Keith Garrett, coy technologist, father, and former marine, comes on to discuss Ted Chiang’s masterful “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.” We talk about the benefits of forgetfulness, the limits of attention, the difficulty of assessing the benfits of cognitively affecting technologies, biases, colonialism, religion, and traffic.

Show notes:

• Read “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”! Online or buy Exhalation wherever you buy books.
• Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers
• Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases
• The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes
• Socratese’s story of Egyptian king Thamus and the invention of writing
• Ted Chiang on the dangers of runaway AI relative to the dangers of no-holds-barred capitalism: Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear