There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world.
I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.
This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot of source material and recompute.
An article by Ted Chiang: The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling -- talks about some of these issues from a couple of different & interesting perspectives which I found really intriguing. One of which being a thought exercise about what it would mean to have the ability to accurately replay everything we'd ever seen or done. And how two people who went through the same experiences can come out with vastly different memories and interpretations. It's a good read :)
Over time, my 'urban legend' bullshit detector has been refined, and is much improved from earlier in my life.
I have, on a few occasions, found myself relating some 'fact' or 'story' and realized immediately that it was likely an urban legend. Both times, the detector was right, and a quick search cleared it up.
I wonder if there is a good way to intentionally 'paw through' your repository on purposes, and apply your life experience to them on purpose.
In practice, people rarely if ever revise their mental model as the world around them changes. Which is why a younger generation without this baggage inevitably rises to supplant the older one.
This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchecked premises.
The method of loci, for building/encoding hierarchical "memory palaces", works well for remembering key ideas or facts and building upon them to compose your models. Also, using software like "The Brain" [1] and other mind mapping tools are useful aids for organizing information so you can easily go back to remember.
Great point - a possible explanation for a wide range of phenomenologically bizarre viewpoints (e.g.: anti-vaccers, birthers, chem-trails, creationists, etc.)
There's always a danger that you'll introduce a bug in your code at some point, right? If you 'pull' from a lot or sources, at some point one of those sources will introduce a bug. But if you have a lot of high quality committers (book authors) and you continue to pull (read) from those sources, you stand a good chance of discovering and squashing these bugs eventually. In fact, as your code (mind) matures, you start to develop procedures to test unproven pull requests (theories/ideas) before merging and committing. You'll be especially careful of unknown authors or authors that have introduced buggy code in the past, while possibly giving full commit access to authors you trust.
I wouldn't call that a danger. I would call that being human. We all have models of the world that deviate in some ways from one another, otherwise we would all have identical minds, identical environments and origins, identical heritages, identical ways of interpreting information, and identical ways of composing information into new creations.
Making an erroneous assumption or a mistake can mean that a particular sentiment is expressed "incorrectly", but that doesn't mean it's existence is useless. It may prove to be very useful eventually.
The idea that mental models can be incorrect by being compared to other mental models is a strange concept to me. It requires assumptions that can not be proven in their entirety.
"I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten."
Not only disconnect: What I've read of psychological studies indicate the mind amplifies those facts that support it's current model of the world and actively ignores those that do not.
Which goes a long way to explain why it's nearly pointless to argue with fanatics of one kind or another.
In the analogy, it seems more likely that a mistaken short in the wiring is created, than we compile and lose the code all the time. Most of us have good ideas of the provenance of our prejudices (I am pretty sure I can remember which side of most debates arguments I get from Fox Mews and which from the BBC, even if the specifics are hazy.)
There are always areas where we do forget the provenance. In my case I stood up amoung friends in my thirties and announced that Ice cream was made from seaweed. After a few blank stares I remembered my father explaining to a much younger self on the beach that I did not want an ice cream - because they were made from that horrible floppy green muck. And he did not have to make a half mile trek back up the beach. Yet that "fact" and it's provenance stayed at the back of my brain for twenty years.
But even so the provenance was quickly recovered. I am not convinced we easily lose our source code. We can usually point to the module or package even if the line numbers are hazy.
But trauma does rewire us, and quickly, and is not to be discounted - I just think it is not the normal course of events.
"Let's not let facts get in the way of a good argument." :-)
Many times we tune out feedback that isn't congruent with our worldview and get locked in. That's why it's good to follow Paul's lead on rereading and revisiting. Sometimes it's hard to remember the anecdote or story that steers us, but finding it again allows us to question it. There was a specific retelling of a Vonnegut (of all authors) story that got me interesting in technology. Rereading the story in it's original form 20+ years later allowed me to understand the first better.
There's an opportunity to outsource mental models to software in a similar way to how we've outsourced basic math to calculators and basic facts to search engines.
A benefit to a digital mental model is that it could be updated based on new data independent of the owner which has all kinds of (possibly disturbing) implications.
This reminds me of something I read of Objectivism. The idea that you revise your model of your knowledge as you learn new things. It seems like a difficult task given how our minds work.
I'm curious, do you think it would be beneficial to make a list of where you got your ideas from? Like a sort of list of citations for your model of the world.
It's even worse (at least with emotional political opinions); when confronted with adversarial data we tend to become more entrenched in our positions.
An associated problem caused by a change in the mental model due to reading is the "Curse of knowledge" principle - which essentially states that "....better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties."
Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to include the new information, you have a difficult time understanding why others don't see what you see. This is compounded by the fact - as highlighted by pg in the essay - that you also forget how and when your mental model changes.
This is one reason why not every expert is a good teacher - as they fail to see the world from the point of view of students.
But it is also relevant and useful to remember this in the world of startups. Established large companies routinely get disrupted by novice startups - often because the experts at the large company fail to see problems the way novices do. It is impossible to become an expert at something while continuing to view the world from the eyes of a beginner.
>better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties
Reading this made me think of poker. Calibrating to the skill level of lesser players is often very difficult for intermediate and lower-advanced players. Being able to synthesize the less sophisticated thought technologies beginners are using is surprisingly difficult. Failure to adjust often leads better players to play incorrectly against newbies. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of beating medium/high stakes cash games only to lose in home games with your friends for 1/1000th the stakes will know what I mean.
This is also why it is so incredibly important to treat everyone's input with respect and consideration - you don't always know what you don't know, or someone could give you an experience or new input that reframes how you think about a particular thing. I think this is one of the elements of human interaction that I value and enjoy the most - being able to try to learn how other people think, and what they think about, and sharing how I think and what I think about.
If you haven't seen it, S01E03 of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, deals exactly with what PG describes at the end of this post: technology that lets you review and relive your past. It's very much worth watching, and was recently added to Netflix's library:
I just watched the whole series, and I wanted to go ahead and recommend that everyone watch more than that single episode (although I think it's one of the strongest). It's only 6 episodes total (each season has 3 episodes).
I think this audience would especially like the series:
'Black Mirror is a British television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker that shows the dark side of life and technology. Brooker noted, "each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality. But they're all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes time if we're clumsy."'
Without seeing your comment I made the same recommendation to one of my lead devs a few minutes ago with the same segue, having also recommended this article.
> Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of.
Hence the important art of keeping a journal. You can keep a transaction log of changes. The act of replaying the journal allows you to identify patterns in your thought processes and identify cognitive dissonances. The very act of reading should induce a reactive compulsion to write.
As Burroughs taught in his later creative writing courses -- in order to become a better writer one must first learn to read (I'm paraphrasing here).
Part of becoming a better thinker is learning how to think. In order to do that one must catch one's self in the act.
I'm definitely a fan of taking notes on things you've read (among other things, the effort to write notes makes you choose what you read more carefully). And I agree that it will help you remember the sources for various ideas.
But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would rarely go back and look at things, and it's not searchable, and paper is not editable.
For the last 10+ years, I've used a Wiki. Hyperlinks are huge. They really do model the associations your brain already makes. I have wiki pages that are 10 years old and that still grow new associations. I think it takes a big load off your brain to have all that stuff written down, and searchable with ease. (I had to write my own Wiki to get it fast enough though.)
I really enjoyed Paul's compilation analogy. It reminds me of a quote by Robertson Davies. "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
It also reminds me of that MIT paper that gives advice on how to do research. The part it talks about why it is that when your colleague gives you a paper to read and says it's particularly poignant, but when you read it it doesn't seem like anything special. Maybe it's because your colleague had the dependencies in his state of mind that you did not have in yours, so it didn't seem as memorable to you as to him when the code compiled.
Yeah, his analogy extends to art pretty well. Let's say we use Tolstoy's definition of art, that art is about communicating a feeling to others via a medium.
There are times in our lives where our state of mind makes us more likely to be moved by a piece of art.
It's why you should revisit your favorite books from your youth - you'll often find the same words mean completely different things later on.
Most people equate the term "memory" with what is more accurately termed episodic memory - little movies in your head. Most people can't remember when "Christmas" was first defined for them, but they can rattle off many things about it - the date, the religious meaning, the corporate meaning, etc. This is semantic memory, and together they form your conscious explicit memory or declarative memory (there are differences between the two that are not relevant here). The brain often throws away the episode but keeps the concept, and that is what Paul is talking about here.
But there's more to it than that. Your unconscious implicit memory includes things you can't even articulate. That's the difference between the date of Christmas and how to ride a bike: the latter is nondeclarative. Learning a different way to ride a bike, or approach programming, is even more difficult than recomputing semantic memory.
You can (and should) read a new books and gain new episodes to base your facts and opinions on. Read diverse material with abandon. But when learning something nondeclarative, like a weight-lifting technique, it can be well worth seeking out an expert and learning it right the first time. With nondeclarative memory, what you don't know can hurt you.
For more on the science and classification of memory, the Wikipedia page is as good a starting place as any.
Why not take notes? Whenever I read a book I want to remember, I just pencil a dash in the margin next to any key fact, insight, or quote. Then after I'm done with a few chapters I retype these sections into a mindmap. It probably only adds 10 - 20% extra time, but you're getting 1000% more value.
In general what matters isn't how much you read, but how much you retain and what sorts of connections with past and future insight and information. It's important to have the full experience of having realizations and making connections while you're reading, which is why I just make a dash in the margins as opposed to taking actual notes in real time, but I feel like by not circling back later you're cheating yourself out of the true value of learning.
Especially since you have no idea if the books you're reading are even true or not until you vet the facts with primary sources.
This comment will run the risk of sounding condescending, but I believe it's true so I'm going to post it anyway.
Thought processes like the ones captured in pg's post are fostered by education in critical analysis--the sort of analysis that one learns in the humanities. Art, literature, philosophy, history, etc. are the products of human thought, and learning to critique them is in part an exploration of how humans think. Not the physics or neurology, but how influences can shape each person's mental model.
Part of this is exploring the influences that affected the mental model of the person writing or creating the art. Another is exploring the mental model(s) that the artist or writer sought to create. (This is what we experience when we "get into" a book.)
So, if you're looking for a reason that CS or engineering students should take humanities courses, I think one is illustrated in this post: it teaches you how to read books consciously. It gives you a framework for exploring how the thoughts of others (and therefore yours as well) are influenced and shaped by the information that is consumed during a lifetime.
> And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page.
This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I've had this exact feeling about books I read, films I've watched, conversations I've had, work projects I've completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive impression on me.
I've always felt guilty about this, especially when I see others who don't seem to have the same problem when they talk about the books they've read, etc. I've also found that recall can be greatly improved by repeatedly talking about the specific topic with multiple people.
The strange thing is that I have an excellent memory for certain things - information about people and relationships. In light of our evolutionary history as a social species, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.
I remember reading something very similar to this (but can't remember where, ha), where it said the important thing about reading is how if affects your general thinking rather than the individual pieces of information that you're likely to remember (or not).
I spent several years reading a ton of different books on economics and I can recall very few facts from those books, but it did and has completely altered my world view of many things.
pg's analogy of a program where you've lost the source code doesn't feel quite right, because you can't make modifications to the program without the code. Some sort of machine learning model seems more appropriate, where you've lost the original training data but can still update the model later with fresh data (a new book), and end up with a better/different model, but then lose that training data again.
While I was reading came to my mind the Borges's short story "Funes the memorious". It's about someone who can't forget any detail. He remembers absolutely all the things and the infinite instances of them through the time. At some point of the story Borges conjectures: "I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget the difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details."
I have an interesting take on this. Most of the books I've read, I have a copy of. A while back, I endeavored to cut, scan and OCR them all into my computer. One idea was then I could do a full-text search, limited to what I've already read rather than what google thinks is relevant.
So far, I've found it very handy to find something if I at least remember which book it was in. But I need a program that can extract the OCR'd text from .pdf files - anyone know of a simple one?
(I can do it manually, one at a time, by bringing it up in a pdf reader, but that's too tedious and slow.)
This is a great idea. Full-text search for "my knowledgebase", books I've read, thing's I've written, etc. is an area with potential that still seems unfulfilled.
Abbyy Finereader (paid, Windows) is one of the best OCR programs, most of the books on archive.org are OCR'ed with Abbyy.
If the PDFs already have OCR text, calibre (GUI or CLI, Linux or Windows) can convert to .txt and many other formats. The recoll.org search engine will index PDF files that have OCR text.
I will never understand why this guy's essays are so revered. I'm expecting some profound conclusion, but the only message of the essay is "reading and experience form mental models." Well, duh! Whats worse, he doesn't support his claims with evidence, besides a single anecdote.
What i found shocking here, is how casually pg talks about what i believe is the fundamental point of philosophy. That is the mapping of our minds inductive model of the world, and our deductive one.
>Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists.
Here, he is pointing out the the relevant information you perceive, your empirical data, is only retained insofar as it effects your deductive model of the world, that is, the model we use to determine truth and falsity. The rest of the data is generally trivial. This is a very sensible insight in my mind, and kudos to him. The dance between empirical data and deductive truth is one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. This as a model for data retention is something i'd not thought of.
>Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.
Here, i find this problematic. In Soros's terms, the mind is reflexive. Thus, in reviewing the data, we are experiencing new data. If we edit our thoughts, do we not remember editing them? I don't see away to take away the reflexive nature of self examination, that in creating changes, we create new data about the changes.
One of the most significant books I ever read was A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. He graduated college in the 70's, wasn't sure what to do, and decide to walk from New York to the Pacific ocean. This book covered the first half of the walk; he wrote it while taking a break in Louisiana along the way.
That book was hugely influential to me. I graduated college and spent two years teaching. The summer after my second year of teaching, I had no obligations to anyone else for the first time in my life. I remembered Peter Jenkins' story, and decided to bicycle across the US. I knew I wanted to travel under my own power as he had done, but I wanted to go a little faster than he did. Bicycling was perfect for me. I ended up doing two cross-country trips over successive summers, and then I spent a year living on my bicycle, circumnavigating North America.
I reread A Walk Across America some years after doing my own trips. I was amazed at how bad I thought the book was. pg observes that
The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life.
This is absolutely true. Now that I'm in my 40's, I'm going to go back and reread the most influential books of my 20's. I might even have to change my HN username after doing so, but I hope not.
I don't like the flavor of this post. It feels very much like navel-gazing and, if it wasn't for the domain name, it likely would have been lost to /newest.
Where is the knowledge here? That we don't have immediate recollection of retained information? Knowledge is based on a beginning and ending context.
It's not that you forget the content, it's that you forget how to phrase it concisely. If the author needed 70, or 200 pages to explain a concept, and you can at some point raise your hand and claim 'I get the point', it's not reasonable to expect a 12-word summary. What do I remember? Hard to put into words. Likewise, it's not reasonable to expect a perfect memory, reciting paragraph after paragraph of the original text.
If you really can summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the author have done that already?
Maybe it's time for me to reread Cryptonomicon. There are parts of that book I have absolutely no memory of, flipping through it, yet other parts I remember all too often (bicycle sprockets, comets of pee, bisecting alligators, van eck phreaking).
Interestingly, if shown a series of hundreds of images, we wouldn't remember many in the list. But if we're shown alternates (was it a goldfish or a watch?), we would instantly recognize the item.
We didn't forget, we just couldn't access the memory on demand. The conclusion is the same: it's there, influencing us and adding to our lives, even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes.
I've been thinking about this very issue recently, and coincidentally started working on software two days ago to help manage the problem of remembering things that I've read. Obtaining information in 2015 is remarkably easy. Retaining it is damn near impossible, at least for me. I read books and bookmark links from hn and reddit on a daily basis, consuming constantly. But I find that I recall very little of it. I don't know if Stephan Hawking was right about black holes destroying information, but my bookmarks folder comes pretty close. Links go in and then are never seen or heard from again. I take copious book notes and type them up, only for them to be consigned to the void of my hard drive file system. I've tried evernote and anki and several other tools, but it's always a one way ticket. My trouble isn't remembering what I've read, but remembering to remember. No matter how I've tried, I can't change my daily work flow to set aside time to review the notes and information that I've already collected, rendering it useless.
If I had a magic device that recorded all of my experiences, it wouldn't do me much good because I'm too busy collecting new experiences to be remembered. It would be great to be able to search for details and trivia, but I wouldn't have time to peruse the archive to refresh myself about things that I had forgotten completely. Much in the way that google lets us search for and recall anything, except the things we don't remember the name of.
I'm going in the direction of reminding myself about things that I previously read or bookmarked, especially as they tie in to what I'm currently reading. I think one part of the solution is to display existing bookmarks and typed up book notes to myself in a near random fashion. It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. I think a plugin that relates past content to the current page might be a good idea, ie for this page I could see any previous bookmarks that involve memory and retention. And generally reminding myself to review things I've already learned, even if they don't seem relevant at the moment.
I don't have any great ideas yet, but I've been coding like heck for the past few days to try to take small steps toward a solution. I've been on a quest to make my brain work better, and this essay has definitely given me some ideas and helped to push me along.
"However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them." -- Schopenhauer
[+] [-] nilkn|11 years ago|reply
I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.
[+] [-] arjunnarayan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatix|11 years ago|reply
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...
[+] [-] ColinDabritz|11 years ago|reply
I have, on a few occasions, found myself relating some 'fact' or 'story' and realized immediately that it was likely an urban legend. Both times, the detector was right, and a quick search cleared it up.
I wonder if there is a good way to intentionally 'paw through' your repository on purposes, and apply your life experience to them on purpose.
[+] [-] not_that_noob|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programmarchy|11 years ago|reply
The method of loci, for building/encoding hierarchical "memory palaces", works well for remembering key ideas or facts and building upon them to compose your models. Also, using software like "The Brain" [1] and other mind mapping tools are useful aids for organizing information so you can easily go back to remember.
[1] http://www.thebrain.com
[+] [-] etrautmann|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eaurouge|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcomputer|11 years ago|reply
Making an erroneous assumption or a mistake can mean that a particular sentiment is expressed "incorrectly", but that doesn't mean it's existence is useless. It may prove to be very useful eventually.
The idea that mental models can be incorrect by being compared to other mental models is a strange concept to me. It requires assumptions that can not be proven in their entirety.
[+] [-] fsloth|11 years ago|reply
Not only disconnect: What I've read of psychological studies indicate the mind amplifies those facts that support it's current model of the world and actively ignores those that do not.
Which goes a long way to explain why it's nearly pointless to argue with fanatics of one kind or another.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|11 years ago|reply
There are always areas where we do forget the provenance. In my case I stood up amoung friends in my thirties and announced that Ice cream was made from seaweed. After a few blank stares I remembered my father explaining to a much younger self on the beach that I did not want an ice cream - because they were made from that horrible floppy green muck. And he did not have to make a half mile trek back up the beach. Yet that "fact" and it's provenance stayed at the back of my brain for twenty years.
But even so the provenance was quickly recovered. I am not convinced we easily lose our source code. We can usually point to the module or package even if the line numbers are hazy.
But trauma does rewire us, and quickly, and is not to be discounted - I just think it is not the normal course of events.
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
Many times we tune out feedback that isn't congruent with our worldview and get locked in. That's why it's good to follow Paul's lead on rereading and revisiting. Sometimes it's hard to remember the anecdote or story that steers us, but finding it again allows us to question it. There was a specific retelling of a Vonnegut (of all authors) story that got me interesting in technology. Rereading the story in it's original form 20+ years later allowed me to understand the first better.
[+] [-] flipside|11 years ago|reply
A benefit to a digital mental model is that it could be updated based on new data independent of the owner which has all kinds of (possibly disturbing) implications.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tmaly|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyant|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salimane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argumentum|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pitchups|11 years ago|reply
Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to include the new information, you have a difficult time understanding why others don't see what you see. This is compounded by the fact - as highlighted by pg in the essay - that you also forget how and when your mental model changes.
This is one reason why not every expert is a good teacher - as they fail to see the world from the point of view of students.
But it is also relevant and useful to remember this in the world of startups. Established large companies routinely get disrupted by novice startups - often because the experts at the large company fail to see problems the way novices do. It is impossible to become an expert at something while continuing to view the world from the eyes of a beginner.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
[+] [-] awolf|11 years ago|reply
Reading this made me think of poker. Calibrating to the skill level of lesser players is often very difficult for intermediate and lower-advanced players. Being able to synthesize the less sophisticated thought technologies beginners are using is surprisingly difficult. Failure to adjust often leads better players to play incorrectly against newbies. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of beating medium/high stakes cash games only to lose in home games with your friends for 1/1000th the stakes will know what I mean.
[+] [-] sixdimensional|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sinak|11 years ago|reply
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=33258...
[+] [-] berberous|11 years ago|reply
I think this audience would especially like the series:
'Black Mirror is a British television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker that shows the dark side of life and technology. Brooker noted, "each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality. But they're all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes time if we're clumsy."'
[+] [-] vanadium|11 years ago|reply
Fantastic episode.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] agentultra|11 years ago|reply
Hence the important art of keeping a journal. You can keep a transaction log of changes. The act of replaying the journal allows you to identify patterns in your thought processes and identify cognitive dissonances. The very act of reading should induce a reactive compulsion to write.
As Burroughs taught in his later creative writing courses -- in order to become a better writer one must first learn to read (I'm paraphrasing here).
Part of becoming a better thinker is learning how to think. In order to do that one must catch one's self in the act.
[+] [-] chubot|11 years ago|reply
But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would rarely go back and look at things, and it's not searchable, and paper is not editable.
For the last 10+ years, I've used a Wiki. Hyperlinks are huge. They really do model the associations your brain already makes. I have wiki pages that are 10 years old and that still grow new associations. I think it takes a big load off your brain to have all that stuff written down, and searchable with ease. (I had to write my own Wiki to get it fast enough though.)
[+] [-] Supermighty|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctchocula|11 years ago|reply
It also reminds me of that MIT paper that gives advice on how to do research. The part it talks about why it is that when your colleague gives you a paper to read and says it's particularly poignant, but when you read it it doesn't seem like anything special. Maybe it's because your colleague had the dependencies in his state of mind that you did not have in yours, so it didn't seem as memorable to you as to him when the code compiled.
[+] [-] temuze|11 years ago|reply
There are times in our lives where our state of mind makes us more likely to be moved by a piece of art.
It's why you should revisit your favorite books from your youth - you'll often find the same words mean completely different things later on.
[+] [-] icementhols|11 years ago|reply
edit: found it
http://web.cs.dal.ca/~eem/gradResources/MITAIResearch.html
[+] [-] sirsar|11 years ago|reply
But there's more to it than that. Your unconscious implicit memory includes things you can't even articulate. That's the difference between the date of Christmas and how to ride a bike: the latter is nondeclarative. Learning a different way to ride a bike, or approach programming, is even more difficult than recomputing semantic memory.
You can (and should) read a new books and gain new episodes to base your facts and opinions on. Read diverse material with abandon. But when learning something nondeclarative, like a weight-lifting technique, it can be well worth seeking out an expert and learning it right the first time. With nondeclarative memory, what you don't know can hurt you.
For more on the science and classification of memory, the Wikipedia page is as good a starting place as any.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory
[+] [-] Alex3917|11 years ago|reply
In general what matters isn't how much you read, but how much you retain and what sorts of connections with past and future insight and information. It's important to have the full experience of having realizations and making connections while you're reading, which is why I just make a dash in the margins as opposed to taking actual notes in real time, but I feel like by not circling back later you're cheating yourself out of the true value of learning.
Especially since you have no idea if the books you're reading are even true or not until you vet the facts with primary sources.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|11 years ago|reply
Thought processes like the ones captured in pg's post are fostered by education in critical analysis--the sort of analysis that one learns in the humanities. Art, literature, philosophy, history, etc. are the products of human thought, and learning to critique them is in part an exploration of how humans think. Not the physics or neurology, but how influences can shape each person's mental model.
Part of this is exploring the influences that affected the mental model of the person writing or creating the art. Another is exploring the mental model(s) that the artist or writer sought to create. (This is what we experience when we "get into" a book.)
So, if you're looking for a reason that CS or engineering students should take humanities courses, I think one is illustrated in this post: it teaches you how to read books consciously. It gives you a framework for exploring how the thoughts of others (and therefore yours as well) are influenced and shaped by the information that is consumed during a lifetime.
[+] [-] igonvalue|11 years ago|reply
This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I've had this exact feeling about books I read, films I've watched, conversations I've had, work projects I've completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive impression on me.
I've always felt guilty about this, especially when I see others who don't seem to have the same problem when they talk about the books they've read, etc. I've also found that recall can be greatly improved by repeatedly talking about the specific topic with multiple people.
The strange thing is that I have an excellent memory for certain things - information about people and relationships. In light of our evolutionary history as a social species, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.
[+] [-] coderholic|11 years ago|reply
I spent several years reading a ton of different books on economics and I can recall very few facts from those books, but it did and has completely altered my world view of many things.
pg's analogy of a program where you've lost the source code doesn't feel quite right, because you can't make modifications to the program without the code. Some sort of machine learning model seems more appropriate, where you've lost the original training data but can still update the model later with fresh data (a new book), and end up with a better/different model, but then lose that training data again.
[+] [-] pacalleri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|11 years ago|reply
So far, I've found it very handy to find something if I at least remember which book it was in. But I need a program that can extract the OCR'd text from .pdf files - anyone know of a simple one?
(I can do it manually, one at a time, by bringing it up in a pdf reader, but that's too tedious and slow.)
[+] [-] sixdimensional|11 years ago|reply
Some ideas: - Apache PDFBox https://pdfbox.apache.org/ - command line: https://pdfbox.apache.org/commandline/#extractText - XPDF has a command line tool you can use in Windows - http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ - pdftotext - If you're going for accuracy, Tesseract is one of the most accurate https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ - Apache Tika is often used the way you suggest: http://tika.apache.org/
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
If the PDFs already have OCR text, calibre (GUI or CLI, Linux or Windows) can convert to .txt and many other formats. The recoll.org search engine will index PDF files that have OCR text.
[+] [-] WalterBright|11 years ago|reply
(I just tried pdftotext, and it does just what I wanted.)
[+] [-] normloman|11 years ago|reply
Am I missing something here?
[+] [-] scoofy|11 years ago|reply
>Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists.
Here, he is pointing out the the relevant information you perceive, your empirical data, is only retained insofar as it effects your deductive model of the world, that is, the model we use to determine truth and falsity. The rest of the data is generally trivial. This is a very sensible insight in my mind, and kudos to him. The dance between empirical data and deductive truth is one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. This as a model for data retention is something i'd not thought of.
>Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.
Here, i find this problematic. In Soros's terms, the mind is reflexive. Thus, in reviewing the data, we are experiencing new data. If we edit our thoughts, do we not remember editing them? I don't see away to take away the reflexive nature of self examination, that in creating changes, we create new data about the changes.
[+] [-] japhyr|11 years ago|reply
That book was hugely influential to me. I graduated college and spent two years teaching. The summer after my second year of teaching, I had no obligations to anyone else for the first time in my life. I remembered Peter Jenkins' story, and decided to bicycle across the US. I knew I wanted to travel under my own power as he had done, but I wanted to go a little faster than he did. Bicycling was perfect for me. I ended up doing two cross-country trips over successive summers, and then I spent a year living on my bicycle, circumnavigating North America.
I reread A Walk Across America some years after doing my own trips. I was amazed at how bad I thought the book was. pg observes that
The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life.
This is absolutely true. Now that I'm in my 40's, I'm going to go back and reread the most influential books of my 20's. I might even have to change my HN username after doing so, but I hope not.
[+] [-] debacle|11 years ago|reply
Where is the knowledge here? That we don't have immediate recollection of retained information? Knowledge is based on a beginning and ending context.
[+] [-] arh68|11 years ago|reply
If you really can summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the author have done that already?
Maybe it's time for me to reread Cryptonomicon. There are parts of that book I have absolutely no memory of, flipping through it, yet other parts I remember all too often (bicycle sprockets, comets of pee, bisecting alligators, van eck phreaking).
(also... > seige warfare ?)
[+] [-] david927|11 years ago|reply
Interestingly, if shown a series of hundreds of images, we wouldn't remember many in the list. But if we're shown alternates (was it a goldfish or a watch?), we would instantly recognize the item.
We didn't forget, we just couldn't access the memory on demand. The conclusion is the same: it's there, influencing us and adding to our lives, even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes.
[+] [-] karmacondon|11 years ago|reply
If I had a magic device that recorded all of my experiences, it wouldn't do me much good because I'm too busy collecting new experiences to be remembered. It would be great to be able to search for details and trivia, but I wouldn't have time to peruse the archive to refresh myself about things that I had forgotten completely. Much in the way that google lets us search for and recall anything, except the things we don't remember the name of.
I'm going in the direction of reminding myself about things that I previously read or bookmarked, especially as they tie in to what I'm currently reading. I think one part of the solution is to display existing bookmarks and typed up book notes to myself in a near random fashion. It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. I think a plugin that relates past content to the current page might be a good idea, ie for this page I could see any previous bookmarks that involve memory and retention. And generally reminding myself to review things I've already learned, even if they don't seem relevant at the moment.
I don't have any great ideas yet, but I've been coding like heck for the past few days to try to take small steps toward a solution. I've been on a quest to make my brain work better, and this essay has definitely given me some ideas and helped to push me along.
[+] [-] foobarqux|11 years ago|reply
"However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them." -- Schopenhauer