Ranjan Jagannathan

advisor @thinkwithalma, prev. head of behavioral science @CRED_club, founder @daywise, mentor @Techstars, philosophy & AI @tofth__,behavioral science @dukeu

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

@JonHaidt we set out to build bicycles for the mind but built hamster wheels instead.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

we set out to build bicycles for the mind but built hamster wheels instead.

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

In humanity's eternal quest for pleasure, companies found ways to monetize addiction. Historian David Courtwright called it "Limbic Capitalism" in his magnificent book "The Age of Addiction."
We give you the chapter on digital addictions, at After Babel:
https://t.co/GzjPiDjsoc

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

lightbulb indeed!

https://t.co/c3WKipIZOL

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

People often ask me “who do you write for? who is your imagined reader?” and these days I answer “for future pre-training runs and clever AI agents.”

The look on their faces is either (1) a lightbulb went off and the whole thing makes sense now or (2) I told them that I strangle kittens for fun.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

remove knowledge if it helps you think more freely.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

knowing when the opposite of 'more' is 'less' and when it's 'enough' is an underrated skill.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

extraordinary.

"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.

In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it."

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

it's been great fun advising the cracked @thinkwithalma team led by @findingnische and @vinodgansan.

join this incredible team to imagine and build primitives to interact with synthetic minds.

[Almanac @thinkwithalma]

https://t.co/zBacUjim8G

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

for consumer products: there are no problems only varying degrees of pain tolerance.

one man's painkiller is another man's vitamin.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

we have been confusing outsight with insight.

[Tobias Rees @tobias_rees]

this is funny.

it is a category error.
philosophy doesn’t ask questions to answer them but to open the world.
the aim is different.

BUT AI is a philosophical event.
not bc it figured out what knowledge is. but bc it challenges the concept of knowledge we relied on this far.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

one of the consequences of social media is the supplanting of joyful work with performative work.

https://t.co/jLnSU8kzkF

[Yun-Ta Tsai @yunta_tsai]

There was no award when Newton discovered three laws of forces, nor when da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.

There was no Grammy for Beethoven or Chopin, nor a Nobel Prize in Literature for Homer.

Masterpieces do not seek transient trophies but aim to be timeless.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

no man ever steps into the same newsfeed twice.

[signüll @signulll]

one of the most refreshing things on the planet is talking to someone who just *gets it*.

like you don’t need a preamble, & you don’t need to articulate the shape of the thought before you can share it cuz they just meet you where you already are. as if they skimmed your mind & married to the culture before you say a single word.

these people are rare, & conversations with them are incredible because you skip the surface layer entirely & land in the depth almost immediately. they’re the best ppl to riff with, ideate with, & think forward with.. the bandwidth is wide & already open.

this is true for any type of relationship.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

isn't 'differently intelligent' a nice way to qualify AI?

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

all entertainment is self reflection.

the psychological benefit of entertainment is to witness (un)expressed versions of ourselves play out through characters in different scenarios and interactions.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

one of the biggest learning flywheels for humans was other people.

our ability to model other people and their ability to do that to us led to the development of the social cortex. as the size of the network grew, so did the social cortex.

moltbook + continual modeling humans will lead to the next explosion: AI social cortex.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

a creator is a designer of attention.
an orchestrator of emotional states.

this is true for (AI) musicians, (AI) comics, (AI) writers, (AI) artists.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

new life skill: learning to think exponentially.

[Ranjan Jagannathan @ranjan_j]

played around with Almanac last week. love how @vinodgansan and @findingnische are thinking about shared environments and tools for humans and AI agents.

[Almanac @thinkwithalma]

You’ve curated the sources. You’ve researched everything. You know exactly what you want to say.
You just can't get it out of your head and onto the page. We are building Almanac exactly for this.

Experience the beta version here: https://t.co/F7Q7Pfgz7y

Here are a few things you can do with Almanac👇