I do on my blog or on other social media. It becomes a balancing act of sharing enough information, making enough sense of this stuff, and also you still got to get things done, that becomes important. Ross: As you know I’m a deep believer in the Share part, on lots of levels; personally, in contributing to the global brain and all these wonderful things. But I think there are many people who would say, is that necessary? It takes time, people might not respond in the right way. That Seek, Sense, and Share, is that for everyone to do? Harold: If you think about living in civil society, participating in a democracy, and if it is that the people who can be articulate are not sharing, where are other people going to get their information from? I find that if you’re not helping to make your network and your community smarter, then you may wind up with a dumb network that’s making bad decisions like voting for demagogues or going down the populist simplistic route. In a networked society, I think it’s part of the social contract. It also is something that is not taught in schools at all. That’s really missing. I’ve implemented PKM in one educational institution so far. I’m not doing really well in that. Ross: You mentioned before about the pandemic, I think that’s something which everyone is trying to make sense of. It’s not as if we can really truly make sense of it. It’s only a moving target with new data or new information and new insights. Partly, we want to understand what’s going on in our nation, in the world. But also, how do we keep ourselves and our family safe? How have you seen all this being applied by you and/or others in terms of making sense of what we’ve experienced this year and last? Harold: The pandemic hit, we got locked down. The first thing I did is I is I phoned my son, my son is a microbiologist, works as a research scientist, and going like, What’s all this stuff? What’s going on? So he explained a little bit to me. I started following the WHO, CDC, and the Canadian Public Health as well, to get the information. Then some weak signals came out that the WHO is political? Of course, it is, because it’s a member-nation organization. The CDC was a little bit slow on that, and you start taking a look at who are these people, and you know they’re researchers, and they want to make sure the research is perfect, and then start getting conflicting information. I found a couple of people who were a bit on the edge, and one of them just happened to be a person that I’ve been connected with on Twitter for a long time, so I knew her. That’s Dr. Trisha Greenhalgh, who teaches Primary Care Medicine at Oxford University. I started following her. Trisha suddenly started going off and criticizing the word that WHO was saying, and in early 2020, she and a team of 36 other scientists and physicians, put out a paper talking about that the COVID or the Coronavirus is airborne. Whereas, we were here washing things down, putting up Plexiglas barriers and things like that, and it showed quite clearly that this wasn’t working. I started following her, connecting to other people, actually, I wound up having a Twitter list called Pandemic. It’s off of my Twitter profile. I’ve got about a dozen people from three, four different countries with experience all over the world, who basically have gone a little bit against the mainstream because one thing is that they don’t have bosses who force them to toe the party line. I have been six to 12 months ahead of what has come down through official channels. We were masking when nobody else was. We then started getting the higher quality masks when people were wearing cloth-ones and things like that. It’s this little network I’ve got; some of these people follow me back, most of them don’t. But they are trying to help make the network smarter and passing on really good research and information about the nature of this pandemic. I’ve realized that every authority, every institution has its own agenda, and you have to know what that agenda is. Then you have to figure out how can you make the best decisions for you and your family. I found my little pandemic Twitter list has been pretty darn good. I’m kind of happy with that. Ross: It sounds like this is choosing your sources. Harold: Yes, choosing your sources, but also choosing the sources that are going to disconfirm what you think, so you need to have the people who are going to challenge your thinking so you don’t go down a single rabbit hole. That’s the trick. That’s the art in doing this. It’s having people who are on the outside, or who have differing opinions, not dumb, not total nut job opinions or anything like that, but people who see things differently. An interesting one that I follow on the edge because I’m very deep into things that are important to me, the pandemic has suddenly become important; but I’m also interested in climate change like anybody else. I’m following the arguments, the discussions, and conversations around nuclear energy as a good short-term alternative to adding more CO2 into the air. It’s interesting to watch how people have entrenched positions, and there is very little middle ground in this. Anyway, it’s a place where I poke a little bit and try to learn, but diversity becomes really, really important. It is having diverse sources of knowledge, particularly when we’re dealing with something that is complex, like climate change, or the pandemic. Ross: At one point you said, there were just a dozen sources in the pandemic, so this is not a very wide net. You’ve been very careful in curating that list of sources. Harold: Yes. It started with a few people. I’ve got folks in the UK, US, Canada, and every once in a while I tweet out and I say, Okay, this is who I’m following. Is there anybody else I should be following or anything like that? I’ve removed a couple of people; I’ve added a couple of people. But for the most part, the ones that I’m following are people who are in the business of communicating and information. They’re putting out a lot of stuff, and they’re referring to a lot of other sources. As one individual having 50, or 100 of these things to go through, it would be too much. I would definitely add to it if I came across something or someone that could add to the conversation, and the knowledge, that is being shared there. But yes, finding your limits becomes important as well. Again, if you’re spending all your time seeking and reading, and not doing anything about it, that’s not very helpful. Ross: In terms of the sense-making, you have diverse sources; take the nuclear energy as an example where you’ve got a lot of polarized opinions, not a lot of mil of ground, it’s a burden, it’s a responsibility; how do you then make sense of this complexity when you’ve got all of this diversity of opinion? I think that this goes to the point where people will say, Oh, it’s easy, when all my information sources agree, then I don’t need to have a difficult cognition of working out what’s going on. But I suppose that is one of the challenges as it becomes more diverse. It leaves us with the burden of trying to continually sort through that. Harold: Again, you have to say, what am I making sense of? Am I just reading this to read it and understand it? Am I going to try to put these diverging or diametrically opposed opinions and try to find some middle ground on that? I have a degree in education, but I’m not an educator per se. One of the things I did when the boys were in school was I started connecting with people who were talking about un-schooling, de-schooling, the big homework question, is homework valuable? Does it detract from learning? And I collected a lot of information about that. I used that to make sense of how should we be helping our boys in school? I’m not really interested in it anymore. I’ve parked that one over on the side. I think part of it in the sense-making is what are you doing with the information and the experiences that you’re living through? Probably one of the easiest things that I recommend, and one of the activities we do in my workshops, is I get people to take a look at a situation. Let’s say, it was the riots in the US last year, then get information from multiple spectrums, then put that together, and try to ascertain the validity of each one of the perspectives and where there are disagreements and things like that. Another easy way, in terms of sense-making, that I found is writing book reviews. When you’ve read a book, write about it, write what you think what’s important about it. I found that has just been helpful with other people. I have those reviews on my website where you asked me, Look, I’m really interested in a book, and I said, I read a really good one, several years ago, let me pull it out. It’s there, it’s on my blog, and all I have to do is share the link. That makes it a minimal effort for me, in terms of the sharing. Sometimes sharing is sharing at the right moment. But if you’ve got nothing to share, that’s not very helpful. The nice thing about the blog is I can write it but also I can share something. I know, I’ve used some of your posts from 10 years ago, that I still share in presentations or conversations saying, check this out here. Had you not read that and had you not made it easy for sharing, it would be difficult for me to disseminate that. Ross: Yes. Digging a little bit into the detail of what’s in a day for you, an information day for you? Do you have a routine? Do you look up particular sources at particular times of the day? What happens in the day in terms of information input, or assessing or working with it? Harold: Usually, the places I go, for sure, are my private communities. I’m a member of three online communities and they’re focused on different things. If there’s anything new in those, I will definitely check that out. I also manage a community called the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club, and we’ve got about 70 members in that. As the moderator and convener of that, I’ll check out what’s going on there. Then I use an aggregator. I use Feedly right now. I’ve got about 75-100 sources, and usually, at least once a day, I’ll go through the aggregator and see what’s new. I’m pretty quick. It’s like new, interesting, then if there’s something, I’m going like, oh, I want to do something with this, I put things into a very small holding tank because I know that holding tank would get really big. It’s like this is something I want to read in-depth or this is something that I think I can comment on or I can connect a, b and c here together, and those are blog posts to be written or things to be shared within my communities, I get those in there. Then I use Twitter. I usually check Twitter fairly frequently, unless I’m working. What I found pre-pandemic, was interesting; because I had two routines. I had my at-home routine, and then I had my travel routine. While I was traveling, I was only seeking and collecting stuff. When I got home, that was when I would be doing the sense-making and the sharing. Now my routine is focused on whatever my priority happens to be. Let’s say my priority this week is writing some of my own material or maybe it’s client work, maybe it’s preparing a presentation, those kinds of things. If I have a presentation that I’m getting ready to do, maybe a month from now, I’ll have that part. Then I will also have an eye to my feeds, into my conversations, go, Oh, hey, that’s an interesting connection, I think I can put that into this idea that I’ll be conveying in the presentation. It’s fluid. The other thing is to not compartmentalize. I don’t compartmentalize work, non-work, leisure, and things like that. For me, it’s one brain and it’s one flow as it goes through. I hope that kind of answers it. Ross: Yes, absolutely. Let’s say you’re going through an aggregator and you find something that you want to read more about later. Do you use a note-taking system? Do you tag it? Do you bookmark it? How do you then follow up? Harold: Short term, I bookmark it, and I just put it into my menu on one of the browsers, because I use multiple ones. The thing is, that gets full really quick, so that forces me to do something with it. Because I used to use aggregators and Bloglines years ago, and it had that save for later function. Then one day I’d take a look, I have 700 save for later items, I’m not going to read any of these things. That’s why the things that I save, I put into a very small container. Things that I think could be useful, but I’m not going to do anything in the short term with, I then put them into the social bookmarks system. I use Pinboard right now. I really like Pinboard, because it’s super simple. Also, you have to pay for it, which means that the fellow who runs it is going to be around for a while, so I’m not going to lose my data, and it’s quite easy to export on that. Pinboard is handy. I use it quite often with my clients. It’s that my client is interested in something, let’s say it’s remote work, so as I find articles and references on remote work, I will tag them; I will highlight pieces of the text and put them into Pinboard. Then the client, they’ll see some interesting stuff on that, I can take a bunch of those, stick them together, put a separate tag on top of it, the client’s name, let’s say or something like that, and give it to them. Now I have this curated list of 10,15, 20, whatever things, that are relevant to them. That’s the asynchronous sharing. I’m getting this stuff, I’m adding some value to it with my comments, with my tagging, with highlighting of text, then at the appropriate time, when someone needs it, I can give it to them. I’m not dumping them information that they may need six months from now because they’re not going to read it. Ross: You talked before about synthesis. Actually, you said, I will be synthesizing some of these conversations, which is absolutely true. But that’s again, the challenges we have is how do we synthesize, build our mental models, and so on? Of course, you create some visuals, some diagrams, or some frameworks. I know, that’s part of your practice but what is that process of cogitation or laying things out or writing them or drawing them? What is the process for you of synthesis, of building effective mental models? Harold: You can add value to information in a lot of ways. An easy and a low value add would be categorizing stuff, which is fine. Let’s say you find 50 sources of information about something, and you can find the top 10, or you can categorize it as type A, type B, type C, that makes it easier for you to share, it makes it easier for someone else to say, Oh, this is pertinent to me, and it also makes it easier to come back to sometimes and say, Oh, yes, I remember I put those things down there, and now is the time for me to do something about that. Another way of adding value, particularly if you’re doing client work, I’ve done this many times, is that I will read a very deep paper research document or something like that on a topic, and I will pick out what is pertinent to the client. I say, Okay, they talk about these kinds of things, this I think is really of interest to you, and this is why I think it is. That’s again, a nice way to add value to the knowledge. I know that you’ve talked about this as well over the years. Just another way of doing it is to present it. I think we’re seeing that a lot particularly in the younger generation with TikTok, is that they’re taking some complex thing that’s happening in society, and in 30 seconds, and quite often in a humorous way, they’re synthesizing the key points. I’d say, Oh, that’s what it’s really about. I think that’s a really good value add. I think synthesizing it, presenting it, presenting it in a different way, presenting it to a certain audience, categorizing it, summarizing it, those are all ways that we can make sense of it. Jony Ive gave a presentation when he became The Oxford Cambridge fellow in information or something, that was about three, four years ago. I read his speech which was quite good. He talked about the development of the iPhone and the challenges between design, shipping, and things like that. I took all of that, and I highlighted what I thought were the key parts, because he talked about how important curiosity is, but then it has to be balanced with the resolve to solve the problem, and to ship, and to deliver what it is that you’re doing. Yes, you can go, Oh, look, a butterfly, but you still have to build the iPhone and get it out there. Then I actually matched that up with my seek, sense, share model, and he’s basically doing that. He’s out there seeking information in his networks. He’s also focused on collaborating and getting work done. In the middle, he has this group of people from multiple disciplines who are learning from each other, who are sharing in this private space what’s going on, because the design is different from engineering, is different from marketing and all those things, but they all have something to add to it. He talked about during the day is that you’re constantly going from that out there curious, this is an interesting idea that may be fruitful later, all the way down to what is it that we’re going to get done today? And he says it’s this constant dance between curiosity and resolve. For me making sense of it, putting it, adding a visual, helped me convey that. Ross: Yes, the process of distillation; I think as you’re trying to get it in that 30 second TikTok is a nice way to frame it because if you can pull something into that, then that’s a real act of synthesis. Harold: Yes, and there are some really good folks doing it. The challenge, just to digress a bit, is how do you keep up with all of them without going down the rabbit hole. Ross: What’s your response to that question? Harold: I ignore a lot of stuff. That’s basically it. Ross: We could talk for hours because you have such depth here. I’ll obviously point any listeners to your website, Jarche.com, and your work. In terms of just wrapping up here, Is there anything else, which we haven’t talked about yet, which you think is critically important in being able to understand how it is that people can thrive on overload? I think we’ve covered a lot of really good territory, in terms of your framing of this, but what else is really critical to understand so that people can prosper when we have so much information, so much we need to make sense of? Harold: We’re seeing it right now, on social media, people are saying I’m leaving social media, I’m going into this private forum or something like that, it’s the difference between networks and communities. I firmly believe that we need to be engaged in both. A network is like the Wild West, and it is filled with trolls. Twitter is a network. Facebook is a network, no matter what they say. But these are really good places to get divergent opinions, and you are going to get Sturgeon’s law, 90% of everything is crap. There is going to be a lot of crap out there, but also balance that with a community, a community that serves its members, that is there for its members, that’s run by its members, and where there are trusted relationships, and you can stick your head out there, say something stupid, people may say, Harold, that’s stupid, but they’re going to say it in a nice way, like in a family way. It’s where you can feel comfortable doing those kinds of things. I think that folks who are in the learning business should really be focused on helping to develop communities, to support the communities, to help other people find communities, because things are moving so fast, we need to have safe places where we can share information. It’s both communities and networks, and don’t confuse the two. A network is not a safe place, but it’s a place where you could get some really interesting ideas. Ross: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for your insights, Harold. To your points earlier, I’ll probably, quite likely will ping you with an email, with a question here or two along the way. Harold: By all means. Ross: Thank you so much for your time and your insight. It has been a great delight to talk to you again, Harold. Harold: It’s always nice to talk to you, Ross. Thank you. The post Harold Jarche on personal knowledge mastery, the Seek, Sense, and Share framework; networked learning, and finding different perspectives [REPOST] (Ep67)  appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Information can pass through your head all day long, but unless you can capture it and put it on a shelf somewhere, it didn’t mean anything. It’s the capturing and putting on a shelf so you can find it again, that’s the important part.” – Leslie Shannon About Leslie Shannon On this episode, we learn from Leslie Shannon, Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting for Nokia based in Silicon Valley. Her work involves examining new technologies and how they will converge through this decade. She is a five-time undefeated winner on the US game show Jeopardy and racked up many successes on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. LinkedIn: Leslie Shannon Twitter: @lshannon45 Facebook: Leslie Shannon What you will learn What Leslie Shannon’s typical day looks like at Nokia… (02:03) …and as a collector of trivia (03:04) She uses flashcards and PowerPoint to remember stuff (04:13) Her PowerPoint presentations can go as large as 400 slides (07:59) Sometimes it doesn’t happen the way she expected and that’s ok (11:21) Every new solution is the kernel of the next problem (12:43) You always have to ask new questions (13:38) A lot of technology is looking for a problem to solve (14:16) Find, Filter, File, Familiarize and Formulate (16:10) Leslie’s routine that involves a lot of unsubscribing (20:57) It’s an exercise in imagination…(23:58) …and connections (27:48) Find the system that works for you (31:44) Episode Resources Unsubscribe-A-Mole Connections (BBC Documentary) Transcript Ross Dawson: Leslie, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Leslie Shannon: Ross, it’s lovely to be here. Thank you much for asking me. Ross: You are definitely on top of lots of new information, both as in your job, as a professional trend scouter for a global organization, and also as a very successful competitive trivia person. How do you do it? Leslie: It does take a lot of mental discipline. Just to explain a little bit about both the job and the trivia side of things, in my role as a trend scout, I’m physically located in Silicon Valley, and my role is to look for new technology. I’m in the telecommunication space, so new technology that will come at some point in the future requires some kind of telecommunication support. I find all these little nuggets of things that small companies are doing, big companies are doing, then I think of them as building blocks, and then I weave them together to build these imaginary castles of what’s going to be possible in the future. If this company is doing that, and that company is doing that, and this other company is doing that, we can imagine a future in which this amalgamation of all of these different new things is possible. Then I tell that to the people within my company, so they can plan what’s coming. I tell that to our customers as well, so they can plan how to design their networks for what the future is going to bring. Then on the trivia side, constantly, every single day, my antennas are up. What is the fact that I didn’t know? Then I note it, and again, in order, to remember it, I have to weave it into something. If it’s historical, some narrative that my brain has for the history of the world, or I have to have some mnemonic, I have to hang some kind of tag on it, so I can retrieve that information later. Weaving it into the stuff that’s already there is the easiest way. Both of these methods require finding information, filing it in a way that I can retrieve it, and then using storytelling or some kind of synthesis to make sense of it, and then communicate that sense to others. Ross: Wow, it sounds like a fun life. Leslie: It actually is. The thing with trivia is that you need to review it constantly to keep things fresh. There’s an app on the smartphone, it’s a flashcard app that a lot of people in competitive trivia use. Every time I see something new, I make a flashcard about it. I’ve got over 20,000 flashcards now. The key is actually to keep revealing them and to keep reviewing them. Similarly, when I find a new innovation, that I think, oh, okay, that’s really interesting, I make a PowerPoint slide out of it, because my means of communication is PowerPoint presentations, either internally or, to others. A picture is worth 1000 words. If I’m talking about new technologies and if I’m just talking, people will go, yeah, whatever; but if I’m showing a picture of the thing that I’m talking about, oh, that’s concrete, maybe that really is going to happen. To keep reviewing the actual slides that I have, in both cases, I have a file, I’m continually reviewing what I have, continually refreshing the narrative in my head, and refreshing my understanding, so that it doesn’t get old, it continues to stay fresh, and the new information is continually assimilated, and incorporated, which also means continually questioning my own assumptions, which is actually very important as well. Ross: That is beautiful. Let’s look at the PowerPoint slides. I have two questions. Is there a particular format for the slides? What information have you got? Have you got a picture? Leslie: Yes, always a picture. The bulk of the slide is the picture, and that’s really to communicate to the audience that this thing is real; this thing is going to happen. One of the ones that I just made yesterday, I saw that the University of Basel in Switzerland was using augmented reality on smartphones to help people deal with arachnophobia through exposure therapy. The idea is that you’re using your camera on your smartphone to place scary-looking spiders in your environment so that you get used to seeing scary-looking spiders. You stick your hand there, you look at your hand through your camera, the app puts a giant hairy spider on your hand, and then you get used to it. It turns out that people who have had that exposure through the augmented reality app are much calmer when they encounter a real spider. For that one, absolutely a picture of the hand with the camera and the giant hairy spider. I can talk about it all but as soon as you see that, the big hairy spider on the hand, you get it. You are going to remember it much better than I will. So yes, the picture is the main thing, then a little bit of descriptive text. Here, the thing is, the slides can go traveling; I have had slides stolen by other people, and then presented as their own. I don’t put the whole story in the text on the slide, but just enough to indicate there are some interesting things here. I always have the source in the note section. If you have any credibility at all, or in order to have any credibility at all, you’ve got to be able to point to where this came from. Ross: With those PowerPoint slides, you’ve got a certain format to them. What are the merits of getting the PowerPoint slide? How do you cross the threshold to say, it merits a PowerPoint slide. Leslie: Within my industry, it needs to be something that our customer base could ultimately somehow make money from. My customer base is the phone companies of the world. What is something that a phone company could conceivably offer to their end-users as a service or something? There’s a lot that goes into that. That’s the first level of criteria. Then the second is how earth-shattering is this? Because the spider thing is cool but that’s not very earth-shattering unless you have crippling arachnophobia, in which case, it could change your life. But in general, the sliding scale, however, sometimes it’s hard to know what is a standalone thing and what is ultimately going to be part of a bigger story; chaining together several things from different sources, you can tell the story of a much bigger development. I have a massive one right now, it’s about 400 slides. Here’s my index, and I have categorizations, so I make the slide, I slot it into my categorization. Then I have a short version that’s my master story. That’s what I’m telling at any given time, and that’s about 50 slides. There are different levels of criteria; first of all, do I care about you at all? Then it’s like, okay, apply criteria, will my customers care? Can they do something with this? The second level of criteria, do you make it into the giant file? Oh, the highest, do you actually make it into the small file? And then you actually get presented out to others. To make it into the small file, it’s got to be part of the overall story that’s being told. Right now that’s a story about how head-mounted displays and mixed reality glasses are ultimately going to be displacing smartphones by 2030. That’s the big story that I’m looking at. There’s a lot of little stuff that goes into that. If I come out and say that to you right now, “No way”, something in your brain is saying, “she’s nuts, that’s completely never going to happen”. It’s up to me to assemble the facts that I have, to assemble the different bits of evidence that I’ve gleaned from all these different areas, to assemble that in order to tell the story, to show this is how I came to this conclusion. Okay, now at the end of the 50 slides, what do you think? Generally, at that point, people go, oh, okay, that’s not crazy, maybe that is going to happen. It’s about telling a story, and it’s about persuading others that all kinds of crazy science fiction-sounding things actually are going to happen. Ross: You have a thesis, I suppose, is that accurate? Leslie: Yes, I do have a thesis. That’s actually the thing that I need to keep revisiting. Ross: I was about to get to that. The intent is to persuade them of your thesis, and I agree with you on this particular thesis, but it’s not a certain one. Leslie: Right. Lots of variables. Lots can happen. Lots can change. Lots can go wrong. I have been doing this for a while and some of the things, for example, five years ago, I was looking very hard at what Google and Facebook were doing in terms of alternate ways of bringing connectivity to rural markets. They were doing all kinds of things with free Wi-Fi, they were looking at drones, and Google’s Project Loon, the balloons and everything, and I was saying these guys are serious about disrupting the way that connectivity is delivered, we need to pay attention to that. Now the story’s not over but that has not developed the way that I thought it would. My industry breathes a sigh of relief but the people in rural markets, it’s like, Hey, we’re still underserved here. Another thing that I do, and this isn’t much about information gathering, but a way to test my thesis is to look for gaps. Places, where there are gaps in terms of technology, are the places where the innovation is most likely to catch hold. Innovation for innovation’s sake, nothing, worthless, doesn’t mean a thing; innovation that solves existing problems are where there is a gap in what we’ve got today. If there is a match between an innovation and a current gap, or a current problem, then that’s when I think it’s going to get traction, which is why I think, finding new ways to connect the people in the world who are not yet connected, and finding a lower-cost way to do that, that problem is still out there and something’s going to come in and do that. Maybe it’s going to be the satellite technology, I don’t know. Within every new solution is the kernel of the next problem, so it’s never-ending, we’re never done here. My smartphone lets me do all kinds of fabulous things but now, where do I plug this thing in? That’s the new problem. It’s always rolling forward. Ross: It puts on to get us towards, so you’re spotting your innovation, part of the filtering, that is to say, does this meet an existing gap? Does this have relevance? Is this useful? Leslie: Right, does it fit the gap, it’s how significant is this, how big is the gap? How big is the problem that needs to be solved? Ross: Does that mean you’ve already mapped out the gaps? The ones which you are looking for solutions to? Leslie: Yes, there are. However, again, there is complacency. You can’t just say, Oh, I have my list of gaps and I’m done. You always have to be open to questioning. What am I assuming that might be wrong? What are gaps that I was not aware of? I was not aware of the gap in arachnophobia exposure training. Now I know about that. The guys at the University of Basel, seem to have filled that. Sometimes when you see something that’s when you become aware of the gap, oh, look, here is a solution to that, I can totally see that’s a good thing. One of the problems in this industry, especially with trend scouting, is way too often there are technologies in search of a problem to solve. I remember once I was talking to the CTO of a major Oceania-based telecom service provider, and he was saying, I need a blockchain app. I’m like, oh, okay, well, what problem are you trying to solve? What’s the issue that you need to address with blockchain? He just looked at me, he’s like, I need a blockchain app, and I’m like, okay, I hear what’s going on here. His board or somebody above him said, Oh, blockchain is cool, we need some headline around blockchain, go make it happen. It’s ridiculous how often that kind of thing happens. It’s the use of a new technology; it will only find fertile ground if it is actually in service of an existing problem. You need to start with a problem and see what technology that leads you to, and then you’ll find something that’ll take root and grow. If you’re trying to force blockchain on people, guess what, whatever ideas you come up with are probably not going to be good ones. Ross: Let’s move on to scanning. That’s part of the job, you guys scan, look around, see what you see. You obviously see a lot, so what do you scan? How do you scan it? What are your tools? What’s your process? What’s your routine? Leslie: I subscribe to lots of industry newsletters, both in my own industry and adjacent industries. Every day, I look through all of them and I go really fast. I’m looking for keywords. Ross: Does your email have newsletters? Leslie: Yes, it has been the email newsletters, absolutely, online. If something’s interesting then I’m like Okay, this is great, I pull it over, I drop it to an Excel spreadsheet, and then every single day I try to make at least one slide out of something from my Excel spreadsheet. My target is 20 slides a month. I don’t always make it but that’s the volume that I’m looking for, a cadence of about a slide a day. Scan quickly but also just be aware for anything. If I happen to come across a trivia point, then I’ll just drop that to my flashcards and keep going. It’s really Find, Filter, and then File. That is the input hopper. Then once you have the file, familiarize, by reviewing; and reviewing to make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything either on the trivia side or what are interesting elements of my story here; because sometimes I put things in the giant 400 slide deck and I forget that they’re there, so when I’m just reviewing those, I’m like, Oh, that was interesting in the past but now it’s important, I’d forgotten about that one, bring it in. Then formulate, formulating the story that I’m going to tell whether it’s an external story to convince people about the credence of new technological developments and the importance of those or formulating a story so that I can remember key bits of information and random bits of information that I happen to come across. It’s the five F’s, Find, Filter, File, Familiarize and Formulate. Ross: You made that up? Leslie: I did. Ross: Good, write a book about it. Leslie: It works for me, your results may vary. It’s important in all of this to find a methodology that matches your own brain. I was extremely lucky in terms of the game show success that I’ve had. I have a reasonably well-organized brain. I can retrieve things very quickly because of the way that I’ve consciously filed them, and I happen to be just naturally a fast person. Fast on the buzzer? Sure, no problem. Create something where you pay money for people to remember things quickly. Okay, that just happens to suit me. The same way that somebody who’s very tall and has great reflexes, Oh, guess what? Basketball is the sport for you. I’m just lucky that my own way of approaching the world is rewarded in this crazy game show way. Different methods work for different people and it really depends on how your brain is organized. I’d say lean into that as opposed to say Well, there’s this method that I heard about from this other person; no, lean into it, discover your own method, that is what I say to other people. Ross: Just coming back to the Find, newsletters, you find better than scanning publications? Leslie: Yes, basically I’m paying somebody else except the newsletters are free, I’m paying somebody else to do the scanning for me because I only need the keywords, because I know very strongly that what it is that I’m looking for, so all I need is a couple of words. Okay, that’s worth pursuing, not, not, oh, that’s worth pursuing. If somebody else has actually gone through and read the original articles and extracted the keywords for me, absolutely I’m going to make my time more efficient by piggybacking on their labor. Then I’ll go and I’ll actually read the full article before I make the slide, and absorb the deeper knowledge which will then make it more memorable for me, but having somebody else to do that initial abstraction is invaluable. Ross: Do you have any routines in terms of times of day that you go through your scanning, your note-taking, on your reading the articles? Leslie: There are multiple daily and weekly email newsletters that I get. I’m in California, which is the worst time zone; my headquarters are in Europe and I’m 10 hours behind my headquarters. By the time I wake up in the morning, most of my colleagues, their business day is done. When I wake up in the morning, my inbox is full of everybody else’s day, and it’s actually quite wonderful. I can just stay in bed, and just go through the emails and read them all very quickly on the phone, delete the stuff; okay, nothing, nothing, nothing, save the ones that I want to look at more in-depth. Then when I get to my desk, I’ve already cleared out the dross from my inbox, the things that I have left, these are the things that I’m going to attack today. Then I can put my focus and attention on them directly. That’s the daily rhythm that I have for that. I’m also critical of newsletters. I don’t have a hard and fast timing, but if I have not gotten any nugget from a newsletter in about two or three months, I’m not measuring it exactly, but if I get the feeling like, well, it’s been a while, unsubscribe. I’m an unsubscribe monster, stuff that ends up in my inbox, I will look at everything once. Sometimes random stuff comes to you and it’s good. It’s like, oh, here’s a marketing message from somebody, okay, unsubscribe; here’s an ad for a call, unsubscribe. I try to keep my inbox as information-focused, and information that I care about focused as possible. There was a New Yorker cartoon years ago about the unsubscribe-a-mole, like whack-a-mole except unsubscribing, that’s the way it is; being ruthless so that the things that come into my inbox, I know are things that I want to pay attention to. That’s part of it as well. Ross: When you take notes, do you note the source, as in the newsletter source just to keep track of that? Leslie: No, I do not keep track of the newsletter unless the newsletter itself has done the reporting. I need the initial source. I will use the newsletter as a stepping stone to the initial source. Sometimes that’s a little unfair on the newsletter creators because I’m not giving them the publicity that they probably deserve. Ross: I was thinking more about just being able to track where you got the information; which were the most useful newsletters? Leslie: Yes, it’s original source for sure. Ross: You used this delightful phrase in the beginning around imaginary castles of pulling these things together? What’s that process? How do you pull together all of these snippets, insights, innovations, and things that you see to build these building blocks together to create these imaginary castles? Leslie: It’s funny because, in my education, I actually have a Master’s degree in the history of art. My undergraduate degree was in neuroanatomy, where I cut up a lot of rat brains. I have a biology sciences background, but then I did my graduate studies in the history of art. The thing that the history of art teaches you to do is to think nonlinearly, to think visually, and to think beyond the spreadsheet. It’s an exercise in imagination. For me, a lot of it is visual. What is it to use these technologies? And also putting myself in the shoes of these things, and always asking myself what problem does this thing solve? What problem does this thing create? Then that thinking about it that way, you end up with this three-dimensional puzzle piece that’s got various shapes on the outside of it. Then when you see something else that has a reciprocal shape, you can just put them together. That’s very much the way that I think. That’s not so useful for other people. Ross: Do you use anything visual to take notes, write or draw things to piece things together in your mind, or is it all just an imaginary construct? Leslie: It’s all just an imaginary construct. Ross: Does it have dimensions? Is it in two or three dimensions? Or as in this shape? Leslie: Thinking about the new technology, that’s actually quite amorphous in terms of the way it’s represented in my head, but thinking about the trivia that is actually quite solid. I’m closing my eyes and I’m looking at the timeline for the 19th century in my head right now. That’s important because I’ve always got new things to put in. As opposed to the technology work that I do, it’s up to me where I put stuff, it’s like, oh, I think this might go with that, that’s really interesting, look what you could do with these two things putting together. For the trivia stuff, you have to file it in the right place; you’re not going to access it again. That is very visual, particularly things with history, things with dates, and geography. Now I’m seeing the world and the different countries that are lighting up in the information that’s the tagging off of the different countries. That filing system is very visual for me. Ross: Right, though it is a filing system more than a tool of synthesis in that case? Leslie: No, because I like to think of it as individual categories, or like Christmas trees. Now when I closed my eyes, I saw the world, actually just looking at the globe, Brazil is the country that’s right in front of me here. What do I know about Brazil, it’s actually like decorating a Christmas tree. The more that you know about something, the easier it is to hook more on and the more decorated, and shining the Christmas tree becomes. Now when I close my eyes, I don’t actually see a Christmas tree but I see Brazil is glowing a lot more brightly for me than Bolivia is. Bolivia is dark because I don’t know as much about Bolivia, as I know about Brazil. The more that you hang on the Christmas tree, the more brightly it glows. The more you put on, the easier it is to put more stuff on and then access it again later. Ross: Because there are more connections? Leslie: Yes, because there are more connections. I remember one of my favorite TV programs when I was a kid was Connections, hosted by James Burke, a British guy. Ross: Several of my guests have mentioned it! Leslie: Oh, my God, the book to that show was like my favorite book. That was probably the thing that taught me as a teenager, connections are important when they cross, divide, you don’t have to stay in the same groove all the time, you’re not locked into a lane here. One of the things that stuck with me out of connections was James Burke’s point, whether it’s correct or not, I don’t know, but the Renaissance was not triggered by the printing press, the Renaissance was actually triggered by the invention of the index, and the ability of people to find information, once they had filed in a book somewhere, and that I totally agree with. Information can pass through your head all day long but unless you can capture it, and put it on a shelf somewhere, somewhere where you can find it again, it didn’t mean anything. It’s the capturing and putting it on a shelf, so you can find it again, that’s the important part. Ross: I do have to ask for your compact with the story, how did this start? I love those jewels, degrees, those are wonderful compliments, so you’ve obviously found your path, how did this happen? Leslie: The fundamental thing is I was trying to figure out how people work? What’s going on? Also, I love doing stuff with my hands. I stumbled into cutting out rat brains, experimenting on rats, making changes in their brains, and see what happens. I was doing my undergraduate degree, but then at the beginning of my junior year, the third year of university, I am like, I need to be a well-rounded person, so I took Art History 101, just the basic art history. By the end of the first day, of the first class, we were looking at the cave paintings of Lascaux in that very first class, I was suddenly just blown away. It’s like, oh, my God, I’ve been cutting up rat brains, and I’m no closer to understanding the human mystery, what makes us tick. In this one day of looking at the product of human beings in a particular time and place with their limitations, you can deduce and understand so much about the society that produced something far more than you can by cutting up a rat brain. I instantly reworked everything so that I could double major in both art history and neuroanatomy. I ended up going to graduate school in the history of art. It’s not just limited to art. Any object tells the story of the society that made it and the time that produced it if you only look. Learning the history of art taught me to look, to not make any assumptions, to look and to be open to what does this event, what does this new development, what does this object has to tell me if I’m open to reading it? Lucky me, I had a degree in the history of art, and that has turned out to be an excellent way to become a technology trend scout, X decades later, who knew. Ross: Fantastic story. It doesn’t need to be brief but to round out what would you advise to someone who says, All right, I’ve got lots of information, how do I make sense of it? How do I keep on top of that? What’s your summary advice? Leslie: Find the system that works for you. People will suggest things like index cards or I don’t know what. When something clicks, like people recommended the flashcard app on my phone a bunch of times before I really tried it, I started using it like, oh, this is the one, so if you haven’t found a system yet for organizing information in your life, keep your eyes open, keep your mind open, listen to what other people are saying works for them, and try it. You never know until you actually try something, whether it’s going to work for you. Again, try to get rid of any assumptions you might have, and give it a go because the most unlikely things might end up being the things that work. Sometimes it is, what is the thing that’s going to solve your problem? What is the problem you need to solve? I need to not only take the information that I take in about my trend scouting, but I need to then present it to others, so making a PowerPoint slide, two birds with one stone, I’ve now got this record of this thing that I found, that I can instantly present it to anybody else, so that kind of thing. What are the multiple problems that you have? What’s the most efficient way that you can do it in a way that actually matches the way that your mind works? There’s something out there for everybody. Ross: That makes a lot of sense. In a way what you’re suggesting or perhaps I’m reading too much, but you’re implying that the problem is the way of being able to structure or make something of what it is the information you encounter. Leslie: Exactly. Why is it that you’re gathering information? What is the information for? If it’s just for you, like the flashcards, then something that is just for you; if it is something where you need to turn it around and present it to others, something that will actually get you down that path in terms of the presenting it to others, whether it’s a PowerPoint or a book or whatever. Efficiency is also something that’s near and dear to my heart, so try to cut out inefficient steps, that’s another part of maximizing your time. I try to touch information as little as possible. That’s why it’s like, the first cast going through the emails in the morning, okay, yes, yes, no, no, then straight into the Excel spreadsheet. Then I’m going to make a slide today, okay, yes, I’m going to do that one, oh, no, that one looked good at the time, no, toss. Don’t spend too much time agonizing. It’s a little bit of that Marie Kondo. If this piece of information sparks joy, hang on to it, it’s important. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it, off it goes, and keep curating the things that spark joy for you. Ross: Fantastic, Leslie. Our conversation was not just instructive, but also entertaining and inspiring. Leslie: I hope not too overwhelming. Ross: Absolutely. It has been delightful. Thank you so much, Leslie. It’s a real pleasure to talk to you. Leslie: Oh, Ross, as always, terrific questions you’ve been asking. Thank you. You really made me question and query my own processes in a way that I hadn’t done before. Thank you for that. I’m actually now much more conscious of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Ross: Fantastic. The post Leslie Shannon on finding nuggets, storytelling for synthesis, the five Fs of sensemaking, and visual filing [REPOST] (Ep66) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I have this wish that more people will come forward to collaborate in building up some infrastructure for what we know, that we might use together to make better sense of the world.” – Jerry Michalski About Jerry Michalski On this episode we learn from the incredible connector Jerry Michalski. His fascinating career is hard to summarise, playing a central role in the emerging digital economy as long time managing editor of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter. He is now leader at the Relation Economy Expedition (REX) as well as an advisor facilitator and speaker at the Institute For The Future with a deep focus on trust and relationships Website: jerrymichalski.com Medium: Jerry Michalski LinkedIn: Jerry Michalski Twitter: Jerry Michalski YouTube: Jerry Michalski What you will learn How the word consumer started his journey to collaboration (03:52) He still uses a 23 year old software called TheBrain (07:16) Why he is sharing his brain… (19:18) …and it’s the only asset he will pass on. (21:32) How and why he’s building a more collaborative brain (22:57) Delicious still has no successor (25:25) What information sources does Jerry use (28:49) In spite of all his information, he feels less overwhelm (33:07) On connections and serendipity (35:22) His routines and structures (37:32) He has a collection of mental models and thinking frameworks (40:25) OODA loops and virtous circles (43:43) Being a pattern hound (45:35) Using dialogue to enhance his and collective models (49:27) Episode resources TheBrain Open Global Mind Kumu Miro Nassim Taleb Henry Molaison Nicklas Luhmann Delicious David Allen GTD Connections TV series Farnam Street John Boyd OODA Loop Episode images The images below are referenced during the conversation with Jerry. Contrarians Who Make (or Made) Sense  https://bra.in/4jrdQp David Bohm (1917-1992)  https://bra.in/9jrB85 Virtuous Circles and Vicious Circles  https://bra.in/5vB5Ja OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act)  https://bra.in/7pDkZn Useful Thinking Frameworks and Mental Models  https://bra.in/8vPM9p Design from Trust (DfT)  https://bra.in/9jYPAq Types of Accident  https://bra.in/8vm7QZ Transcript Ross Dawson: Jerry, it’s a great pleasure to have you on the show, Thriving on Overload. Jerry Michalski: It is a great pleasure to be here, and it’s nice to have a chance to talk with you as well. Ross: Yes, it’s been too long. I’ve got to say you’re certainly one of the very first people that sprung to mind when I thought about people who are excellent at thriving on overload. Jerry: I love that. Thank you. Ross: We’ll try to go through in a little bit of the frame we have around Thriving on Overload; firstly around purpose. In a world of information, how have you developed the clarity of filtering information, or how do you find what’s relevant to you? Where does that come from for you? Jerry: I can point to two things. One of them is an insight, and the other one is an accident. A long time ago, both of the events happened within a couple of years in the mid-90s, when I was a tech industry trends analyst; not a Wall Street analyst, I don’t care what next quarter’s earnings are going to be, but is AI going to kill us or save us? Or where should we apply neural networks? Those were the things I was looking into back then. The thing that was an insight was one day, there were a couple of briefings I can point to when I suddenly realized that I didn’t like the word consumer. At the time, I was working for Esther Dyson, who was the doyen of the tech industry. I said, Hey, this word bothers me, and she said it’s just a term of art in the ad business. My little inner voice, which I’ve learned to listen to a lot, said, Hey, no, there’s something much more profound going on here. Word consumer is a symptom of a much deeper problem. This is my advice to young people, pay attention to that little inner voice, because really often it’s giving you a very good clue. For me, it gave me the clue that we’ve consumerized our world that involved the whole series of breaches of trust, and that whole mission took me deep into the notion of trust. I have a whole bunch of things I’ve thought about, which are weirdly about institutional design around trust. If you wanted to create a high-performance, high-trust team, I can point you to other people; that’s not my issue, but really, why did we design our whole world around mistrust, is the question. That was the insight that led to a quest, to a path of inquiry for me that is rich and live to this day. Then the accident, the serendipity was that back then I was writing Esther’s newsletter, and I decided to write about bookmark management & mind mapping. I’m not sure why I picked those two things. This was back in the early days of the web, and browsers, and all that. Even back then everybody knew that the bookmark feature in your browser sucks, and nobody uses it, so what else might we do to save the breadcrumbs of where we’ve been. I’m halfway done writing the issue, I’m unhappy with everything I’m seeing, and this little company had booked a visit, the company had a piece of software called TheBrain. I remember making the appointment with a little eye-roll, going, TheBrain? It turns out that this piece of software was exactly how my brain worked. I wrote about them, I invited them to our conference, and I started using their software, not knowing that 23 years later, I’d still be using their software, really not knowing that 23 years later, I would be curating the same data file that I started the very first day I started using it. My path to being able to cope with information is highly unusual, arguably unique, and has a lot to do with my passion combined with this weird tool that lets me collect up what I see and hang it in the right place, almost like ornaments on a Christmas tree, or pieces of a puzzle. The world’s largest puzzle is how does the world work? I’m busy snapping little pieces in place, which gives me a little oxytocin hit, which causes the lather, rinse, repeat addiction response to kick in. The time that other people would spend maybe putting a link in a spreadsheet or somewhere, I put adding a link to this one curated mind map. Ross: It’s probably a good time to tell us what is TheBrain? Jerry: TheBrain is a mind mapping piece of software. The easiest way to show you is to share my screen. Ross: Some people will just be listening to the podcast, so can you describe that? Jerry: Okay, I’ll describe it as a football announcer. The mind map has a blue background and words or phrases, mostly phrases, linked by lines. The color scheme that I use is the color scheme that this thing shipped with 23 years ago, a dark blue background with a little bit of fading at each side, a little bit of gradient, words mostly in white on this dark background, lines in a light blue, and occasionally, I use the colors yellow or purple as highlights. I just took us to a thought because it’s called TheBrain, every node is called a thought. I just took us to a thought I called Lessons from my Brain. Under here are a whole bunch of different thoughts, one of my favorites, because it’s an unusual insight, is that we are an amnesic society. What I mean by this is that, because we’re not storing things in a way that we can refer to them with each other, we’re stupider than we normally would be. We have cultural amnesia. Gore Vidal famously once said that America is an amnesic nation, we have no memory, we don’t care about history, all of that. I’ve got this little tool where, for example, I’ve been tracking the Trumpocalypse, and everything from Trump before he started running for office, all the way through the campaign, his presidency, the January 6 insurrection, and all that, I’m a little bit of a newshound, so all those events are sequenced in this little memory, except everything you’re seeing in this Brain I put in by hand, and it’s just me with this weird little artifact, and I’m dying to be collaborating with other people to create a shared memory, except the tool doesn’t really do shared memory very well. My passion project right now is called Open Global Mind, and we’ll get into that. Open Global Mind answers the question. What if there was an open collaborative thing like this, but also like Kumu, Miro, and other tools that help you visualize and analyze information? I’ve been hacking this tool a little bit, to do things that are different than unusual, like storytelling, or gathering evidence, or simple things. An easy way to demonstrate it, if you want to go there, is I was a tech industry trends analyst, and I needed to know who competes with whom, who founded what company, who funded what company, what PR companies represented them, and all of that; I can cruise through that information in this tool easier than any database I’ve ever seen, and easier than anything else. It just snapped in place at the right moment for me. Different people have different representational schemes. My wife has a calendric memory. It’s like she’s flipping through the calendar in her head, and I don’t know what I did last week, without the aid of my artificial calendar. This thing happens to really fit how I represent things. Ross: Would it be accurate to describe this as a mind map where each of the element clicks is a hyperlink to another mind map? Jerry: This is actually one big mind map. We have an amnesic society. Amnesia is under memory. There’s also elective memory loss, then there’s institutionalized amnesia, organizational amnesia, social amnesia, a whole bunch of different kinds of things. Apparently, Henry Gustav Molaison was studying amnesia. He had students named Brenda Milner and Suzanne Corkin. Molaison wrote about patient H.M. who had a traumatic brain injury, etc. You see that I’m basically making these links. All these little links between the thoughts, I’ve put in by hand, because these things are related to each other. Ross: This gets to a really fundamental point. Let’s say you have a new piece of information, you find an article or resource, how in your mind do you go through the process of working out where that fits in your Brain? Jerry: It’s really simple. Before we go forward, I just want to correct myself, Molaison wasn’t a scientist, he, in fact, was an accidental research subject because he had a lobotomy after a traumatic brain injury, and suddenly things happened to his memory that changed everything, so here’s a couple of articles titled “The brain that changed everything”. Sorry about that. Do you see anything in the flow of information in your day that’s worth remembering? Ross: Yes. Jerry: Me too. It turns out that I probably see 50 or 60 things every day that are really worth remembering. Then there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam that I let go by. The first decision is, is this worth remembering? The second decision is where would it go? I’m curious about everything. I was just on YouTube, and right there on the side, there was an explanation and simulation of the ExxonMobil Refinery Explosion in Torrance, California, in 2015. I clicked on it and started going there. Then I decided, that’s interesting. I already had a couple of refinery accidents. One, I had the attack in Saudi Arabia, and then I had a Texas City one, so I added the animation that I just watched. I just dragged it into my Brain, creating this thought in the meantime, under Refinery Accidents and Incidents, which is under Oil Refineries and Types of Accidents. Just to illustrate, here are types of accidents, which are GPS accidents, ice skating falls, roadkill, satellite accidents, wardrobe malfunctions, remember Janet Jackson? That’s an accident, or maybe not. Then just to show you how absurd this gets when you start doing it for a long time, one day, I realized I had a lot of types of thoughts, so I created an Uber thought called Types. Here are types of abuse, types of accident, types of activism, types of addiction, types of advertising, types of age, aircraft, alcohol, and anarchy. At this level, it’s just fun to wander around. This is not a useful thought for me. We’ve just gotten to the seas here, types of capital, this is a scroll bar down here, so you can see that there’s an awful lot of collections of types, some of which are really interesting, like, variants of capitalism is really interesting. How many different ways that people titled capitalism, both destructive capitalism and attempts to reform capitalism, I collect all that stuff, which means that later when I find a new article about the same thing, I’m actually putting it into the same context and making that part of my Brain richer and better. I publish my Brain openly online, so anybody can go browse through it. Ross: Coming back to purpose, what is it that makes something you want to keep in your Brain or not? Jerry: When I first started using this, I was a tech industry trends analyst. The company Edify, for example, I don’t have much around them because they are all around an interactive voice response, they got some money from Greylock management. Then if I click on Greylock management, we’ll see that they also invested in Dig, Crunch Fund, and Coda. These lists are out of date. I don’t make any claim that these lists are complete. But obviously, there was a purpose for my use of this tool for my job immediately back in 1998,1999, 2000. Then, I was like, I can store everything here. As I said, I’m on this quest around the word consumer and trust but I’m curious about everything. I then started arranging this slowly over time. You know how when you’re a blogger or a podcaster, you suddenly realize, Oh, I have to have fresh content for the blog. There’s never been a day in my last 23 years, when I was like, Oh, I must add something to my Brain today because there was no reason to, but every day, naturally, 10 to 50 things showed up that were worth remembering. I would then get into this quick habit of adding something to my Brain, which is really a quick act; it can be under a minute. I can take something, an article worth remembering, and just drop it in. Over time because there’s a part of me that’s trying to digest how the world works, and then transform that into insights, I have a process that I call Design from Trust, that I’m trying to stand up as a practice, where the assumption is we lost trust in humans, but then we went and designed all of our institutions from the basis of mistrust of the average person; if we flip that equation, what does that look like? That’s all here in TheBrain. I’ve got it all cataloged here, I just haven’t written the book about it. Ross: Do you ever use paper or any other visual tools outside TheBrain? Jerry: I have next to me a little Squirrel pad. I use it rarely. I can only write on graph paper, on Squirrel paper, only on one side of the page, this is an old habit from 30 years ago, and only with the pen; I can’t use a pencil anymore. I have a little metal clipboard that I love. Then I have an iPad, and I use a drawing app on it. But I use them all occasionally. Ross: Essentially, this is where you capture and organize your thoughts? Jerry: Exactly. Now, I don’t do outlining for an article. Let’s say I’m writing a post somewhere, I would have a link to the post here in my Brain but the outline for the post would be in Google Docs, or medium, or wherever it is I’m writing the piece. I don’t use TheBrain for outlining. You easily could and many people do. I just don’t do that, partly because I feel like I’m serving two audiences. One is just me and my idiosyncratic use of this tool to remember stuff, but because I’ve been publishing my Brain online for a really long time, at least 15 years, I have a second audience which is whoever trips across this thing and decides to try to use it, for which, thank you very much, but I want to make this clear enough that people can find their way through and run into stuff that’s actually very useful to them. I have a thought that people are generally more trustworthy than we think they are, which is one of my beliefs. I have a thought called My Beliefs right here. I think this is really interesting and useful, and I can show you why I think this, and who said it, I’ll let you know. I was at South by Southwest years ago, and Craig Newark and Jimmy Wales interviewed each other. They said this sentence basically twice within the 90 minutes that they were talking because both Craigslist and Wikipedia are designed from the trust. That’s what got me started thinking about how these things all click together. I won’t claim that this curating has given me the different kinds of ideas that I now have, but it sure has helped. It really helped, so when I’m trying to remember what was that article I saw 10 years ago, and chances are that Google has forgotten about the article because Google loves things that have fresh inbound links. PageRank is like who is linking to this piece, and if a piece wasn’t popular, or was long ago, it’s probably fallen off of Google’s memory. Thank God, the Internet Archive has the Wayback Machine, because I use that all the time to basically do CPR on dead web links. I don’t get rid of broken links in my Brain, partly because as Nassim Taleb tells us, we don’t hear from the graveyard often enough. One of the things I can do is somebody shows up and says, Hey, we have a cool new group calendaring app, and I can say to them, you want to see the couple 100 companies that have died trying to do this? Can I show you who tried and died? Maybe we can talk about what special secret sauce do you have that’s going to make sure you survive? Ross: Just want a comment on the point of saying, alright, I’m going to open this up for the whole world to see the inside of my Brain. Jerry: First, there was no reason not to. I can check a little box, so if I click on a link, it gives me a little dialog box. Then over here, there’s a little lock symbol; if I click on the lock, it makes this particular thought private. Now and then as I synchronize to the cloud, to TheBrain’s web servers, whenever I sync, that refreshes, and I do that several times a day, which puts the most up-to-date version on the cloud. Anything I marked as private, nobody else gets to see it. I can protect the things that I care to protect, and I don’t protect very much. I’ll give a speech inside a company that nobody outside the company is meant to know about, that thought is private. But the people I meet who are employees of the company, I attach them to the company, and I make them publicly visible. Nobody needs to know where we met, that linking thought is for me. My notion of the benefits of publishing this publicly has obviously grown over time, as this has become a bigger asset, as I’ve done more thinking about what it means to work like this in public, etc. I’m a little bit vulnerable for doing this, so I do have that thought called My Beliefs. You can very easily infer my political stance and a bunch of other things from how I arrange things in my Brain. My intentions there are to actually have conversations of other people who’ve done something similar. I’m anxiously looking forward to a conversation with a QAnon fan, who has done some curating not necessarily in TheBrain, but somewhere, to try to build a factual argument for any piece of what they believe. Okay, so pedophiles are in charge of the government, great, where’s your evidence? And how does it fit together? Or anti-vaxxers? Or just conservatives? I’m more on the liberal side but I have plenty of critique of liberal beliefs. I’m using this to sort through what do I believe? And then not just what do I believe, but why? Ross: That’s wonderful. You have shared extensively on social media at various times in various channels over the years, so this is perhaps the biggest sharing, you’re sharing TheBrain and everything with your Brain marking. How does this relate then to your other social sharing? Jerry: It’s funny, I’m Twitter user number 509. Ed Williams is a friend, but a different friend of mine basically said, Hey, try this when it was still just an SMS service. I don’t have a zillion followers, but I’ve been on Twitter since it was born, and I’ve used other social media, but I have no large audience anyplace. My wife and I recently were doing our wills, and the only asset I have that matters to me when I pass on is this thing. The only asset I have that matters is my Brain. It’s easy to fund a server still being alive to serve up TheBrain contents frozen on the day of my death. Okay. But a really interesting question is, how might there be other people who then pick up and start using this as a sourdough starter, and then keep going? The project I’m doing now Open Global Mind, one small motive for that project is to get me out into a more open collaborative tool with other humans doing this so that what I’ve done is just a starter for some new layer. Think of this as on top of Wikipedia, but different. Ross: Tell us about the tool, where that’s at, and where it’s going? Jerry: OGM, Open Global Mind isn’t actually trying to build a tool, we’re trying to first look around for open source products that exist. There’s a thing called Graphviz, which does visualization; there are a few other bodies of open source code. We’re also trying to motivate existing vendors to write toward each other so that their tools can interoperate, and to separate themselves from their proprietary data formats. Almost everybody has seen Minority Report, and they have that Tom Cruise scene where he’s doing the analysis and flipping things around, isn’t that cool? Some of our geek friends were actually advisors on that movie, so it’s a really good simulation. Although I’m not a huge fan of VR gloves, and all that stuff but imagine a conversation between people using different kinds of tools for memory, and connecting ideas, and building arguments, who weren’t just trapped in little rectangles with a chat on the side but instead were in idea land, and when you showed me something you believed in an argument that I really liked, I could grab it and link it into mine, and say, for this topic, refer to this thing Ross just did. I already have referred to you in my Brain, I’ve got a bunch of stuff around you and things you’ve written in posts, and that’s an interesting start. But what does this look like at the next level when we’re starting to think together? And when we’re starting to set up experiments or arguments to try to convince other people to do something? So heading down that road. Ross: I sometimes think that the defining theme of where my life is going is collective intelligence. Jerry: That’s fabulous. Collective intelligence, collaborative sense-making, hive mind, whatever term you want, that’s the place where we’re aiming. Then there’s a whole bunch of small subgroups. There’s a bunch of people who are fans of subtle custom, which was a system developed by Niklas Luhmann with index cards and a coding scheme, and they’re emulating that in software. Then there’s the cult of Rome research, which is doing backlink key outlines; then there’s a bunch of others, and none of us are connected to each other. Each of these is like its own frothy little cult. I’m really interested in what does it look like when a heavy Rome user, who’s done a lot of this work, and I talked to one another? And what can we build together? Ross: One of the things that hopped off for me is actually social bookmarking and Delicious, and so on, which was a big loss when that disappeared. Is there anything now that you feel in terms of social bookmarking or other things that are useful? Jerry: I was not a Delicious user, because I was already a Brain user, but Delicious was the closest thing to TheBrain without any of the visual aspects, but certainly the social side of it was more than TheBrain, the shared links, the hash-tagging, a bunch of other interesting stuff, and I regret the day Yahoo bought them. I, even more, regret the day that they went under, and Joshua Schachter is now driving sports cars. I’m like dude, couldn’t you have just funded this thing to stay up as a server? A lot of old Delicious users wound up on Pinboard, which is a mediocre substitute. Then there are a couple of other tools that are picking up some of that but don’t quite have the magic or the community because, for example, C19, as a hashtag on Delicious, was a rallying cry for historians who cared about the 19th century. They were using a C19 to share what they knew in a beautiful way. I totally agree, Delicious was a huge loss when it went away. We need a lot more things like that, that can play nicely with things like this Brain tool, with Graphviz, with Kumu, and with other kinds of tools. I don’t know why more people aren’t interested in that space where we can enrich the way we communicate. Ross: Yes, it does seem that there’s less happening now than there was, unfortunately. Jerry: Yes and no, because the little cults that I talked about are new. A lot of those are new, frothy, and interesting. Whether it’s personal knowledge management, or personal knowledge graphs, or network knowledge graphs, there’s a whole bunch of subcategories, I’ve got most of them named in my Brain and collected up. They’re all trying hard to figure this thing out, and many of these people are really good bloggers or chroniclers of their activities, on whatever medium you want. If you want to get in those conversations, they’re openly available; but you’re right, in another way, a lot of this stuff has died off, and there isn’t a great deal of interest. Ross: I will have a look at your Brain to find those references. Jerry: I’m happy to send you links or whatever. A nice thing is that I can send a shortened link to any particular thought, any specific thought in my Brain to anybody. That’s easier than going to Jerrysbrain.com, clicking on launch Jerry’s Brain, and then trying to use the search function, which is okay, but slow. You can get around that way but it’s so much easier if I send you someplace directly in the middle of TheBrain. Ross: Actually, that would be awesome to get the direct links for where you were referring to earlier in the podcast so that people can track our conversation and to delve into what we’ve just been chatting about. Jerry: We can add them to the comments, no problem. Ross: What are your information sources? The things that you use regularly? How do you choose those sources? How do you find broader sources beyond that? What is your structure for finding and using your sources? Jerry: I’m no scientist or information technologist about this stuff. It’s been a pretty organic thing. I love the New York Times because I lived in New York for five years and got really used to it and its writing style. For example, there have been plenty of controversies about its agendas and whatnot over the last couple of election cycles, but I have a lot of references there, and that’s the only paper that I will regularly go look at. I only look at it online, I don’t get anything delivered on paper anymore at all. Then I subscribed to a bunch of different newsletters most recently, probably Heather Cox Richardson, the historian, who’s doing political commentary, no opinion. There’s a whole bunch of people, and I’ll turn them off once they’re less relevant for me, so I’ll unsubscribe. I spend a bunch of time trying to unsubscribe from things because I get way too much mail. I also know way too many humans who are interesting, and every now and then they’ll throw something overboard. But for me, the social network is the source of my best links. I’ve been careful about curating who I follow on Twitter. If you treat Twitter like Facebook, and you just follow your friends, your Twitter feed will be trashy, it’ll be awful, and you’ll be like, God, Twitter’s just terrible. But if you’re careful about who you follow, then I see world news hits first in my Twitter feed before CNN gets it, before I hear it anywhere else. If I happen to be looking over at Twitter, and there’s an earthquake somewhere or an explosion somewhere, or something, it’ll start there. I rely on Twitter for contemporary newsy stuff. I rely on my social network, that’s just lots of people and a few newsletters for the bulk of things. I don’t really subscribe to many publications, summaries like ZDNet, or The Economist, or whoever, they’ll send out, Hey, here is a bit, and I’m like if there was a good article in your publication today, I will hear about it some other way. I don’t subscribe because every organization is going to send you 20 great things every day, and that’s just way too much, that’s overload. I do get the feeling of overload periodically in doing what I’m doing. In particular, I will add, because I’ve been obsessive about this Brain thing and trying to figure out how to digest the world at the expense of making a normal income, and all those kinds of things, I’m devoting a lot of time to doing this, even though it’s a quick act to add something new to it, and only a couple of times I’ve sat down and thought, Oh, crap, I’m having a feeling of overwhelm. That’s happened a couple of times during lockdown, but really only twice. At those moments, I’d got way too many tabs open that I wanted to filter into my Brain, I just came up with three great conversations, I’m done, I’m spent. Also this little feeling of maybe I’ve just lost a grip on what’s happening in the world. I don’t usually get to the point of I should just give up. I fall short of just throwing my hands up and deciding to give up, but trying to be a little coral polyp on the reef filtering the nutrients that go by is an ongoing act. You’re always wafting with the current picking up like, oh, that’s good. I wish many more people did this because what I see that’s important, and pick out depends on my filters, my worldview, and how I think the world works, and I’m really interested in other people’s worldview, and the tools like this make it really easy to model, explain, elaborate and then show your worldview. I find that to be really important. Ross: You’re getting to the essence of what this is all about. I’ve got to say, if you had that feeling of overwhelm only a couple of times, then you’re doing better than most people. Jerry: I think I feel less overwhelmed than most because I have a very productive way to put things in a place where I know I’ll find them again. David Allen is the Getting Things Done guy; he says, you have a whole bunch of open loops in your head, you need to put them in a system that is reliable, where you know, where you don’t have this worry that you’re going to miss a loop and drop something. He helps you design a reliable system. I’m terrible at GTD, although I took a couple of David’s workshops. I’m terrible at GTD but I’m really good at knowing that what I’ve put something in TheBrain and then linked it up a little bit thoughtfully, and I failed to go through the rest of my logics for when I put things in TheBrain, that I’ll find that again, that it’s now more useful than it was before, and that it’s in its context. It’s like it has found its little home. Going back a moment ago. First, is it worth remembering? Second, what is it part of? What does it connect to? I’ve got enough things in my Brain that there’s almost always a place I can go to, so I go there. I don’t know if you noticed, but I have my screen always set up where TheBrain is flush right and the browser is flush left, and there’s an inch gap. The only reason I do that is that the easiest way to add something to TheBrain is to grab the URL, the little icon next to the URL, I grab that and I drag it across into the blue background of TheBrain. TheBrain goes, Oh, you’re adding a thought, under the current thought, I should pick up the name of the file and whatever URL you’ve got, and create a new thought. That’s what it does, and 80% of the time, it does a pretty darn good job of that, and I’m done adding the thought; but the other 20% of the time, I have to go clean it up, edit it, move around the text, which is easy to do. Then I sit down and I think what else should I connect this to? Because this isn’t a hierarchy, TheBrain is not just like top-down. It’s a multi-directed graph of some sort. I know nothing about graph theory, but TheBrain doesn’t care if I make circular references, or if I over link or whatever, so I’m really interested in connecting things to things that are similar. My Brain is a very happy pattern finder. I do lots and lots of patterns over matching and linking up which means then when I come in to find something, I’m like, who was that woman who did the paper on whatever? I can usually find my way to it. Ross: You mentioned serendipity before. When you’re out exploring or finding, is there any way in which serendipity is more likely to happen in what you discover? Jerry: Serendipity, curiosity, and innovation are not things that I worry about, I have no scarcity of any of those. There are a lot of reasons why. One of them is that I keep a bunch of open channels, and I have a bunch of friends who will send me stuff. Another one is that I’m curious about everything, and I’m always nosing in corners looking for stuff. Years ago, when I was 35 years old, I finally read my first good history book, and that gave me the nose for Oh, wait a minute, history doesn’t have to be about there was this battle on this date, and here’s who won; you can actually peel back the curtain and see what was going on; isn’t that cool? That led me to a different form of inquiry that helps me go through and connect things up. One of the big motivators for me was James Burke’s series Connections, which aired on PBS here in the US, but then it was a book as well. It was all about serendipity, and connections. So someone used Limelight, which was made popular in theaters as a way of lighting the stage, and turned it into a signaling system between the semaphore stations. Then suddenly you have the Saturn V rocket, remember that episode? My mind works a lot like that. Also, I have successfully preserved a child’s curiosity and openness to finding new stuff. I’m busy trying to figure out how other people think. I want to know why people voted for Trump. I don’t think they were all misogynist, racist, homophobic assholes. I think a lot of them, for example, wanted to break the system. They really wanted to shatter a system that was nonfunctional for them. They were like, this guy with his bull in the china shop approach is very likely to break the system enough that we’re going to have to get a new system. That’s a logic to me. That makes a lot of sense because I think the system is broken, too. I just would fix it a different way, but look how far I’ve gotten. Ross: Do you have any routines or structures during the day or the week? Are there times of day when you scan sources, or think about things, or do deep dives? Jerry: This is a great and painful question to answer. The thing I should be doing is I should eat the frog, as they say, every morning. The night before, I should set up with the one most important thing I could do the next day, and then just do that and ignore everything else for the first couple of hours, and my life would be very different had I figured out how to do that. Instead, I try to get through my email and I start following things. Before you know it, I’m curating my Brain, adding stuff in, which is beneficial in the sense of these were all little pieces of the puzzle, but not great in the sense of, I probably should have sent that email today. I think I’m overly in the dig, click, connect, and weave mode. I think of TheBrain as a modern loom. I think of this as me weaving information together because the little lines between thoughts are very much like the warp and weft of a fabric. Weaving is one of the earliest technologies. The only problem is everything that was woven rotted and went away, and the people who made large stone monuments to themselves survived because the stone is more durable than fabric, which is a shame. Because the weaving was really important, it was how we stayed alive to carry stuff, to get dressed, and whatever else. The pyramids served no particular useful purpose I can see. Metaphorically, similarly, I’m really interested in how we might together weave what we know together, so we don’t have to keep having the same stupid arguments over and over again. I apologize to go back to Trump for a second, but if the American press corps had agreed with some memory device, and said, hey, these six lies that he’s been saying over and over again, let’s all agree that the next time he utters that lie, any one of these six, there’s just 6/3 real things, we will turn off the camera, stand up and walk out of the room together. Can we just agree on that? Okay, good. I don’t know that that would have solved the problem but it would have been a little bit of animal conditioning, to show Trump that his assumption that the news media could not shut its eye and leave might be wrong. Having a shared memory for journalists might have been a good thing. For me, the idea that we don’t have a shared memory makes us much easier to spend, makes us stupider than we actually are as humans, means that we’re perfectly happy to go watch TikTok videos till the cows come home, because hey, it’s only a minute, and it’s got some cute music, and somebody did something light-hearted. Wait a minute, we have five major crises in front of us. Wouldn’t you do something fruitful toward any of them? Or if you don’t want to try to fend off crises, wouldn’t you do something positive that helps people? Ross: You’ve been implicitly talking about mental models throughout, about how you’re building your way of seeing the world, to be able to build it and collaborate around that and to refine and make it better. Your repository is TheBrain but it is not in the software literally, it is inside your mind. What’s the relationship between what you are thinking in your mind and the external resource of TheBrain or anything else? How are you continuing refining and developing? Jerry: Farnam Street famously has published a couple of books about mental models, but I’ve been collecting mental models for years. I see yellow as an attractor that says hey, there’s a lot of stuff under here; so these yellow things are OR tools, dynamic programming, linear programming, Monte Carlo, nonlinear programming, queuing theory, etc. That’s just one little subsection of useful thinking frameworks. The Cynefin framework is in here from Dave Snowden, brainstorming techniques, etc. I have a massive collection of mental models here that aren’t curated toward each other, meaning somebody who took this collection and went down another level with it could actually say, this one is like this one, here’s how they’re different; somebody could front end this collection with, if you’re stuck in this kind of a situation, here’s how to find your way to a useful mental model or thinking framework. I think that it would be terrific work to do. Then some of these thinking frameworks are proprietary. I don’t like good ideas that are locked behind an IP gate. Apparently, in our culture, smart people write books, and they put their best ideas in books. Then we protect books with digital rights management. We make it really hard to use the information in books, and then we expect culture to move forward. Seriously people? What we want to do is have creative people make a living, let’s solve for that, and let’s solve for that around walking away the content. I’m a huge fan of open source, open content, open as much as you possibly can. There are business models that are successful, where much of what is done is actually open. Then the secret sauce or the proprietary data is not, and that layer is protected. That’s fine too. But we have way too many people who are over protecting intellectual property, hiding ideas from one another when we actually need to work together. Ross: Synthesis is one of the key frames through my life. It’s bringing together disparate ideas and making them one. TheBrain shows connections but there’s this vast amount which you cover through your voracious curiosity, what is the process where you synthesize, pull things together to make sense from these things, and coalesce all of this array of different resources you’ve discovered? Jerry: Let me show you two examples. One is the OODA loop. John Boyd, Air Force Colonel, a crazy guy who used to call his associates at 2 am and say, I’ve got an idea. He invents this brilliant thing, which was used by Dick Cheney. In John Boyd’s biography, the author credits and acknowledges that. Dick Cheney is a big fan of Boyd, so I wrote a piece that I didn’t actually publish. Back when John Kerry was running, I wrote neocons are inside the democrats’ OODA loop. Because everybody on the far right understands OODA, nobody on the left understood it. When there was swiftboating, flip-flopping, and all the things that kept John Kerry off balance were being done because this was political use of OODA. That’s just one little piece of synthesis. This one, I understood by myself and got into it. Another one is virtuous circles. One day, I was trying to learn more about Brian Arthur and virtuous circles, and all that. In doing so, in my Brain, I suddenly realized that vicious cycles are what happens to everybody else in a virtuous circle. One of the examples of a virtuous circle is Microsoft bundles up Excel, Word, and Access, and sells that as the Office suite. The other vendors don’t really have as good an Office suite, and all of a sudden, everybody decides we have to use Microsoft, and there’s a virtuous cycle that lifts Microsoft to market leadership, which is a vicious cycle for Novell, Lotus, and everybody else. That came to me from sitting here and looking at basically cycle, circles, making these connections in here, feedback loops, positive feedback, negative feedback, all of that.These insights don’t happen that often directly while using TheBrain but they happen to me all the time because I’m a pattern hound. When I get them, I try to represent them in this Brain. What’s interesting is that this Brain isn’t just a collection of companies that sell products, that have people in them, that were funded by Venture Capital firms, that live under categories, there’s a piece of my Brain where I’m doing that, but I’m also trying to think out loud, think with whoever else wants to play, about all these topics and make sense of the world. Ross: You’ve mentioned that word pattern hound more than once, what does that mean? How do you sniff out patterns, find them, or articulate them? Jerry: A big piece of pattern recognition is I curate the world’s largest published Brain with 460,000 thoughts, 850,000 links, and 23 plus years now. This idea that when you look from one place to another, there are things that are really parallel to each other, really works for me. I have a thought that’s really important to me, which is going to look messy, my apologies, but it’s contrarians who make or made sense. Years ago, when I was starting to figure out about trust and all that stuff, I discovered that I had a bunch of heroes, David Bohm, who invented the dialogue process, Alice Miller, who did the unresolved childhood trauma, and a bunch of stuff around family systems thinking, Christopher Alexander, the cranky urban planner, and architect. These people are all on this list. Then I realized one day that all these people shared something that none of them would have called by this name, that’s when I came up with this idea of design from trust. I saw the pattern that all of these people were saying, in my discipline, education, architecture, urban planning, finance, self-image, health, whatever, we don’t trust humans anymore, so we built these really coercive institutions that control people, and really have screwed up. We screwed up how to do policing, for example. Each of these people also then suggested a positive way to fix that. Christopher Alexander invents pattern languages, which are a way of distilling wisdom in any discipline so that ordinary muggles can come in and perform much higher levels of design, discussion and make more intelligent choices because they have distilled wisdom at hand, like light from two sides, make small niches for children, and how to cite a home on a lot. How do we do this for every domain? This is one of the major patterns that I’ve found. I think if we all tried to design from trust, a book I need to write, we might actually solve a lot of the world’s problems because design from trust is cheaper, it reconnects us in the community, and it actually seems to solve problems. Design from trust is really scary and counterintuitive. I wrote an essay called the Two Oh Shits, which is in here, which basically says, when you hit a system designed from trust, like Wikipedia is designed from trust, your first reaction is, Oh, shit, this couldn’t possibly work. What moron invented a system where anyone on earth can come change any page? Then you bounce around in there, try a couple of pages, look at something that you know a lot about, and the second Oh, shit is like, Oh, shit, this seems to be really working. What makes it work? What is the secret sauce here? How do I get more? That process to me is super fascinating because I think that’s the direction we need to go to fix what ails us. Ross: Just one thread there was David Bohm’s dialogue. Jerry: Yes. Ross: WikiHow is a wonderful and often neglected resource. This is a little implicit in what you’ve been sharing, but how do you use dialogue? How do you engage in dialogue to be able to enhance your models, or other people’s models, or collective models? Jerry: It’s funny because I’m a facilitator. I’m a convener; I have meetings that I pull together of different kinds, and Open Global Mind right now is mostly a community of practice that is busy working on these different kinds of things. When I lived in Manhattan, I attended several Bohm dialogue sessions, and I was really struck by how subtle the whole process is because we would show up, we would take our coats off, we would sit down and start talking, and before we knew that there was a special something in between us, that the place we were in, the conversation we were having had grown to feel different. That’s a piece of what dialogue is. It’s not about trying to convince anybody of anything. It’s not for therapy, but it might feel like it. I try to incorporate some of that in the conversations that I host. I’m trying to listen with care to what people bring to the conversation, and unpack it. I’m probably a little too directive as a facilitator but I feel the safe space in which to say things that matter to you, is really important for civilization to move forward, and also for companies to make good decisions, to make wiser decisions. We don’t have a lot of those safe spaces. We don’t listen well. Another thought I have is that we’re in an epidemic of not listening to each other. We’re all busy ready to say things, and not that ready to stop, sit and actually listen to other people. In fact, one of the safest, easiest ways to bridge the cultural divide is to listen respectfully to other people. It’s crazy how well that works.Bohm is a small piece of that puzzle for me in the middle here, but he was a super interesting fellow. By the way, Bohm’s ideas were met with silence and derision. It is a thought here in my Brain. Ross: Not by everyone. Jerry: Not by everyone; some things come around later, and make a lot of sense later. Ross: Yes, that’s perennials. You are really an exemplar of thriving on overload. You’ve pointed a path through what you’ve done, a unique path, and you’ve pushed it out further than anyone else. I really hope your project succeeds in being able to provide a more collective frame for this filtering, gathering, and sense-making. Is there anything else to share from your insights and experience on how other people can learn from that to thrive themselves on overload? Jerry: Yes, many small pieces of advice. One of them is, you can browse my Brain for free at Jerrysbrain.com. I would love for anybody to join the conversation and the actions at Openglobalmind.com, the same sort of thing. A thing for young people, in particular, is to pay attention to your little inner voice, because many people have a lot of trouble finding their purpose in life, like, what is my purpose? Doing stuff without a real purpose is not nearly as much fun as having a purpose. Although sometimes having a purpose is really frustrating because if your purpose is to stop the earth from melting because of climate change, man, we are in a lot of trouble right now around that. I’m in Portland, Oregon, where we just had the three hottest days on record, the last three days. Today’s normal, it’s still way above normal for June averages, but we just had Portland’s highest temperature ever by a lot, by five or six degrees. Find something that irks you, and chances are that irritation is the source of something the world actually needs. Because younger children are really brutally frank, but they’re actually seeing things as they ought to be. Then we teach them, we basically socialize all that wisdom out of them. One of my beliefs is that we’re born pretty connected to the world, to each other, and to the earth, and we don’t figure out what to do. I have a lot of things to say to younger people and I have this wish that more people will come forward, to collaborate in building up some infrastructure for what we know, that we might use together to make better sense of the world, to bridge those divides that are being widened intentionally, we weren’t always this far apart on everything, there’s this kind of a wave, where every now and then mostly politicians figure out that if they pump fear and mistrust, and undermine facts in science, they can drive a wedge and win some elections. That’s where we are. One way to combat that is by sharing what we know. Another way to combat that is just through listening and safety and has nothing to do with technology. I don’t want to say that if we only all curated TheBrain, we would solve the world’s problems. I actually want to say, if we listened respectfully to each other and went out for a beer, we might actually solve more problems, but then we might want to sit down and decide to express what we know, share it better, and build on it. That’s the piece I’ve been working on for a while here. Ross, thank you for the invitation here. I love your questions. I love your quest. Thriving on overload is important. My wife just finished writing a book Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. Your books are very allied, and we’ll probably see each other on the road on a book tour. Ross: Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much, Jerry. It’s been really insightful. I look forward to speaking again sometime for long. Jerry: Thank you very much. Ross: Take care. Thanks. The post Jerry Michalski on collecting, connecting, and curating two decades worth of information [REPOST] (Ep65) appeared first on Humans + AI.