Four For Friday | May 16, 2025

LF173 | Humans as analogy machines, food and fertility, the poly opportunity, Oura data + 25 N8N hacks

Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week.

1. Humans are analogy machines

If you’re looking at what’s going wrong in the world, and keep asking why, sooner or later you’ll end up back at the Enlightenment. This is what gave us homo rationalis - elevating Man as a singular species, and set in motion the idea that animals and natural resources are here to be extracted for our benefit.

This critique now extends not just to our environmental catastrophe, but to all areas of society, including AI. According to Geoffrey Hinton, one of the field’s (now disillusioned) founders, humans are “analogy machines”. We do not reason top-down, logically, like machines, we make meaning from connecting similar things - making analogies - and tie it together with there merest amount of logic.

The claim is more than cognitive trivia. Today’s massive and increasingly costly LLMs are built with the worldview of human brains as logical computers. If we accept Hinton’s approach, the billions of dollars of funding going to this approach is going to stall out, and not deliver a truly human-like artificial general intelligence (AGI). Investors and educators should take note: systems, funding and policies rewarding nimble, emergent pattern-matching, not rule-chasing, will win the race.

The So What? Saying that AI is like a brain is itself an analogy—which only proves the point that we understand things, including intelligence, through analogy.

2. Food, fertility and chemicals

A lively summary of the state we’re in by environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt on how processed food is causing one in 7 early deaths in the UK and costs the country £286 billion a year, more than the cost of the Nation Health Service.

“This £268 billion shows us that we have a food system that privatises the profits and socialises the harms from bad food. It puts a price on the failure of governments stretching back over 30 years to regulate big food”.

Processed food makes up 53-54% of the energy consumption of people in the UK and US, and is a big part of the broken food system, that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization suggests costs the world $8 trillion a year.

And adding to this unappetizing soup are toxic chemicals and microplastics, which (in particular the endochrine disrupting chemicals that boost oestrogen at the expense of testosterone) are now the primary culprit in the halving of mens’ sperm count in the past 50 years.

The So What? Remember tobacco in the 60s? Our kids (the few that we have, anyway) will look back at this time and wonder how we were complicit in our own, slow poisioning.

3. The Poly Opportunity

All this gloom and doom about the emerging inteconnected polycrisis can be exhausting, so let me elevate the mood with The Poly Opportunity:

Is this it? Is this really all there is? Collapsing ecologies. Moral dissolution. Zero-sum politics. Hyper-aggressive masculinity. Loneliness and division fueled by tech oligarchs. Our very humanity challenged by AI. Will our societies become super-optimized regimes of ugliness and sterility? Or can we imagine a world where beauty is not just appreciated but essential?

It is dawning on us: There is no going back to ‘progress.’ The Polycrisis must be an opening for a new reality we create together. One that transcends liberalism, populism, and techno-optimism alike. One where a plurality of stories, paradoxes, and truths strengthen one other. One that embraces the entanglement of living systems and repositions business inside biology as well as a new metaphysics. An economy of the other, breaking free from distraction and extraction, shifting us from human-centered to life-centered.

This group is building a global movement around rethinking how we do business and run our society, and has built momentum and some impressive global partnerships.

The So What? Seems like an inspiring group to get involved with - their in-person events sound highly experiential, and they’re running an online event later this year.

4. Oura data can find places that are actually healthy

Blue Zones claims of longevity are one thing, but actual real time data about health measures, and how they change, are much more valuable when it comes to understand whether some places really do nurture you.

Oura has released data, covering about 20 biomarkers, on the impact of health on their members visiting different places and the results are not that surprising, but still interesting. Good weather, “local infrastructure that supports healthy living” and a culture that emphasizes wellbeing were all associated with healthier places. It also suggested “similar demographics” as a factor - which I took to be that people are more likely to go out for a jog in a place they feel comfortable.

The So What? This study illustrates how much data we have under our fingertips, literally.

Bonus AI tool: 25 N8N tips

As mentioned before, I’m down the rabbit hole of n8n as an automation tool, and these 25 tips from one of the best N8N Influencers, Nate Herk, are golden.

That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome, especially on the new audio features.

- Stephen