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How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

numinous.productions

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

Is this what Apple Shortcuts is trying to achieve? https://apps.apple.com/au/app/shortcuts/id915249334

I don't know Shortcuts in depth; but the problem with "rule based" tools like this is that they typically don't allow users to build new abstractions, so they don't really count as general programming languages. (You can create first-level abstractions, but they compose poorly).

But yes, being able to create small automations over your own data is a start (see the large success of a tool like IFTT).

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

I second this. I believe apps like Coda/Notion will make a big difference in how people work, think and interact with their computer and mind. Not everyone would invest the time and effort to build what is basically an extension of the mind with these tools, but the ones who do will have an edge in thinking/planning/coordinating/executing I believe.

That's the core value proposition, yes :-)

Though I still have to find a Nocode platform that combines the powerful tracking tools of developer's IDEs with the simplicity for building automations in a functional language found in a spreadsheet.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think excel is the leader in this category. Was looking at a roadmap produced in excel the other day, somewhat amazed of what the persons working on it had been able to produce with various workarounds to get it to their liking. It still a rather blunt tool though. But is has the right elements in place, data grids, a workable visualization canvas, some limited automation capacity to tie them together. I’m th…

> I still think excel is the leader in this category. Yes, definitely. The "reactive functional" programming paradigm of the spreadsheet is radically more understandable for end users than the imperative, as it doesn't require keeping a mental model of state changes in memory. Fortunately, React has popularized this reactive functional paradigm and it is no longer confined to spreadsheets. > I’m thinking the same ele…

BTW, several people have created Javascript libraries that follow the simple design of Scratch primitives, so that those can be used within a textual environment.

[1] https://woofjs.com/

[2] https://www.blocklike.org/

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#64
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…

> The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship.

I think this is a really important insight and a big problem I noticed as well. When I started working on my own space repetition app[1] I really wanted to enable and facilitate this kind of interconnection of concepts. I added a notes section in addition to cards and the ability to link/reference notes from cards, cards from notes, cards from other cards, etc.

I found this really helpful for example with Japanese. Having a sentence card for a vocab word that also links back to a long form note on the grammar being used in the card. Another example is kanji. Making cards for individual kanji as well as vocab cards that use those kanji and linking them together. Over time I was able to build up a huge web of interconnected information.

[1] https://mochi.cards/

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

Is this what Apple Shortcuts is trying to achieve? https://apps.apple.com/au/app/shortcuts/id915249334

Yes, this is a great start. Higher level abstractions can be introduced very gradually.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#67

The premise of the article doesn't make sense. Tools can only train thinking ability, they cannot extend it. Thinking and reasoning must be fixed at the root.

A quick read to see how mediums and tech fundamentally affect "thought" is Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

The fact that my comment was down-voted makes me feel like 'John the savage' from 'Brave New World'.

From my PoV, it seems that most people don't really understand what 'thinking' means.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#68
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…

From the Hinton link: "Letters submitted to mathematical journals of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly disturbing or dangerously addictive."

I wonder whether anyone in modern times has tried it, and how it turned out.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#69
I have this idea that refuses to leave me alone, but I don't really have the time and dedication to investigate it, so I'll just give this one away here:

I believe a lot of effort in reading stems from parsing: words can be ambiguous in sense ("ball" could mean a spherical object or a festive event; "work" could mean a result of working, or it could be the verb [they work], or it could be an imperative [work!], ...). So disambiguating sentences containing words of degeneracy G1, G2, G3, ... have a total disambiguation space of G1 x G2 x G2 x ... interpretations. Then there is also grammatical disambiguation.

There was the recent paper showing how transformers effectively provide each instance of a word with not just it's sense but also its grammatical position encoded as vectors, with the root at the origin, its children a unit distance away, and their children another unit distance away from their parent etc... This turned out to be essentially the Pythagorean theorem.

Now let's make another oversimplification: let's pretend the human ear hears volume logarithmically (or at least understands the logarithmic scale for intensity, very plausible since different resonators emit exponentially decaying sound with half-lives that depend on the properties of the object [transmission at the boundary conditions]). On top of that make the assumption that the discernible frequency bins form essentially a constant Q transform (i.e. equal temperament bins, a good but rough approximation, see Plomp and Leveldt). This insinuates we can present a vector as a list of decibels for each frequency bin. My choice for audio is mostly because it would take 0 effort for the listener to align the auditory sensors: even if we rotate or move our heads very fast, there will be no appreciable doppler effect to a speaker, let alone headphones. If we chose visual intensities or graphs, we would have to either look at the same point on the screen for prolonged periods of time, or alternatively shift the image in our brains.

So the idea would be to have a fraction of the frequency bins correspond to the sense vector, and the rest of the bins for the grammatical positioning vector. Then sequentially play the vectors in a sentence (or in any order really, since in theory the grammatical position is encoded in part of the spectrum).

We could create multiple choice questions by playing a sentence (senses and grammar positions), then repeating the sound of a word of choice's sense without grammar frequency bins, and have the user select the right word in a different sentence, to make sure we are recognizing the sense specifically.

Then "hear" pre-parsed texts, but scramble the word order to force the user to rely on the grammar vector component of each word.

Then, later, generate sentences that are ambiguous without grammar vectors: the unordered set of {cat, mouse, sees, the, the} "rendered to sound" twice with different grammar vectors: once with the meaning "the cat sees the mouse" and once with the meaning "the mouse sees the cat" and the user cas to connect the sentence audio to the right written sentence, to verify the user is interpreting the grammar vectors.

Who knows how fast we could be hearing text? Could we learn to hear text as fast as we can see and abstract visual scenes, if parsing is done for us by transformers? "A picture says a thousand words"

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#70
post #9

here 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…

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