104: Jellyfish Signaling with Sam Livingston-Gray

Greater Than Code

• Episode: 104: Jellyfish Signaling with Sam Livingston-Gray
• Website: Greater Than Code
• Feed URL: https://www.greaterthancode.com/feed/podcast
• Duration: 01:03:17
• Published: 2018-11-07 06:00

In this panelist episode, Sam Livingston-Gray talks about driving evolution, fitness landscapes and functions, how humans make decisions, and scaling, optimizing, and thriving as individuals and communities. Check out a new podcast called The Local Maximum! It's hosted by Max Sklar who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Foursquare. He covers a lot of fascinating topics: AI, building better products, and the latest technology news from his unique perspective. Max interviews Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Creators of all types - with half of the guests being successful women in software and tech. Subscribe to the Local Maximum podcast wherever you listen! Panelists: Jessica Kerr | Janelle Klein | John K. Sawers  | Sam Livingston-Gray Show Notes: 01:33 – Is Sam a Jellyfish? 03:14 – Sam’s Superpower: Making Connections Between Weird Things 05:17 – Driving Evolution 08:19 – “Fitness Landscape” and “Fitness Function” aiweirdness.com 21:17 – How Humans Make Decisions Sam Livingston-Gray: Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies Saccade Blindsight by Peter Watts   33:43 – Completion Bias 40:52 – The Importance of Clarity of Communication in Code 45:49 – Mimicry and The Theory of Mind 52:18 – Scaling, Optimizing, and Thriving as Individuals and Communities 57:38 – Rhetoric and Interacting with People Everything's an Argument Want to help keep us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag, and bring us to conferences near you? Support us via Patreon! Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to [email protected]. Are you Greater Than Code? Submit guest blog posts to [email protected] Please leave us a review on iTunes! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode. To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and interactive transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Transcript: JESSICA:  Welcome to Episode 104 of Greater Than Code. I am here today with Janelle Klein. JANELLE:  And I am here with my good friend, John Sawers. JOHN:  And I am here and I'm happy to introduce an episode all about Sam Livingston-Gray. JESSICA:  Yay! Finally, we cornered him. JOHN:  Sam Livingston-Gray has been a dad since 2008, a Rubyist since 2006, a Portlander since 2001 and a programmer since, at least 1998, a juggler since 1988 and a human seems 1974. He's keenly interested in writing software that makes other humans lives easier and making technical topics easier to understand and in helping increase the number and variety of humans in technical spaces. Welcome, Sam. SAM:  Thank you. I'm so glad to be here and I'm so glad that you all ambush me with this, so that I didn't have to be all anxious about it for like three days coming up. JOHN:  It's a clever ploy. SAM:  Thank you. JESSICA:  I have a question. Before you are a human, were you a jellyfish? SAM:  Not directly, no, but I came from a jellyfish or at least, part of me did. JESSICA:  Which part is that? SAM:  That would be my brain and your brain too and all of the other signaling mechanisms we use inside our bodies to coordinate them and feel things and laugh and cry and all that good stuff. JESSICA:  Does that give you jellyfish superpowers? SAM:  I wish. No, actually, as it happens, jellyfish just freaked me the fuck right out because they float around in the water and they're blobby and squishy and slimy and they can hurt or even kill you and they don't have brains, so they didn't even know they're doing it. JESSICA:  They don't have brains but yet, we have them in our brains.