Two days left in the first month of the year. How’s things? Feel accomplished? Feel like you put the shoulder into the yoke of 2024? Yeah, me neither. However! We do not exist to live in our disappointments, but to remember to strive ever forward, and to choose what direction forward is in for ourselves. Forgive yourself first, so that you can forgive everyone else. Feet shoulder-width apart, bend at the knees, good first step and punch, and drive your hips. You’ve got this.
Inputs
1: I maintain that one of the more profound and important things said during the Bush the Second administration was one of the more mocked in the media, which was Donald Rumsfeld talking about known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. The four quadrant theory of knowledge is vitally important to understanding one’s own limitations and to making better and more informed choices, even when those choices are informed by knowing what you don’t know.
Venkatesh Rao goes in a bit on this in relation to cultural identity and AI here. He discusses attempts to turn what we know into something we don’t, and evolving that generated freedom from truths to create new truths around which to rally, a danger that is easily weaponized against those who those truths look to cast as others, as outsiders, as opponents to a mobilized belief. As he says in the post, “You have to eventually come to terms with what you choose to unknow.”
2: Speaking of unknown knowns, Sam Altman would prefer that we not know how ChatGPT and generative AIs came to know what we don’t know that they know, especially as they’ve gotten very good at replicating their inputs so exactly that they show clear signs of plagiarism inherent in their models. Instead, he’d prefer we willingly give up the mass of human knowledge to him for free, and that we pay for the right to know it back again.
Gabe and Tycho get at the heart of it fairly precisely.
3: Finally, something we thought was a known known, that cloning would be our history. It wasn’t until reading this piece that my memories of the hype around cloning bubbled back, from Dolly to popular media with cloning-related plotlines, to the fears around the theological and moral implications of cloning humans. And all of that sort of went up in smoke, falling straight off the Hype Cycle past the trough of disillusionment into the nether of unrealized futures.