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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?

#41

Post by emilga »

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.

The ancient Romans and Greeks were known to use the Memory Palace technique, as other commenters here have mentioned. (It's mentioned by Cicero, in Ad Herrenium (of unknown authorship), and St. Augustine, among others.)

This was continued into the middle ages, by e.g. Christian monks, see Mary Carruthers' work [0], and the Rennaisance (e.g. Matteo Ricci), see e.g. Frances Yates.

For non-western uses of the memory arts, I'd recommend Lynne Kelly. She writes about aboriginal Australians' use of songlines, the African Luba people's use of lukasas, etc. (Lynne Kelly has done multiple podcast interviews that make for fascinating listen, as she's both an accomplished practitioner of the memory arts as well the history behind them.)

For a modern, practical introduction, Alex Mullen has some great youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2_Zsm4K3xE&list=PL5fi_YS6Tf...

[0] Thomas Bradwardine's 14th century essay: https://books.google.no/books?id=sFxuCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT210&lpg=P...

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#42

Post by kuu »

chromeaway wrote: post #37
xamuel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the ancient near east people did not refer to literary works by means of a dedicated title, but by the first line of the composition, which is taken as an indication of origins in an oral tradition, esp. for the earliest works that were written down. When large portions of text have been committed to memory, reciting the first sentence is often enough to trigger a flow, a small but useful "technique" applied by e.…

This is still done today even if not with the same intention. When we don't remember a name of a song we repeat part of it "do you know this song? the one that says X..." It's natural

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#43

Post by VvR-Ox »

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.

It's called "remembering things" and we all used to know how it works before we outsourced that to computers ;-p

Back in school we needed to rehearse latin vocabulary and lyrics of ancient stuff that I sometimes still remember today though I'm used to outsource this kind of data to computers.

I think the skills for this are still in us - it's just about the proper techniques to persist the information- and access it fast.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#44

Post by keiferski »

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…

If you're only using Anki to memorize facts, you aren't using it correctly. You need to get more creative with the card-creating process. For example, instead of just memorizing the definition of a term, create cards like this:

- "Describe [term] in one sentence/two sentences/three sentences."

- "Describe [term] without using the words [common words used to typically describe it]."

- Imagine you are explaining the concept of [term] to a small child. How would you do it?

And so on. The power of Anki is the underlying memory algorithm, not simply the memorization process. You can understand and remember anything if you organize the data in the correct way.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#45

Post by emilga »

goerz wrote: post #31
reubens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another commenter below notes, a recommendation is to spend one second reviewing each card. Thus, your cards are generally quite simple. This can very easily lead to a patchwork of simple details, but no glue holding them together. I’ve come to believe that the mental effort it takes to understand something should be prioritised over memorisation. If you’re relatively busy and spending a lot of time doing Anki car…

I don't see why cards need to be quite that simple. I generally take about 10-15 seconds for reviewing each card. A lot of my cards are why/how/what questions (typical examples: "Why are bras covariant?"/"How are Green's functions used in solving linear differential equations?"/"What is Q-Learning?") The problem with skipping memorization of concepts after having understood something is that two months later, you'll…

> The problem with skipping memorization of concepts after having understood something is that two months later, you'll have forgotten those concepts.

The key realization, for me, is that conceptual understanding, intuitions, and key insights are themselves just pieces of information that can be memorized.

E.g.: Q: How to derive Bayes' Theorem? A: Write P(A and B) two different ways.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#46

Post by kkwteh »

Daniel Dennett introduced the introducing notion of Intuition Pump, which I would say definitely qualify as transformative tools for thought.

They are thought experiments designed to focus attention on important features of a question and to deflect them from getting bogged down in hard-to-follow details.

Google talk by Daniel Dennett on Intuition Pumps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#47

Post by reubens »

throwaway_bad wrote: post #25
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 am one of those guys who had a 4.0 GPA in college but I never used spaced repetition because what I was doing seemed to work well enough. Post-college I tried it for learning japanese and it seems like a downgrade from my usual approach. The best way to learn something is by contextualizing it. For example it doesn't matter if you forget a math formula if you know how to re-derive it. If the formula is truly import…

That is a very elegant way to put what I said so grumpily, thank you.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#48

Post by reubens »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #24
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…

Glad you like my work. To quote the essay: "these kinds of results should be taken with a grain of salt. The mnemonic medium is in its early days, has many deficiencies, and needs improvement in many ways... is this medium really working? What effect is it actually having on people? ... are there blockers that make this an irredeemably bad or at best mediocre idea? How important a role does memory play in cognition,…

Thanks for your response Michael, and my apologies for the temerity of my initial comment. At the end of four years of Med school, I am truly Anki fatigued (and a bit fed up with learning facts about rare diseases I may never see in practise). The points you highlight here I recall being present to a degree in Quantum Country, so I really don’t have a leg to stand on- apologies for directing my frustration toward your work.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#49

Post by plmu »

throwaway_bad wrote: post #25
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 am one of those guys who had a 4.0 GPA in college but I never used spaced repetition because what I was doing seemed to work well enough. Post-college I tried it for learning japanese and it seems like a downgrade from my usual approach. The best way to learn something is by contextualizing it. For example it doesn't matter if you forget a math formula if you know how to re-derive it. If the formula is truly import…

But sometimes you lack the time to re-derive.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#50

Post by TuringTest »

babesh wrote: post #39

If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible. Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human…

There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there.

Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred knowledge for building and adapting the available tools.

A widespread literacy for building automations would change the current focus of smartphones for media consumption and multiply common people as builders of automations (with all its implications in society in terms of security and new dynamics of people interacting with automations of varying quality).

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