Mortal Thinking

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Metadata

Author: Benjamin Riley from Cognitive Resonance
Full Title: Mortal Thinking
Category: #articles
Summary:: In the podcast “Mortal Thinking,” Benjamin Riley and Audrey Watters discuss the intersection of AI, education, and cognitive science. They explore how human cognition is often confused with machine intelligence and emphasize the importance of understanding both fields for better educational practices. The conversation highlights the need for a deeper, more holistic approach to learning and technology.

Highlights

How many languages do you think human beings have ever spoken, like from the beginning of language? Audrey Watters: Oh, I don’t know. 5,000? Benjamin Riley: Half a million. Audrey Watters: Wow! Benjamin Riley: Yes. Now, the second question—you already answered because you nailed it—how many languages are literally being spoken right now? They say, and by the way, it’s amazing how wide the variances are—it’s somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000. And then, do you know how many languages make up like 98% of what’s on the web? Audrey Watters: I mean, I would say that it’s probably three or four. Benjamin Riley: Yeah, six. So close. But yeah. So, the denominator there is half a million languages spoken in all of human history. And then 5,000 right now. And then we’ve got six on the Internet. (View Highlight)
But language is much more complicated, more complex than that. And there are expressions that simply are untranslatable. There are thoughts that are untranslatable. (View Highlight)
The author is a media studies scholar at the University of Virginia, and he’s written several very interesting books. This one on Google came out in 2011, which was still in an era where people, particularly in education, thought Google was really great. He was concerned about the power Google had to shape knowledge. His argument was that page rank—the early model of Google search—embodied the idea of pragmatism, because, in his view, it surfaced “truth” based on the consensus of everyone. (View Highlight)
So not only did it not help me, but it actually wasted time that I could have just spent doing the research in the first place. How many kids are doing that? Are they doing that spot check? This is just ubiquitous nonsense thrown into every guidance given to educators about AI. “You have to fact-check it.” But then, what’s the point? (View Highlight)
- Note: What’s the point indeed.
And it’s doubly unfair to saddle students with that burden, too. These are students—we’re supposed to be helping them understand the architecture of knowledge, the information architecture, like in a library, helping them navigate their way through categories of meaning, knowledge, and facts. And instead, we give them a—you know, we haven’t decided if we’re cussing on this—but a bullshit machine and say, “Good luck.” Some of us can look at this stuff and say, “That seems too good to be true,” or “I’m not sure Abraham Lincoln would have said that in 1913,” and recognize something is wrong. But expecting students—college or K–12—to be able to do that? It would be like giving them a textbook and saying, “Half of this stuff might be wrong, but you’re going to be tested on it anyway.” (View Highlight)
And so I think that one of the things that I notice with a lot of these things that happen in school, we’re interested in the essay, so write the essay. We’re interested in the test, so take the test. But were not so much interested in the things that have to occur in order for order for those outcomes to happen, right? So what matters is the grade, not the learning. What matters is you have this product that you produce, whether it’s a diorama that you’ve built in a shoebox—actually, probably nobody does that anymore—or an essay. (View Highlight)
However, I feel like lately I’ve been reading a lot more neuroscience, because some neuroscientists look at large language models and…yawn. That’s in part because when, they look at a brain scan with an fMRI, and are in essence reading what’s happening in the brain when different types of thinking are going on, they see certain parts of the human brain light up. When we are engaging our language faculty, that part lights up. But that part only lights up when we’re engaging our language faculty. There’s all sorts of thinking that we can do without the language part activating. (View Highlight)
was recently reading this history of cognitive science, a book called The Dream Machines, which is largely about J.C.R. Licklider and his role in basically creating the Internet. There was a quote in that book from Norbert Wiener who said, “The thought of every age is reflected in its technique.” I don’t know if I agree with it, but I sure haven’t stopped thinking about it. Our technology reflects how we are conceiving of what’s happening in humans mentally. And if you go back in history, to the phenomena of creating automata, that was a really big deal back at the time of Descartes. Not a coincidence! Stanford historian Jessica Riskin has written this wonderful book about automata, The Restless Clock, that maybe we’ll cover in a future episode, (View Highlight)
- Note: Is this quote true? To what extent?
And it’s again, it’s so interesting that this is the place in which people are like, “Oh, yes, give dogs treats. We know that this works,” and yet we forget the ways in which in which humans interact with one another, by giving each other treats to get us to do certain tricks, to sit and stay. (View Highlight)
- Note: It is the ultimate goal of humans to be free and it’s not just tech that is holding us back. It is our culture and the way we live.
It’s frustrating when someone uses their scientific background to wade into political theory or history without really knowing what they’re talking about. It undermines both that history and their other ideas. (View Highlight)