brianrgordon.bsky.social
@brianrgordon.bsky.social
Strategist on the innovation frontier. Cognitive Scientist.

strategy, agency, creativity, innovation, (meta)science, organization, 4e cognition, philosophy and practice of science
Pinned
Quick intro:

I am a strategist mostly; but I approach strategy using a 4e cognitive science lens. I split time between industry & research. I care about science, R&D, invention, innovation, and organization - each broadly construed. And of course, cognition. It’s been a journey getting here.
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the whole AI Herrenvolk Thoughocracy schtick annoys me way less these days - it's the intellectual equivalent of a clown in underpants slapping themself on the back, like, whatevs, have at it

their TOTAL IGNORANCE OF FOUNDATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE, on the other hand, DRIVES ME INTO WILD FITS OF RAGE
You're telling me an AI researcher is myopic and almost completely uninformed about other fields of study that could complement their own? No way; that bunch is famously multidisciplinary and supportive of the humanities.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
August 28, 2025 at 12:11 AM
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AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAALHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
August 13, 2025 at 1:46 PM
The anti-AI takes on bluesky are honestly as puzzling and disconnected from reality as the e/acc and doomer takes on Twitter.
August 23, 2025 at 4:38 PM
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I know BlueSky is usually reflexively hostile to generative AI, regardless of use case or nuance (a reason why I post here less than other platforms), but I didn't realize it was also generally against autonomous vehicles until I posted about Waymo's latest (peer reviewed) safety statistics. Weird.
August 23, 2025 at 2:51 PM
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Not sure which is more clearly a millennial religion

The belief that existing technologies are just the heralds and forerunners of “AGI”

Or the belief that existing tech is a “bubble,” a fraudulent Babylon whose millions of deceived followers will melt away like snow when its falsehood is unmasked
August 23, 2025 at 12:30 PM
As someone who still mostly posts there, I have to say this does sting a bit. Personally, I would say I’m more resigned to talking to the few mutuals who persist and maybe the algorithms than anything so post-apocalyptic as Kelsey seems to suggest. But I’m a small fry, at best 🤕.
That discourse persists in the teeming corpse of old Twitter is evidence of the richness of the decay, a failwhalefall covered in the benthic creatures who know other sources of content are few and far between and none guaranteed to have as much rotting meat left to feast upon.
August 22, 2025 at 5:33 PM
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Some people in academia give the name "positivism" or "empiricism" to just anything that involves counting anything at any point. And, like, I just feel like everyone needs to aim higher. Be more ambitious.
August 22, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Interesting. It looks like the true believers and hypsters may feed the bubble on the way up, but it’s a different group that picks up the pieces during the retrenchment, when the technology diffuses. Of course, bikes aren’t a general purpose technology, so not clear how this might generalize.
V good, v interesting & open access. An excellent combination.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
August 21, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Wait, what? This is crazy. Democratizing access to financial markets isn’t always a good thing. And doing it on a platform designed to exploit dopamine hit seeking behavior seems doubly bad.
Many thanks to a friend for making this. Cannot believe we’re letting ppl gamble on both bball and soybeans on the same platform.
August 20, 2025 at 11:15 PM
Within finance, excel is mostly used as a tool to write fiction, so at least this use case remains intact.
August 20, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Pieces like this are as guilty of factual, conceptual, and theoretical gerrymandering as the extreme boosterism we see in pieces like AI 2027, Situational Awareness, or Yudkowskiy’s fanfic Lovecraftian writings. There is a middle ground grounded in solid science wrt the tech and the economics of AI.
August 20, 2025 at 3:51 PM
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This article on how 95% of ai integration fails, *but not due to technical limitations,* reinforces how wildly transformative this tech is likely to be in my opinion. Radically rewriting processes at companies is hard! Most won't be able to do it!
August 20, 2025 at 2:32 PM
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1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.
August 19, 2025 at 4:59 AM
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"data: everything that happened in the 1990s"
May 20, 2025 at 8:00 PM
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this is not meant as a hot take or a unique insight but it's remarkable how a lot of scientific discourse is about methods, data, and findings, whereas what really does most of the heavy lifting happens to be the assumptions
May 8, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Inventing programming in 2025 is just the kind of bold visionary stuff we expect from SV thunkleaders.
ho-oooh-ly SHIT man, the stanford gang might. just. be. ON to something this time. like, a NEW SCIENCE of TELLING COMPUTERS WHAT TO DO WITH INSTRUCTIONS. incredible. I am fee-eeh-lin BLESSED
May 6, 2025 at 3:15 PM
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ho-oooh-ly SHIT man, the stanford gang might. just. be. ON to something this time. like, a NEW SCIENCE of TELLING COMPUTERS WHAT TO DO WITH INSTRUCTIONS. incredible. I am fee-eeh-lin BLESSED
May 6, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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Psychically brutal time for those of us who believe in embodied skill developed through practice, appropriate expertise for the task, and situated knowledge as the proper basis for running a society, a government, an organization, etc
May 1, 2025 at 9:57 PM
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THIS IS ONE NEURON! Jaw dropping.

It distributes a particular neurotransmitter (norepinephrine) across the mouse brain; it’s a locus coeruleus neuron.

@jeremiahycohen.bsky.social and colleagues at the @alleninstitute.bsky.social are using new biotech to see things never seen before.
April 15, 2025 at 4:21 PM
This is a very interesting hypothesis on the role compositional language and its analogs play in episodic memory capabilities, bridging humans and other animals. Language underwrites content addressability in common spaces, which otherwise see multiple episodic overwrites ‘blur’ discernible traces.
Would you like to learn more about memory in non-human animals? Please, check today's exciting post from Hunter Gentry (Kansas State University) and Cameron Buckner (University of Florida) if you want to do so.
open.substack.com/pub/thememor...
Where did I leave my episode, again?
Hunter Gentry (Kansas State University) and Cameron Buckner (University of Florida)
open.substack.com
April 15, 2025 at 5:22 PM
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AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WELCOME TO HELL, AI INDUSTRY
April 1, 2025 at 11:56 PM
Honestly, it’s about time. Brians are a profound mystery, even to ourselves. I for one am excited to see where this research leads!
Big day for Brians! Please tag a Brian who should join us in this research.

Scientists have learned a lot about brains, but they know hardly anything about Brians. That's why we're shifting from brain science to Brian science.

🧠📈 alleninstitute.org/news/announc...
Announcing a shift from brain science to Brian science
Leading researchers at Allen Institute to study interests, behaviors, and brains of Brians.
alleninstitute.org
April 1, 2025 at 6:45 PM
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Stephen Toulmin was born OTD 1922.

If we get to Heaven and are offered eternal residence with Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Montaigne, few of us will ask instead to join Descartes, Newton, and “the exact-thinking but darker-souled geniuses of the 17th century.”

#Philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫 #Booksky
March 25, 2025 at 3:13 PM
This is very true. Science may progress one funeral at a time, but a deep seated animus towards particular theories/approaches is a powerful motivation and a hallmark of science.
March 27, 2025 at 4:26 AM