Rational Creatives #003
Human superpowers, fluidity of belief, accidental breakthroughs and AI vs human intelligence
Hey friends,
Greetings from Miami! I arrived yesterday for a vacation trip and due to a couple of unexpected hassles, I wasn’t able to send the newsletter yesterday. But no worries, I did my homework and I’m ready to share some gems with y’all.
Before we dive into it, though, I want to share an idea I came up with a few days ago and would love to get your feedback on. So, I thought about building/creating a library similar to this one, where I curate interesting resources that you can use to learn more about rationality, creativity and, more broadly, how your brain works. This library would be free but only for subscribers like you. Please shoot me a DM on Twitter and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
Now, without further ado… Rational Creatives #003 🤿
Human Superpowers
Last week I fell into a Twitter rabbit hole and ended up reading a very interesting thread by Visa. At the end of the thread, he shares this diagram where he kind of summarizes it all:
What I found most remarkable and really stuck with me was his definition of “magic”. For him, “magic” is the sum of “curiosity + attentiveness + persistence + willingness to revise and re-evaluate everything”. That’s a hell of a combination. And it actually makes a lot of sense.
After thinking about it for a little bit, I ended up finding people that I think are successful fitting very well in this formula. Many successful start-up founders, for instance, would fit perfectly into it. But also a lot of scientists and artists.
The only thing I would maybe add to this formula is having what Naval calls “specific knowledge”: a very specialized skill that’s very hard to acquire and very few people, if any, have.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to cultivate this Human Superpowers (I believe these are all skills you can get with practice). I will probably do some research. And don’t worry, whenever I find something useful, I’ll share with you.
Fluidity of Belief
Throughout this week I’ve had the opportunity to connect with a lot of smart, interesting people on Twitter. One of them was Brandon Toner.
I had a conversation with Brandon after I read a thread he wrote about the tension that’s created in your mind when you find an idea/concept/beliefs that challenge your own idea/concept/beliefs about reality.
He then shares an excerpt from Jordan Peterson:
It’s really hard to think. You have to be trained like mad to think. You have to be able to divide yourself internally into a couple of different people, and then you have tolet those people have a war in your head. And that means you have to develop characters who have opinions in great detail—opinions that might be contrary to your own,and then you have to withstand the tension of letting them have it out.
When he’s wrapping up, he mentions the prerequisites to navigating this tension successfully: openness, curiosity, patience; willingness to bend, to expand, fluidity of belief, detachment. And that’s when the revelation happens: Good thinking is fluid. It’s like a river where water flows freely and uninterruptedly.
I feel like too often we hold our beliefs as if they were precious objects destined to remain indefinitely in our minds. We get attached to them. And they become stationary pieces of furniture in our mind.
Instead of turning our minds into living rooms, we should listen to Bruce Lee’s advice and aim to turn them into untamed rivers that connect to deep oceans.
Water is light. It flows easily and without friction. It’s “formless” and “shapeless”.
Be like water, my friend.
Accidental Breakthroughs
Since I read The Biggest Bluff I’ve been pondering what’s the role that serendipity and luck play in our lives. More things than we’d like to admit happen to us because of them. And even though thinking that we have control over lives is healthy and can help us live happier, more successful lives, I can’t ignore how powerful these two forces are.
This week I was reading about the importance of serendipity for the creative process and ended up learning that a lot of scientific discoveries have been more accidental than deliberate. These are the one that stood up the most:
X-Rays
Radioactivity
The atomic nucleus
Viagra
Vaseline
If you want to read more about the fascinating stories behind all these amazing discoveries you should check out these two articles:
Is GPT-3 smart the same way we humans are?
As someone who is constantly captivated by the way the brain and the “mind” work, AI is a subject I obviously find fascinating. However, when GPT-3 was first released in June, it didn’t really caught my attention. I had other things in my mind and, to be fair, didn’t do enough research to understand how groundbreaking this was.
But this week, I found a super interesting read and fell in love with the topic. It is an article called What Computer-Generated Language Tells Us About Our Own Ideological Thinking, which I found on the online magazine Quillete after listening to a conversation between its founder Claire Lehmann and David Perell.
The author explores the way our brains have evolved versus the way computers have evolved, language and ideology in order to better understand the differences between GPT-3 output and human intelligence, if any.
TL;DR: Is there a difference between human intelligence and GPT output? Yes – but humans do fall easily into the trap of building self-referential text models, and in that respect, ideological thinking is strikingly GPT-like.
If you’re interested in AI, Psychology or Philosophy, this read will be stimulating and thought-provoking.
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Hope you had found some brain food in this edition and have a happy and productive week full of learning and fun.
Please don’t forget to DM me and let me know what you think about the Rational Creatives Library.
Daniel ♟🎨