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How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

numinous.productions

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Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#11

Post by gwern »

xamuel wrote: post #4

Extremely 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 s…

From reading earlier discussions of the quantum computing tutorial, I am pretty sure most of its readers do not even use classical SRS in the first place.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#12

Post by xamuel »

gwern wrote: post #11
xamuel wrote: post #4

Extremely 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 s…

From reading earlier discussions of the quantum computing tutorial, I am pretty sure most of its readers do not even use classical SRS in the first place.

Yes, I was struck by the really exceptional and beautiful presentation/layout of OP's page. Perhaps the real contribution is less "build a better mousetrap" and more "market the hell out of mousetraps". If OP can show more people the light of SRS, that will be fantastic!

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#13

Post by barry-cotter »

xamuel wrote: post #6
Jun8 wrote: post #5

This 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein

The techniques aren’t secret. You can buy books about them on amazon. It’s like memorizing the Iliad, Odyssey or the Koran, completely doable for a human of normal intelligence but a lot of work.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#14

Post by disconcision »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #7

Honestly 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…

I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are rewrites on that grammar. My current target grammars are for simple LISPy languages because of the simplicity, but my original (and eventual) goal was/is as a tool for exploratory mathematics. I've always felt mathematical manipulation as more of tactile, synesthetic phenomena than a verbal/linguistic one; I feel like the current state of haptic input is not quite up to reifying this yet, though it is improving very rapidly these days! So I'm trying to tackle some of the software side, and seeing what can be done towards this goal with extant input devices.

What I've done is pretty rudimentary so far, but I have a talk about it here if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#15

Post by 1propionyl »

xamuel wrote: post #6
Jun8 wrote: post #5

This 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.

There's a few factors at play. To name a couple:

1) A lack of ability to outsource memory to the written word. I forget who it was, but either Plato or Aristotle was famously against writing because they said it would degrade human's capacity for memory (and "learning" if I recall correctly, though this was arguably wrong).

2) Perhaps even more importantly, the content of the time was shaped to the available medium. It's no accident that epic poetry from the oral tradition universally contains huge amounts of redundancy and pattern: meter, repeated adjectival phrases, character epitaphs or titles, etc.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#16

Post by westoncb »

disconcision wrote: post #14
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #7

Honestly 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…

I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are rewrites on that grammar. My current target grammars are for simple LISPy languages because of the simplicity, but my original (and eventual) goal was/is as a tool for exploratory mathematics. I've always felt mathematical manipulation as more of tactile, syn…

I watched Andrew's talk recently, and I highly recommend it to other readers interested in the above topic. It's full of clearly expressed, interesting ideas.

When I read:

> 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.

—in the parent comment, it was the first thing that came to mind.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#17

Post by [deleted] »

csande17 wrote: post #10
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #7

Honestly 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 m…

[deleted]

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#18

Post by mncharity »

disconcision wrote: post #14
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #7

Honestly 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…

I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are rewrites on that grammar. My current target grammars are for simple LISPy languages because of the simplicity, but my original (and eventual) goal was/is as a tool for exploratory mathematics. I've always felt mathematical manipulation as more of tactile, syn…

Style checking that enforces a single representation for a given ast, seems now a thing in javascript land. One less worry for often-novice programmers.

Which makes code files simply an ast storage format. And makes people's text editors and language modes into an representational ast editors. So... it seems industrial use of semantic editing has finally begun?

Relieved of the impedance mismatch between code-as-ast and code-as-richly-expressive-text, perhaps there's an opportunity here to quicken the innovation and deployment of non-traditional editing? At a time when XR seems likely to be creating the next "great software rewrite".

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#19

Post by reubens »

As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it’s just a way to avoid the mental effort of real comprehension (roughly analogous to a google search for a solution rather than solving a problem yourself).

Edit: I love Michael Nielsen’s work, but I don’t love his glorification of this tool.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#20

Post by cepp »

reubens wrote: post #19

As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it’s just a way to avoid the mental effort…

I'm in agreeance. In this case, I don't think SRS offers a lot of benefit, i.e. the tool isn't the hard part, it's the content you put into it.

EX: I recently (5ish months) started moving Kindle highlights to Anki. I've found my ability to retain the facts has increased but it is also directly correlated with how I designed the card (cloze, length, etc).

I think we should put more focus on extracting key points for later learning rather than focus on automating the review of those points.

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