“When humans face too much information they resort to pattern recognition”—Marshall McLuhan, 1968 The average person is exposed to more information in a day than a person in the 1700s would face in a year.

alan watts said “you can’t catch the world in a conceptual net” and yet that’s what happens. we have so much information that people try to simplify the data into simplistic buckets or narratives. interestingly when i asked chatgpt to explain the full context of this mccullan quote it mentioned that there is a shift from linear thinking to configurational thinking when i asked what configurational thinking means it said it just made up the phrase lol but now that there is so much information, it’s easier to generalise and not be as exacting with your knowledge - i think for most this doesn’t matter but is probably going to lead to a lot of people overlooking important things i’m interested in ai safety, and it’s a realm where the amount of possible scenarios feel almost limitless, and people just don’t think much about possible outcomes and it’s quite concerning

Sometimes I wish my Trans Am was a time machine.

Or perhaps pattern recognition is primary, and "critical thinking" is mostly an illusion.

Is the average human brain more adept to handling this vast information overload compared to th 1700s?

@TheGreatSifting Reminds me of this phenomenal read that strangely becomes more relevant with time. Postman discusses information overload here, too.

My hypothesis is that this is effectively the causes of the autism spectrum. The human brain is evolving. The communication between A.I. and the human species will be most accurately executed by the people on the spectrum whose brains are tuned for it. Just my working hypothesis

Amazing info you are sharing @BrianRoemmele Wondering how you are able to collect this information.

"Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval." - Marshall McLuhan

Love McLuhan. Some people are temperamentally better (as he mentions, artists) and seek pattern recognition - artists and autists?