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How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

numinous.productions

71–79 of 79 posts

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#71
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…

5 or 7??

I can easily imagine much more things simultaneously:

1, 2: 2 cars are parked at the side of the road

3: a third car is driving and going to pass the 2 parked cars.

4: a cat runs out from between the parked cars on the street

5: a dog chases the cat

6: with a pulled taut leash

7: pulling the dog's owner on the sidewalk out of balance,

8, 9: causing the owners hat to fly off, and her groceries to fall out of her free arm

10: a fourth car crashes into the surprised car

11: an elderly couple looking at the scene in pure horror

...

Now if you meant we could only hold 5 or 7 scenes or complex thoughts at once, then yeah, that could be true depending on the complexity of those thoughts or scenes.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#72

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…

Fair enough. I wasn’t thinking of the language actually, more of how they use the painting canvas. The fact that scripts belong to tangible things and not some abstract “background”. Compare VBA and formulas in excel. Formulas naturally belongs to their cells, which is simple, but vba exists in this ambient thing that requires an entirely different abstract model to grasp.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#73
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,…

In the essay, the importance of dependency on previous concepts is touched upon multiple times.

I essentially see 2 distinct "problems" or tasks that would need to be done in this specific respect (without downplaying the value of other factors): 1) it takes effort to encode the dependency relationships, 2) even if someone puts in a lot of work for a specific subject or domain to encode the dependency relationships, we need to modify the tools to take advantage of this knowledge.

I would propose as a next testbed, one takes the MetaMath database (set.mm), since dependency of a theorem on other theorems or axioms can be extracted in automated fashion. So I would love to see a tool (a working title could be Anki/MetaDrill or "autodidact" was the title I had in mind) that presents me with the following exercises:

type 0a, 0b: given ascii characters select LaTeX symbol (a) and vice versa (b) [for example ".-" for negation etc...]

type 1: given theorem/hypothesis/axiom/definition abbreviation name: produce the statement

type 2: given theorem/hypothesis/axiom/definition statement: produce the abbreviation (the reverse of exercise type 1, both can be easily extracted from an instance of a verifier that has parsed the set.mm database)

type 3: given a couple of input statement, and an output statement: produce the theorem abreviation that justifies this step (can be easily done by randomly selecting a target theorem from those scheduled for the user to know, then searching all proofs in the database for steps that reference the target theorem, each reference to the theorem is a utilization or example application of the theorem)

type 4: given a theorem: produce the list of theorems directly used in its proof (this one depends on the proof used, so that it is possible to find proofs that don't rely on those in the database, but is easy to generate for the proofs proposed in the database: just enumerate all the references in the proof of this theorem)

type 5: given a theorem (by abbreviation or by statement): produce a proof (the previous series of exercises should provide all the prerequisites, and the last exercise above would contain a lot of hints to reproduce the proof) it is possible to find an original proof, and the MetaMath verifier can be used to check the user's proof!

the exploration or presentation of new axioms, definitions, theorems, can be limited to those "in view" to the user, using the dependency graph of theorems, so only a minimal number of new concepts is introduced at a time. I.e. this prevents the user from being bombarded with uncontextualized facts like "the connected sum of a torus with a sphere is a torus" without first learning about addition of rational numbers...

once a large number of people can quickly get up to speed with MetaMath, they will see the utility of spaced repitition, and understand that formalization is the way forward, since formalization automatically forces you to be explicit in dependencies, and forces people to state their beliefs as exactly as possible, or alternatively as quickly as possible (be bold), but such that others can prove errors in their conjectures by providing proof that the bold person happened to introduce an inconsistency.

But the biggest advantage of logical formalization of knowledge is that all the above exercises can be automatically generated, no one needs to produce flash cards! not only can they be generated automatically, they can be generated as a function of the past performance of the user on those exercises, instead of waiting a long period of time before retesting prerequisites 2 or 3 levels deep, we can test already seen knowledge that relies on it, and upon failure schedule the immediate prerequisites it relies on 1 level deeper, most of which will succeed, but one of which will typically fail again prompting it's lower level prerequisites to be tested (2 levels deeper from the original failure) to finally prompt a last failure, upon which the 3rd level lower prerequisites are reached but all succeed, just like how a professor in an oral exam probes where exactly the student got stuck. This allows to test for gaps in working memory to be detected without explicitly testing all the lower levels, just like the blood test during the second world war: at some point an expensive but very sensitive test was developed, and instead of testing the soldiers individually, their blood was mixed then tested, and in this manner it was possible to cheaply scan for positives and only zoom in when a group had a positive. I can not find the link to the relevant wikipedia page sadly.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#74
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…

RE: Item 2, I think that unfortunately genetics has a strong, though not absolute role.

But on an more optimistic note I think the ability of technology to accommodate different learning styles will help unlock the potential of many people. I'm looking forward to seeing what innovations come from people who think in ways that are truly unconventional.

However, I think a very important underlying question is "what kind of intelligence are we actually going to need in the future?" I think it depends on who you ask.

Most Americans would probably say 'logical reasoning for working with computers so you won't have to worry about automation'.

But if Kai-Fu Lee was here I bet he would say 'creativity and artistic talent' since art is a human activity that is harder for a machine to grasp.

Either way, the capacity of the internet to proliferate bullshit means that everyone is going to have to learn epistemology whether they want to or not.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#75
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

Thanks, no worries. Sorry to hear you're feeling a bit fed up with Anki / parts of Med School.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious (genuinely) how you define thinking in a way that it's unaffected by the dominant mediums of communication and culture. Maybe you can recommend some reading material?

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious (genuinely) how you define thinking in a way that it's unaffected by the dominant mediums of communication and culture. Maybe you can recommend some reading material?

In my view 'critical thinking' is real thinking. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of what we perceive as knowledge is in fact rhetoric. You need to learn to take everything with a grain of salt; sometimes that means you need to unlearn things along the way. Doubt is important.

I think it's good to read a variety of books with opposing viewpoints or with viewpoints which contradict popular ideas.

For non-fiction, the books 'Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness' by Nassim Taleb were eye-openers for me. Also, I found an interesting synergy between Nassim's books and the book 'Thinking fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman (which is a book about human psychology). Also, I enjoyed reading 'Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World'.

I don't read much fiction but it can be interesting sometimes. I read 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley many years ago and it's a book that appears to be becoming more relevant with time. I find that watching foreign films can also help to diversify my thinking.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious (genuinely) how you define thinking in a way that it's unaffected by the dominant mediums of communication and culture. Maybe you can recommend some reading material?

In my view 'critical thinking' is real thinking. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of what we perceive as knowledge is in fact rhetoric. You need to learn to take everything with a grain of salt; sometimes that means you need to unlearn things along the way. Doubt is important. I think it's good to read a variety of books with opposing viewpoints or with viewpoints which contradict popular ideas. For non-fic…

Thanks for explaining.

> 'critical thinking' is real thinking

Most of critical thinking is awareness of uncertainty. It is abductive reasoning. It's about 'most likely' conclusions and 'best explained by' situations. Which is why:

> You need to learn to take everything with a grain of salt

That's uncertainty. And once you are in the realm of uncertainty (which is almost always), society and culture take a large role in affecting your decisions.

A tool for thought helps navigate that uncertainty, so you have a better understanding of systems, which likely translates to making better decisions.

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