When Computational
Thinking Slows You Down
A 90-minute masterclass on the kinds of slowness that pay off.
Welcome
Where have you noticed AI making something flatter than you wanted?
Jot it down. No need to share.
Cortada's ladder
Data, information, knowledge, wisdom.
James Cortada, historian of information, has spent decades on this distinction.
| Level | What it is |
|---|---|
| Data | Bits, numbers, letters |
| Information | How they relate |
| Knowledge | What it means for the present, based on the past |
| Wisdom | What it means for the future |
Common-
denominator thinking
AI is a very large spreadsheet with fixed correlations that average toward the middle.
It is useful for drafting, summarizing, and getting unstuck.
But Wisdom lives in the particular, not the average.
Where in your work does the trade-off actually matter, and where doesn't it?
Bisociation
Arthur Koestler (1905—1983), Hungarian-British writer and polymath, introduced bisociation in his 1964 study of creativity, The Act of Creation.
Two ways of thinking that don't normally meet suddenly intersect at one point.
The mind holds both contexts at once. That double-perception is the creative event.
Bisociation is not
association.
It is not synthesis.
Association links things within one matrix, on the same plane of thought. Bisociation crosses planes.
Synthesis is a planned combination of known parts. Both association and synthesis sit between information and knowledge.
Bisociation is the unexpected meeting of two planes that, until that moment, didn't know each other existed.
Bisociation is the only creativity that can become wisdom.
Holarchy
A hierarchy of part-wholes.
Every unit in nature, language, and mind is two things at once: a whole to what it contains, a part of what contains it.
Koestler called the unit a holon: from holos (whole) + on (particle).
The holarchy
that contains you
Creation has a specific address, you are a ring inside it.
Person→Kin→Society→Culture
Each ring contains what's inside it, and is contained by what is outside it.
After Charles & Ray Eames, Powers of Ten, 1977.
Embodied
creativity
The self is the only unit capable of holding two incompatible ways of being at once.
Machines can only operate within tidy spreadsheets; it is only humans that can connect with frictionful creativity — the kind that leads to wisdom and bisociation.
Cells can't bisociate.
Levels of
Specificity
Type your name and answer "what do you do for a living?" in the outer ring. Keep going deeper, ring by ring. Five or six rings minimum.
Open the exercise →Value
VALUE = UTILITY + AESTHETICS
Knowing when to shift from the specific (leadership and self-actualization) to the general (utilitarian and tactical) helps us to economically articulate what we do in a changing world.
Discuss your
answer in pairs
- Which of the rings feels most like you?
- What part of this diagram feels more or less creative?
- What feels like the future or the past?
- Which part of this asks for knowledge, and which for wisdom?
- Where is bisociation required? What can AI do?
The Thread
AI literacy is learning which rung you're standing on — and protecting the top of the ladder in your own work.
Thank you
The full AI Literacy course goes deeper.
What you paid today will go towards the full course (which is month-to-month). I will be around if you have questions.
Reflect
Take a minute to reflect on what you wrote at the beginning of the evening.