Tag: intuition

Categories
AI Business

The Topography of a Face

I found myself staring at the physical geometry of a conversation the other day—not the words, but the topography of the faces delivering them.

Elad Gil recently shared a fascinating experiment during a conversation with Tim Ferriss. He’s been uploading photos of startup founders into AI models and asking the machines to predict if they’d be successful, purely based on their “micro-features.”

“Because if you think about it, we do this all the time when we meet people, right? We quickly try to create an assessment of that person, their personality, and what they’re like. There are all these micro-features—like, do you have crow’s feet by your eyes, which suggests that your smiles are genuine? […] So, I have this whole set of prompts that I’ve been messing around with, just for fun, around: ‘Can you extrapolate a person’s personality based off of a few images?'”

He notes the model breaks down the crow’s feet and the furrowed brows, extrapolating a personality from a static frame. It’s a parlor trick, perhaps. But it works because it holds a mirror to our oldest, most unexamined instinct.

We are all amateur phrenologists of the human face. We sit across a table, measure the crinkle of an eye or the tightness of a jaw, and we build a rapid, invisible architecture of trust or suspicion. Over decades of investing and making career choices, I’ve often leaned heavily on this silent language. I’ve backed founders because their intensity felt genuine, and I’ve passed on others because something in their posture felt misaligned.

But if I am brutally honest, that intuition has sometimes been a mask for my own blind spots. I’ve held on to failing investments for far too long because I trusted a reassuring smile. We like to think our gut instinct is a sophisticated instrument. Often, it is just a pattern-matching engine running on deeply flawed historical data.

Now, we are handing that very human habit over to a machine. We prompt the AI to become a “cold reader,” and it obliges, predicting who will be the quiet observer and who will deliver the dry wit.

The unsettling part isn’t that the machine might get it wrong. The unsettling part is that it might get it exactly right—by mimicking the very same rapid, superficial judgments we make every day, just at a terrifying scale.

We are teaching silicon to read the human code. The future will belong to those who realize the code was always written in our own biases.

Categories
Living Mathematics

The Curve That Blinds Us

There is a fundamental mismatch between the hardware in our heads and the software of the modern world. We are linear creatures living in an exponential age. We can be stunned by exponential growth.

Our ancestors evolved in a world where inputs matched outputs. If you walked for a day, you covered a specific distance. If you walked for two days, you covered twice that distance. If you gathered firewood for an hour, you had a pile; for two hours, you had a bigger pile. Survival depended on the ability to predict the path of a spear or the changing of seasons—linear, predictable progressions.

But nature and technology often behave differently. They follow a curve that our intuition simply cannot map.

If a lily pad doubles in size every day and covers the entire pond on the 30th day, on which day does it cover half the pond? Our linear intuition wants to say the 15th day. But the answer, of course, is the 29th day.

For twenty-nine days, the pond looks mostly empty. The growth is happening, but it feels deceptively slow. We look at the water on day 20, or even day 25, and think, “Nothing is happening here. This is manageable.” We mistake the early flatness of an exponential curve for a lack of progress.

This is the “deception phase” of exponential growth. It is where dreams die because the results haven’t shown up yet. It is where we ignore a virus because the case numbers seem low. It is where we dismiss a new technology because the early versions are clumsy and comical.

Ernest Hemingway captured this feeling perfectly in The Sun Also Rises when a character is asked how he went bankrupt. His answer:

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

That is the essence of the exponential. The “gradually” is the long, flat lead-up where we feel safe. The “suddenly” is the vertical wall that appears overnight.

The tragedy is not that we fail to do the math—we can all multiply by two. The tragedy is that we fail to feel the math. We judge the future by looking in the rearview mirror, projecting a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow. But when the road curves upward toward the sky, looking backward is the fastest way to crash.

To navigate this world, we must learn to distrust our gut when it says “nothing is changing.” We have to look for the compounding mechanisms beneath the surface. We have to respect the 29th day.

Categories
Creativity Tools Writing

The Untamed Genius of Not Thinking: Bradbury, Creativity and the Two Minds

“Don’t think.” At first glance, Ray Bradbury’s famous advice on the creative act seems almost heretical. How can we create anything of substance, anything brilliant and transcendent, without deep cognitive focus and analytical thinking?

And yet, there is profound wisdom in Bradbury’s deceptively simple directive when we consider what true creativity demands – a willingness to surrender to the uncharted waters of the unconscious mind, to temporarily disengage from the constraints of pure rationality, and allow the kaleidoscopic shards of our imagination to swirl and coalesce into novel, unorthodox forms.

For Bradbury’s “Don’t think” is not advocating mindlessness, but rather a state of expansive awareness, a openness to the unbridled torrent of insights, images and ideas that bubble up from the our mind’s depths when we stop trying to consciously control and direct the creative flow. It is the practiced meditation of clearing one’s mind to simply observe thoughts, associations and impressions to let them arise and fall away without judgement.

What Bradbury observed is that the act of conscious, analytical thinking, while critical for problem-solving, can actually impede the creative process. It tends to force us into our pre-existing neural pathways, compelling us to tread the well-worn grooves of prior patterns, making linear associations along very predictable lines. Creativity, on the other hand, beckons us into the wild underbrush of our minds, off the beaten path, into uncharted realms where we can be liberated from our self-imposed boundaries.

There’s a connection between Bradbury’s advice and the concepts of right brain vs. left brain thinking. The left hemisphere is the seat of our logical, sequential, linguistic reasoning – the part of our mind that categorizes, defines, organizes and scrutinizes details. Our right brain, in contrast, is the hub of intuition, holistic perception, innovation and making new associations between disparate concepts.

When Bradbury said “Don’t think,” he was advocating taking a temporary pause from our left-brain dominance to allow the ingenious talents of our right brain to take primacy – to let it make unexpected leaps of creative fancy, to perceive reality from new angles, to connect ideas through metaphor and visual imagery rather than getting bogged down in deep analytical scrutiny. To let it just jam.

Our left brain’s vital role is not eliminated, of course. Both hemispheres ultimately work in concert. But for tapping into a more creative flow, giving the reins to the right brain’s propensity for unrestrained imagination and divergent thinking can open up new spheres of inspiration, unconstrained by us overthinking analytically.

From this space of simply allowing our mind to widely wander and make new neural associations, true creative breakthroughs are often born. As Bradbury knew, sometimes the greatest innovative genius emerges not from perspiration and analytical rigor, but from setting aside focused thought altogether and trusting the untamed wisdom of the unconscious, innovative mind. Taking a break and going for a walk outside has a way of helping open up that process, lifting our mood and opening us up to new insights and connections.

“Don’t think” is a refreshing perspective on the richness of human cognition. It recognizes the vital role of holistic, nonlinear and imaginative modes of processing – aspects of our mindful intelligence often overshadowed by our pure left-brain rationality. Bradbury’s imperative frees us to fully embrace the kaleidoscopic potency of our creative right minds.