Oddly enough, the presence of my wife reduces my cognitive abilities due to me instinctively offloading most of my responsibilities to her.
The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
301–310 of 393 posts
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#302Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#303Why do I need to enable cookies to see any content here? I'm genuinely asking, because there's an informative error message, so it's clearly deliberate; I just can't understand the motivation. Edit: the only human-readable cookie is 'machine_last_seen', perhaps that's just considered a really important statistic...
I ask the same thing any time a site doesn't work without javascript
That annoys me, but I understand (from a 'how they built the site' perspective) why it happens.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did No one is worried about the number of people who have ALREADY been killed by nukes, they are worried about the number of people who might be in the future. But I suppose I fundamentally agree with you. I think we may have more to fear from scientifically engineered diseases than we do from nuclear weapons.
Exactly. Every people in their own time considers their time as the most important, crucial and urgent. they consider past times as less important. If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspec…
But that's not what GP was saying.
We, today, have the ability to dictate what others tomorrow over- or under-appreciate as doom and gloom. Whether there is a cognitive dissonance is irrelevant, but what actually happens is very much only avoidable going forward, not looking back.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
“I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.” -Albert Einstein
Which is clearly false: the meaning of words being readily looked up, for example, or common multiplications. Probably he meant "I never make effort to ...". Which IMO is foolish - for most people - but probably reflects more that he easily memorised facts without effort (something I was fortunate to experience in my youth and which is now sorely missed).
He made that comment in reference to not knowing the speed of sound off hand, and it is not remotely foolish. It is a very bad student that wastes his time memorizing endless reams of facts, rather than trying to understand the deeper meaning of what they are reading.
>Education Is Not the Learning of Facts, But the Training of the Mind To Think
-Also Einstein
Information is only useful insofar as it furthers understanding. It has no value outside that beyond parlor tricks or game shows, especially in the modern internet age.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#306"This discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing"
- "The dialogue of Phaedrus, Plato
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#307Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…
Writing made it possible to check if somebody recited something accurately.
Reciting a story accurately pre writing had a different meaning (not word for word)
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#308I lost mine about six months ago and I haven't replaced it. First couple months I noticed I got VERY irritable when I got a momentary flash of boredom, especially waiting in line in stores, etc. Figured that might've been a budding mental issue, and decided to work on my patience and expectation-setting as a result. This has been part of a larger life exercise in practicing general moment-to-moment mindfullness, and…
I'd love to stop using my phone so much, but I can't break the habit. Short of losing it, any tips for dealing with the stress when it flares up from not having the ability to fill those gaps with refreshes of Reddit, news sites or playing games?
I think it can help to have a hard intellectual problem you're working on. Your future startup idea or some talk you'll give or whatever. Then you can think about it when you have a gap.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,…
I have a terrible memory for arbitrary detail, so studying it is a waste of time for me. Instead I try to learn principles. Hopefully, Socrates would approve of this as learning "truth".
Socrates would not have approved, but I do not see why we should care. He was a very important philosopher, but he wasn't flawless. His refusal to see the value in a permanent written record was a mistake, as was his over-valuing of memory.
Heck, Socrates' own students ignored his teachings on this subject and wrote extensively. That they are what we know him from, and not some oral or memorized tradition, is pretty damning for his opinions on the subject IMO.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#310I want to learn Japanese. 3 months ago I changed my phone's language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language. Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.
Go to Japan, get a girlfriend who doesn't speak English. Takes about 6 months after that to become fluent.
Oddly enough, I just use my girlfriend less.
(On a more serious note, 6-month girlfriend fluency in Japanese is something I've observed a few times, and it's a great stepping stone but mostly just barely functional. Especially when your situational choice of e.g. verb form broadcasts so much about your educational background)