How To Break Anything

0 8 Jun 2011

Synchronized Collective Memory

Hi there Kyle Cameron!

June 03, 2010 was a Thursday. Here are your checkins from that day:

Thursday, June 03, 2010

1:20 PM		Calexico Taco Cart - 24th and Broadway Food Truck, Mexican Restaurant, Taco Place, Burrito Place
		"Excellent special: braised brisket in roasted jalepeno sauce"

6:51 PM		Canal Room Nightclub, Lounge

		with:

8:38 PM		Ear Inn Pub, Burger Joint, Steakhouse
		with:

10:12 PM		Zum Schneider German Restaurant, Beer Garden, Bar

		with:

Nice job year-ago Kyle Cameron! That was a solid day. How about a repeat this year?

xoxo,

benny + jonathan + matt

There's something interesting about 4squareand7yearsago, and it's more than just that it helps you remember what you did a year ago.

It has something to do with the fact that if the people you were with are using 4sq&7yrs too, then everyone is remembering at the same time. Theres a fascinating sort of synchronous collective memory being invoked.

(thanks @farrahbostic for the conversation in which this came up)

5

13 Apr 2011

Two kinds of intuition - evolutionary and multiplexed
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
Yesterday I was reflecting on Thad Starner's distinction between mutlitasking and multiplexing. It reminded me that not too long ago I made made the statement "most things worth thinking about are counter-intuitive, because human intuition is wrong about just about everything."

To which my smart friend Alicia promptly replied that she strongly disagreed. Smart because it got me thinking that there are in fact at least two different kinds of intuition.

There's a first kind of intuition that I was originally thinking about when making the statement - this is intuition based on biological and evolutionary process. This is the kind of intuition that is captured on my favorite page of all the internet, Wikipedia's list of human cognitive biases. This is a list commonly referred to as "all the ways that you could be completely wrong about everything."

So, well-designed environments (both physical and cognitive) - the kind I mentioned are worth thinking about - are the types that recognize that humans are constrained by these limitations, as seemingly unnecessary their design elements may be. The Mother Bear Proverbial Wallet for example, shown below - it's seemingly counter-intuitive to build a product that is intentionally hard to use (the opening mechanism is wirelessly synced to your bank account - becoming more tense as your funds get lower). Though, like great architects might masterfully make use of physical limitations to create efficient physical space, great interaction designers use human cognitive limitations as design constraints for better behaviors.

But there's also a second kind of intuition, the kind Alicia reminded me of - which is more akin to muscle memory or something from the Gladwell-popularized idea of "10,000 hours." This kind of complex intuition is developed by way of individual microexperiences, over time, perhaps through Starner's notion of multiplexing. The kind of intuition that gets me wondering if perhaps much of the charge of long-term memory mechanisms can be characterized by the process of reconstructing neural pathways from disconnected to synergetic, when long-term experience and exposure shape them to do so. (sorry, that statement's a mouthful; see David Linden's The Accidental Mind for a nice primer on the biochemical basis of experience-based memory.)

This kind of intuition is what makes a magician's slight of hand truly "magic" - magic is impressive not because there's some secret that could be divulged, rather it's because the magician has put in the hundreds of hours of work necessary to make 15 seconds of performance seamlessly invisible.

This is the kind of intuition that is behind the original charge of this blog: "how to break anything? observe everything" - a statement about pattern recognition through broad and unrestricted exposure.
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet
0

17 Mar 2010

Focus as status symbol: "The Age Of External Memory"
- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
David Dalrymple finds that "filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill" in the digital age:
Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.

via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

...or at least "focus as the key mechanism driving the acquisition of other status symbols."
- views
- Tweet
- Tweet

Search
Tags
- perspective
- value
- metasocioculture
- culture
- long-term thinking
- decisionmaking
- offline inspiration
- cognitive fallacies
- future
- time-orientation
- limitation
- perception
- causality
- definition
- irrationality
- art
- behavioral economics
- game mechanics
- emergence
- experience
- exposure
- observe everything
- philosophy
- programming
- human insight
- illusion
- paradox
- privacy
- reactionary
- want
- worry
- adaptation
- advertising
- behavior
- design strategy
- evolution
- identity
- metaphors
- networks
- optimization
- shortsightedness
- social interactions
- weak signals
- connections
- counterintuitive
- doomsday
- feedback loops
- indirect
- meaning
- tangible data
- context
- glanceable
- motivation
- seeming
- trends
- utopia
- cognitive environments
- complexity
- control
- cyborg anthropology
- gaming
- happiness
- human programming
- information art
- nostalgia
- rationality
- scarcity
- technosocial
- time
- timeline
- Entrepreneur
- PSEA
- chronological proportionality
- classification
- cultural narratives
- data
- deception
- design thinking
- filter theory
- games
- information theory
- intelligence
- levels of abstraction
- linguistic programming
- metaphysics
- nonlinear
- optimaization
- organization
- patina
- pattern recognition
- truth
- wisdom
- wonder
- youth
- Artist
- MTurk
- ROI
- Scientist
- adversity
Archive
- 2012 (15)
  - February (2)
  - January (13)
- 2011 (188)
  - December (14)
  - November (6)
  - October (6)
  - September (9)
  - August (9)
  - July (26)
  - June (21)
  - May (12)
  - April (17)
  - March (21)
  - February (25)
  - January (22)
- 2010 (214)
  - December (22)
  - November (14)
  - October (8)
  - September (7)
  - August (13)
  - July (17)
  - June (16)
  - May (16)
  - April (22)
  - March (36)
  - February (31)
  - January (12)
- 2009 (95)
  - December (6)
  - November (9)
  - October (9)
  - September (8)
  - August (6)
  - July (2)
  - June (9)
  - May (17)
  - April (7)
  - March (8)
  - February (7)
  - January (7)
- 2008 (47)
  - December (10)
  - November (12)
  - October (7)
  - September (7)
  - August (4)
  - July (3)
  - May (1)
  - April (1)
  - March (1)
  - January (1)
- 2007 (4)
  - October (1)
  - September (3)
Contributors

0

8 Jun 2011

Synchronized Collective Memory

5

13 Apr 2011

Two kinds of intuition - evolutionary and multiplexed

0

17 Mar 2010

Focus as status symbol: "The Age Of External Memory"

Search

Tags

Archive

Contributors

How To Break Anything

Get Updates