How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
numinous.productions
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#2Why tho?
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#3Programmers/computer scientists will make better progress on "transformative" "tools of thought" if they spend a few years collaborating with psychologists/sociologists/political scientists/economists/historians on their problems first.
Those that do will have a leg up over those that dont.
Right now it's like watching people working on calculus without spending enough time on algebra and geometry.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#4Extremely boiled down TL/DR: The author's invention is a spaced repetition system built into an essay, so instead of having the cards isolated, the cards are embedded in the text itself.
At a technical level, that's certainly innovative, but I'm doubtful about whether it's actually an improvement on classical SRS. In my experience, one of the most important things for an SRS deck is speed of reviewing: a given card should take less than 1 second to review and rate. This is necessary if you're going to maintain decks with tens of thousands of cards. I find my brain does a remarkable job of reconstructing the surrounding context, so having the cards embedded in the original text would just be a time sink for me, I think.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#5This is a very interesting subject!
1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes.
2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the way baby brains gather information and are trained are limited by their bodily abilities, which are puny.
3) The answer seems to be to devise a way to feed information-reach, highly non-normal stimulus to young brains, e.g. using heads up displays. This is the method described in Mimsy Were the Borogoves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves)
This sounds nightmarish and we also don't have the technology currently. But in the intense competition for colleges/high-schools and even middle schools who knows what can happen?
P.S. Also wanted to mention Hinton's models/toys with which he claimed to have learned to intuitively think about 4th dimensional objects, they are described in his book https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourt....
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#6This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes. 2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the…
Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#7Honestly this is the area I'm most excited about. SRS is just one facet---correct choice of input media, datatypes, and mental models are a big deal here.
I'm a math undergrad. And one thing that drives me crazy is how mich rewriting I do. What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree manipulation ux actions" are is another thing.
Similarly--am I the only one tired of typing? I'd kill for a gait analyzer or a haptic glove that let me program while walking through the park.
Some of this stuff sounds farfetched, but looking at emacs, or chorded stenotype machines, or paredit, really drives it home that we could be doing so, so much better, with very little new tech required.
When I was a kid I had mild synesthesia where I'd tie the words "fourth" and "favorite" with a feeling of "reaching." I still today associate clojure's map with spreading butter, or reduce with "rolling up." Chinese abacus math, developed to the point where thr actual abacus is no longer necessary, is a thing to behold. The human mind seems to make these connections easily and automatically. Why not leverage that?
I'd love if text became just the shared human-legible bytecode for our own personal interfaces.
(Check out this clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70 where some people get fed targeting data from an AI plugged into all the camera feeds---and note especially around the middle of the video how the girl customizes the interface on the fly)
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#8This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes. 2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the…
Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.
Memory palace
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#9here is a different idea: we don’t need [new] tools for though. Our entire history is made up of using tools to basically enhance our abilities - mental, communication, design you name it. Our native possibilities are quite limited (eg you cannot hold a list of more than 5-7 things in your head at once). We figured this out a long time ago and have tooling to augment these abilities. Writing, Language, Computers they are all tools that literally make us superhuman.
Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
#10Honestly this is the area I'm most excited about. SRS is just one facet---correct choice of input media, datatypes, and mental models are a big deal here. I'm a math undergrad. And one thing that drives me crazy is how mich rewriting I do. What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree man…
> What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex.
It definitely seems like there's a gap in the computer-math ecosystem: you've got systems like LaTeX that are great for typesetting math you've already mostly figured out, and you've got systems like SymPy that are good if you want the computer to do the vast majority of the work, but I'm not aware of much in between.
It would be really cool if there was something like Photoshop for math, where you could work with expressions in a visual, semi-tangible way and the computer would give you "smart" tools to help you out.