Purnima Devi Barman - One Woman Found A Way To Save The Rarest Stork In The World

The pessimist in me would have thought this would be possible but the optimists in me knew only a handful of people always have (and will) change the world for better. 

Purnima Devi Barman is one of those rare humans. I salute to madam, thank you , thank you from Max and I. 

How one community—and one woman in particular—have found a way to protect the rarest stork in the world simply by learning to appreciate the species and embracing it as one of their own:

As the conference began, Melvin says she was impressed to hear what women were accomplishing, especially in low-income countries. But she was particularly interested when the host of the meeting, Purnima Devi Barman, got up to speak about her work with a gangly and obscure stork called the greater adjutant (Leptoptilos dubius). Once close to extinction, the bird has rebounded in Barman’s home state of Assam in northeastern India. And that success, according to widespread consensus, is primarily because of Barman, who has single-handedly transformed the species from a reviled nuisance to a beloved cohabitant among a surprisingly broad cross-section of people, including government officials, mothers, and people who pick through garbage dumps for a living.

Hearing Barman talk made Melvin want to get involved—an effect Barman seems to have on people. More than a year later, the two women and several colleagues published a paper that looked at how community involvement has helped to advance conservation of the striking storks. Among her most successful strategies, Barman has created an “army” of women who care for injured storks, throw celebratory baby showers for the birds, and weave stork-adorned fabrics for sale.

In contrast with decades of top-down and high-cost conservation efforts, experts say, the driving principle behind Barman’s work is deceptively simple: Saving species requires buy-in from people. Women, in particular, can be powerful partners, even—or especially—when they don’t hold traditional forms of power in their cultures. By including women in conservation projects that have simultaneously changed their own lives, Barman’s work may hold implications for similar efforts everywhere.

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The greater adjutant is not a traditionally beautiful animal, and its lifestyle isn’t pretty either. A member of the stork family, it has skinny, knob-kneed legs, a relatively puny bald head, beady eyes, and an elongated orange pouch that hangs from its neck like a deflated balloon. It is awkward and large, standing about 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall. It is also notable for its smell. Traditionally called hargilas, which means “bone-swallowers,” greater adjutants drag dead carcasses into tree tops, where they eat the flesh and then drop stinky messes of poop onto the ground below. The birds also spend a lot of time in garbage dumps, where they scavenge for food. 

In the late 1800s, hundreds of thousands of greater adjutants lived in wetlands across much of Asia, from Pakistan to Cambodia. But habitat destruction, pollution, poaching, and the loss of their nesting trees pushed numbers sharply downward in the first half of the 20th century. A reputation as a bad omen in many places didn’t help them in the face of these threats. By the 1990s, there were an estimated 400 birds left. They have rebounded somewhat since but the International Union for Conservation of Nature still classifies them as Endangered, with only 1,200 to 1,800 birds confined to Cambodia and two regions of India—Bihar and Assam, where Barman lives. 

Despite the longstanding cultural disgust that surrounded the birds, Barman quickly began to appreciate the storks’ more appealing side. Raised for several years by her grandmother, who often took her outside and taught her songs and stories about birds, she developed a connection with nature that brought her solace during a period when her parents were away. Later, she studied zoology and wildlife biology at Gauhati University, where she earned an undergraduate degree and then a Masters in 2002. Eager to pursue a PhD, she gave in first to family pressures to get married and have children, giving birth to her twin daughters in 2005. She started her doctorate work in 2007, with a focus on greater adjutants.

Aware of the outsized conservation attention that goes to India’s charismatic megafauna like rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis) and tigers (Panthera tigris tigris), Barman had started thinking about studying hargilas when she saw them in a wetland while doing fieldwork for her Masters. Why, she wondered, had she never seen them in her own village? As she began to collect data, she visited the few villages where they did live. While there, she would leave her phone number so people could call her if they had anything to report about the birds. One day at the end of the hargila breeding season in 2007, she got a call. A villager In the Kamrup District had cut down a giant tree on his property. The tree contained nine nests, filled with hargila nestlings. 

Once at the scene, people gathered around and laughed at her. They jeered and teased her about her concerns. They were angry and mean. “Why are you lecturing us?” they asked her. Why should we care about such an ugly bird?  Would she pay them to care? Would she come live with them and clean up after the birds? Would she eat the birds on her way home?

Trembling with embarrassment and dismay, Barman thought about her daughters, then just 2 years old. On the way home, she made a decision to delay her PhD work. “I thought, ‘No, I won’t do it now,’” she says. “‘First, I’ll rope in all the people. I’ll win the hearts and minds of the people. We will start a people’s movement. And then, only if I’m successful with the birds, I’ll pursue my dream.”

Her plan was to start with the basics: Meet people. Build friendships. Try to understand community concerns. Remembering the comments from men in the village, she cleaned temples to earn trust and show she was listening. Her compassion ran deep. She recognized that these weren’t bad people. They thought they were doing the right thing: ridding themselves and their properties of a messy bird that was a bad omen. It wasn’t their fault that they thought poorly of hargilas. They just hadn’t learned about the value of wildlife.

Meta Values - 48

Most cruelty that humans unleash animals can be captured into following three philosophical buckets: 

1. Qualia Problem: John and Tom have seen roses, and smelt them. But when they try to explain the “rose-ness of a rose” both their internal experiences of rose being different; their explanations can differ drastically or worse they cannot even explain it.  Nevertheless, both John and Tom are both confident about their explanations. 

2. Philosophical Zombie: John has seen roses, and smelt them. Tom has never seen a rose in his life. But Tom is confident and never shuns away from giving a detailed explanation of a rose. 

3. Chinese Room Argument: Neither John nor Tom have seen a rose in their life. But both John and Tom are extremely confident and never shuns away from giving a detailed explanation of a rose. 

Billions of humans have no rudimentary understanding of our fellow animal family members nor they have the epistemic humility to say “I don’t know” and make an attempt to learn about them. 

This self-induced convenience makes them amoral against animals. This is the sad state of our planet. 

The value is: 

Start saying “I don’t know”. 

Next, every living being on this planet is capable of pain and suffering. 

There is no other measure of morality than to ask yourself - I am causing pain and suffering to other animals? 

It is that simple to shift your conscience from being amoral to being moral toward our fellow animal family. 

The Memory Maker

I work in AI and I can assure you these technologies are not magic but just tools with immense flaws and limitations.

I am a human being and I can assure you that I am an organic entity with abilities handed down to me from millions of years of evolution but nevertheless I am an organic entity with immense flaws and limitations.

The core issue which we are embarking into this century is that the people want to monetize these simple AI technologies by just tapping into my evolutionary flaws and limitations and amplify it, 

If you are intelligent and aware then you can use these tools enhance your prefrontal cortex and without giving a dime nor data to the assholes in silicon valley. Only if you are aware… 

A very good piece by Tim Requarth: The Memory Maker

To understand why we’re so susceptible to false memories requires understanding that the brain doesn’t store memories the way a phone stores photos. When you live through something, your hippocampus— a deep brain structure vaguely shaped like a seahorse—encodes that experience by binding together its constituent pieces: what you saw, what you heard, where you were, how you felt. That bound-together pattern is the memory. Over hours and days, the hippocampus replays these patterns, perhaps while you sleep, gradually strengthening their hold in the cortex, in a process called consolidation. What makes these memories so unlike phone storage, and especially relevant here, is that recalling a memory means the brain must partially relive it. The brain recalls by reactivating some of the same sensory and spatial patterns that were present during the original experience. Your brain doesn’t access a stable, static stored memory of yourself at that summer picnic in the park; your brain recreates it by activating some of the same neural circuitry that fired when you were actually squinting in the sun, actually wiggling your toes in the warmed grass. During recall, it fires again, faintly.

The beauty of memory, not as a static storage bank but as a dynamic process of on-demand re-creation, is that it’s efficient. You can access a tremendous amount of information about your past without having to dedicate special storage space to your personal archive. But that efficiency comes with risks. Each time you replay and reconsolidate a memory, it can subtly change. Other things you’re thinking about during recall, how you feel while recalling it, other, similar memories that activate similar patterns of neurons, these can mix and mingle and, ultimately, change the reconsolidation of the original memory itself. And once changed, it doesn’t revert because there is no gold-standard stored version. There is only the latest replay. And because memories are, essentially, reactivations of specific patterns of sensory and other neural activity, that means that sensory patterns alone can get consolidated as memories. This is a false memory. And a false memory, once seeded, benefits from the same machinery as real ones. And the brain’s fact-checker, the prefrontal cortex, arrives late to the scene: the reactivation of sensory and other neural pathways is already underway, the memory reconstruction already in progress, before any evaluation of whether the memory is genuine even begins.

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Piech’s experience suggests that Sora videos could activate spatial memory, meaning that Sora videos also tripped up the brain’s more fundamental systems for sorting real from imagined. “Although it may be disconcerting to contemplate,” as cognitive psychologist Marcia K. Johnson wrote in a 2006 paper, “true and false memories arise in the same way. Memories are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals, and the social context.” Johnson’s work on source monitoring, which is the brain’s process for sorting reality from imagination, revealed there’s no tag, no stamp in the brain that says this actually happened. Instead, a scene’s qualities during recall—how vivid it is, how spatially coherent, whether it arrives unbidden or requires effort to reconstruct—are what make it feel real or imagined. Memories of actual events are usually richer, more embedded in space and context. Imagined scenes, or recollections of scenes from movies, tend to feel thinner, more schematic. But the distributions overlap, and the brain relies on these imperfect cues to sort memory from imagination.

The trouble is that these cues can mislead. If remembering a synthetic experience activates the brain just widely enough—rich perceptual detail, spatial depth, the feeling of having been somewhere, of having been with someone—it stops registering as fantasy and starts registering as memory. Piech’s recollection of Sora generations were arriving with enough of those qualities to blur the distinction.

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One potential consequence is how these tools could shape identity, at scale. I was particularly taken by a term Deutsch coined: propagandi, or propaganda directed at yourself. If propaganda works by shaping collective memory, propagandi is more atomized, more intimate. You’re the propagandist and the mark, constructing a version of yourself that doesn’t exist, for an audience of one. I called Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams to help me stress-test Deutsch’s speculation. McAdams developed the influential concept of narrative identity—the idea that identity is built from autobiographical memories, that the self you’ll be tomorrow is constructed from the memories you have today. Contaminate the memories, and the identity may shift. When I described what Sora users like Deutsch were experiencing, McAdams said he hadn’t heard of the phenomenon yet, “but a moment’s reflection suggests that it is inevitable.” These AI videos could “ultimately be encoded and reworked as ‘things that happened to me,’ and then perhaps ‘important things that happened to me that are now part of my life story.’” Propagandi, in other words, isn’t just a clever coinage. It names a mechanism for rewriting who you are.

A hopeful read isn’t hard to find. Piech made a K-pop dance video of herself, fluid and confident, moving in ways she can’t. After watching it a few times, she told me, she started to feel like maybe she actually could. Athletes have used visualization for decades; maybe Sora was just a more vivid format. Therapists working with trauma have long known that memory can be beneficially malleable; perhaps tools like Sora, carefully deployed, could help people revise the scenes that haunt them. 

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But something else was nagging at me, in addition to the potential psychological consequences: Even something as intimate as autobiographical memory doesn’t form in isolation. It’s fundamentally social. In a process scientists endearingly call maternal reminiscing, children learn to shape experience into story through dialogue with caregivers, a process that continues throughout life: the friend who leans in or looks skeptical, the partner who remembers it differently, the listener who asks a question that reframes the whole event. Even the distraction level of the listener can affect how well we remember our own memories. In one experiment, a psychologist had participants tell a story to a friend who was secretly distracted. A month later, the speakers remembered their own experience less well simply because of how a listener behaved during their retelling of it. The attentive listener isn’t just receiving the memory; they’re helping to construct it.

Now imagine referencing something your friend doesn’t share, because it never happened. The blank look. The awkward silence. You might question yourself, wondering if you imagined it. You might question them. Or you might learn to stop bringing it up altogether, retreating from actual human social interaction to more AI simulacra of human social interactions, which never push back, which always affirm. The false memory, born in isolation, produces isolation again when it enters conversation.

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Some nights after our son is asleep, my wife and I sit on the couch and reconstruct the day for each other. What he said at breakfast, the weird thing he did with his yogurt spoon, whether the stalling tactics at bedtime were really that outlandish or whether we were both just tired. Sometimes we seem to disagree on the details, even if we were both there. She’ll point out something I didn’t notice, or I’ll interpret something we both noticed differently, or she’ll add a layer of interpretation by connecting his actions to similar actions the day before. The narrative shifts a little, adjusts a little to accommodate both of us, and by the time we’ve moved on we both begin to consolidate memories of something neither of us quite experienced—which, in the end, is the uncomfortable truth: Memory and experience are not synonymous. I used to think of this process as more akin to fact-checking, of sifting fact from embellishment, reality from interpretation. But it’s not quite that. It’s something more meaningful than checking facts: sitting there, remembering them together.

Morel Mushrooms - The Last Incorruptible Thing!

The morel is the Last Incorruptible Thing. You cannot plant them. You cannot buy them in stores. You can only spot them in the wild. Morels demand complete surrender to nature’s whims. They grow for three to four weeks each spring, and no one knows when or where. They pop up like middle fingers to corporate control.

Morels encourage revolt against the digital panopticon. No self-respecting morel hunter posts their hot spots online or reveals their finds in real time. Morels cannot be recorded by Ring or tracked by GPS. They are immune from AI chicanery. Make an AI morel and watch no one care: digital tricks hold no power here. Morel hunters guard their secrets in the analog world: in the depths of the forests and the recesses of their minds. Morels are escape artists, and you escape with them.

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A proper morel hunt requires that you walk the woods for hours with eyes to the ground. The outside world fades into irrelevance, a distant realm of misplaced priorities like mortgages and jobs. In the real world, the morel world, you seek loamy soil, south-facing slopes, fallen sycamores. You go slow. You dodge branches and climb creek beds. You take nothing for granted.

With this knowledge, you learn not only the mushroom but the land. What you can grasp from the crunch of a leaf or the rise of a flower. You sense when the season is starting and when it’s getting too late. You know that you could be wrong, and that being wrong is the most pleasant surprise of all.

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Did I actually find morels in these places? Shit if I’d tell!

I got scratched, bruised, bloodied, and sore, but never bored. My thoughts stayed captive to the forest floor. When grief ripped through me, I retraced my steps, wondering if I’d missed one, and often I had. That’s the mercy of morels: they are reticent by nature, and when they reveal themselves to you upon your return, it’s like getting the do-over you don’t get in life.

Live fast, die young, leave a good-tasting corpse. Morels aren’t meant to last, so you can’t mourn them when they’re gone.

- More Here

Cells vs. Neurons - Wisdom Of Michael Levin

Michael Levin agrees with the plant neurobiologists that neurons are overrated, and that other cells can do what neurons do, just more slowly. ‘Whenever I’m at a conference with neuroscientists, I like to ask them to define a neuron,’ he told me. ‘They list maybe five things neurons can do, and I point out that every cell in the body can do those things.’ By which he means, and has demonstrated, that all cells can communicate (both electrically and chemically), form networks, and store information. ‘I’m not denigrating neuroscience,’ he said. ‘I’m saying neuroscience is widely applicable way beyond neurons. Neuroscience is no more about neurons than computer science is about your laptop.’ The term ‘plant neurobiology’ does not offend him.

- Michael Pollan (via Tim)

Culture - The Word That Fucked Up Our Species

I have written so many times about how almost all atrocities committed against our fellow animal family members is not considered immoral since people take umbrage behind the fucked up excuses of “culture”. 

People use culture to macro bullshit and not focus on micro morality which is precious for life on earth. 

Alex Nowrasteh’s wonderful piece is looking at this monster at a different angle. Different angle but same monster. 

The cleanest test is the divided-country natural experiment. North Korea and South Korea share a language, ethnicity, history, and culture up to 1945. One is among the richest countries on earth, the other among the poorest. East and West Germany diverged dramatically under different institutions and converged after reunification. Mainland China stagnated under Mao while Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong prospered, all four sharing Chinese culture. In every case, the culture was identical on both sides of the border. The incentives, shaped by the institutions, are what changed. The outcome followed the institution, not the culture. Untangling causality is difficult, sometimes impossible, but that’s no reason to embrace a false explanation like “the culture made them do it.”

At its root, the culture discourse is anti-intellectual. Culture is a faux explanation for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Use AI to search the literature if you have to because other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. The cultural explanation is the one you reach for when you’ve decided the search isn’t worth your time. Better to remain quiet if culture is the only explanation you’ve got. Here are some examples.

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If a country is poor because of its culture, nobody has to examine the bad incentives facing members of that society. Intellectual laziness explains the rest. Finding the price, the constraint, the institutional mechanism that creates an incentive is hard, but invoking culture as if it’s a magical exogenous decider lets you stop searching. Cultural explanations are cheap to produce, requiring only anecdotes rather than data, prices, or evidence. It feels like an answer because it has the grammatical structure of one. “Japanese people ride trains because of their culture” masquerades as an explanation, but it’s just a tautology.

Culture is endogenous to everything. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is circular reasoning. Every cultural explanation must first survive a price, incentive, and institutional audit. Few of them do, but those that do are extraordinary findings, which is perhaps another explanation why so many claim it. Nobody would let economists get away with explaining a recession of high unemployment with the explanation, “It’s the economy.” We shouldn’t let others get away with the equally lazy non-explanation of “it’s the culture.”

 

Animal Research Doesn’t Need Better Messaging. It Needs an Exit Strategy

The problem is not poor communication by researchers, but systemic lack of transparency and accountability in animal labs. You cannot whitewash an industry that is fraught with infractions that clearly document negligence and abuse of animals in labs.

Industry defenders claim that animal research is “heavily regulated.” In reality, oversight is largely dependent on self-policing. The cornerstone of federal oversight is built on voluntary compliance through an “assurance” document submitted by the laboratory. Once this is approved, the federal oversight agency “grants considerable authority to institutions for self-regulation.” Compounding this problem, inspections by federal authorities are infrequent, often occurring only once every few years and are typically announced in advance.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of animals used in experiments—by most estimates numbering over 100 million mice—are not even covered under the US Animal Welfare Act. Internal oversight bodies, known as the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, are embedded within the very institutions they regulate, creating inherent conflicts of interest.

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Another common claim is that critics rely on outdated information. But delays in public awareness are largely a product of the system’s opacity. Accessing records requires the filing of formal public records requests that can take months or longer to process. Even official databases lag behind real-time conditions, when they are even available. What is perceived as “old news” is often simply the first moment the public is allowed to learn what has already occurred.

Perhaps the most striking attempt to downplay these issues is the comparison of laboratory violations to incident reports at daycare centers. The analogy collapses under even minimal scrutiny. The harms documented in research facilities—botched surgical procedures, burns, dehydration, strangulation, and fatal injuries—bear no resemblance to childcare incidents.

Even basic “housekeeping” standards are not consistently met in labs. Animals have died due to overheating, drowning, exposure, and unsafe enclosures. In one recent case, dozens of rabbits drowned in preventable accidents. These are not edge cases; they are part of a documented pattern that raises serious questions about the system’s ability to safeguard even minimal welfare.

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More importantly, the conversation should not stop at reform. Increasingly, scientific and regulatory communities are investing in alternatives that do not rely on animal use. Emerging methods like organ-on-chip technologies, in silico studies, advanced cell cultures, and more are now being prioritized by the US FDA and NIH for their ability to deliver human-relevant outcomes. These innovations did not emerge from efforts to defend the status quo, but from recognition that better approaches are both possible and necessary.

Animal research does not need a more effective communication strategy to explain away its problems. It needs a plan to move beyond them. With over 90 percent of animal experiments failing to produce meaningful results for human health, this is a system that is seriously underperforming because it is scientifically unsound. Add to that the failed oversight of millions more animals that can be reasonably cared for, and you have an industry that no amount of reframing can improve. The question is not whether the industry communicates the right message. It is whether the system, as it currently exists, can be justified at all.

- More Here

Fuck… thank god for Max otherwise I wouldn’t have lived with these miserable sapiens and hence probably for past 15 years I haven’t taken a single pill nor been to a doctor. 

Derek Parfit - What Is The Impact Of Thousands Of Small Environmental Or Personal Abuses Over Time?

One particular example I’ve always liked (especially since as a kid I had similar thoughts) provides a vivid illustration of the psychology underlying the dismissal of global warming. It shows that the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur out of sight or after so many steps as to seem distant. The example (embroidered a bit here) appears in Derek Parfit’s book “Reasons and Persons,” where he discusses the case of a man strapped to a hospital bed, say by a psychopath, in some indeterminate place with electrodes attached to his heart. Rotation of a dial on the other side of the world minusculely and imperceptibly increases the current in the electrodes and the stress on the man’s heart.

Perhaps a free piece of candy, a pleasant buzz, and a snapshot with the dial are on offer from a mysterious donor as an incentive to anyone in the distant location who twists the dial. Assuming it takes 10,000 people, each rotating the dial once to electrocute the victim, what degree of guilt, if any, do we assign to each individual dial-twister? After all, none of the dial-twisters know the poor man in question nor have they ever been in his part of the world. They might well doubt there is such a man if the situation isn’t clearly communicated to them or if it is ridiculed by a few influential people. Whatever their excuses, however, they are likely to be at least vaguely aware of rumors about the situation. How then do we deposit all these tiny bits of personal guilt into some moral bank account to save the victim. Or do we just shrug and dismiss the significant probability of ordinary indifferent people killing the distant stranger?

The real question of course is, What is the impact of thousands of small environmental or personal abuses over time? In the context of this rather morbid tale of a psychopath, most environmentalists would probably opt to stop rotating the dial or at least to rotate it very infrequently. 

- More Here

Curiosity Is No Solo Act

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

- More Here

The Social Edge of Intelligence

If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cognitive offloading, homogenization of creative output, and the elimination of interaction-dense work—then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement. Its successes, rather than failures, create a spiral: a slow attenuation of the very substrate it feeds on, spelling doom.

This is the Social Edge Paradox, and the intellectual tradition it draws from is older and more interdisciplinary than most AI commentary acknowledges.

Michael Tomasello’s evolutionary research establishes that human cognition diverged from other primates by a process other than superior individual processing power. The real impetus came through the capacity for collaborative activity with shared goals and complementary roles. He argues that even private thought is “fundamentally dialogic and social” in structure—an internalization of interaction patterns. Autonomous neural capacity is far from enough to account for the abilities of human thought.

Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis quantifies the link: neocortex ratios predict social group size across primates; language evolved as a mechanism for managing relationships at scales too large for grooming. Two-thirds of conversation is social, relational, reputational. Language is often mistaken as an information pipe, but it is really a social coordination technology.

My own position is that collective intent engineering, found in forms as familiar as simple brainstorming, accounts for most frontier cognitive expansion. The intelligent algorithms of today have not been built with this critical function in mind.

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The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world.

The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone. It was forged in conversation, argument, institutional friction, and collaborative struggle. It lives in the spaces between people, and it shows up in AI capabilities only because those spaces were rich enough to leave linguistic traces worth learning from.

Every time a company automates an entry-level role, it saves a salary and loses a learning curve, unless it compensates. Every time a knowledge worker delegates a draft to an AI without engaging critically, the statistical thinning of the organizational record advances by an imperceptible increment. Every time an organization mistakes polished output for strategic progress, it consumes cognitive surplus without generating new knowledge.

None of these individual acts is catastrophic. However, their compound effect may be.

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade are not those with the highest AI utilization rates. They are those that understand something the epoch-chaining thought experiment makes vivid: that AI’s capabilities are an inheritance from the complexity of human social life. And inheritances, if consumed without reinvestment, eventually run out. This is particularly critical as AI becomes heavily customized for our organizational culture.

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The Social Edge is more than a metaphor. It is the literal boundary between what AI can do well and what it will keep struggling with due to fundamental internal contradictions. Furthermore, the framework asks us all to pay attention to how the very investment thesis behind AI also contains the seeds of its own failure. And it reminds leaders that AI’s frontier today is set by the richness of the social world that produced the data it learned from.

- More Here