The strange path of accepting how your brain works
alexanderell.is
The strange path of accepting how your brain works
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#2Great article. Something I really struggle with. That is accepting my brain and it's limitations. But working to improve it daily.
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#3Very relatable reverie. I'd add to this that, while the author focuses on the genius of von Neumann, most of the smart people around you aren't actually like that. They too have limitations, strengths and weaknesses, and the fact that you're working with them is already a good signal that you're clustered fairly close together in capacity.
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#4I also struggle a lot with the limitations I have, frustrated at being so slow and stupid. I've also relied on flashcards as an augmentation, but I've started to question its value. For language we're already wired to pick up on it without tools like flashcards. As I think back, like most people (I assume) I learned English through watching TV without subtitles, and reading online. I didn't speak much (if at all) until I was about 20. By then I was pretty much fluent, just from TV and the internet, no flashcards nor lots of output (like conversations) needed. Ironically, I'm in the process of building a language learning tool, but it's aimed at bringing interesting native content (TV) down to a level where a lower intermediate learner can enjoy and learn from it.
Anyway, my hope is that the difference in performance between me and those more naturually "gifted" is in how they use the neurons they have, maybe there's a way for me to find a better way to use what I have. I think the key to this is spatial as well as social reasoning and memory. We're already wired to excel at these things. I can barely remember the formula for cross entropy loss, but I remember the layout and details of that coffee shop I frequented 10 years ago in a different country without much effort. Jeff Hawkins talking about thought through reference frames and movement in his book on the brain really indicates to me that taking the effort to encode our knowledge spatially, i.e. finding the right representation, rather than trying to beat it into our heads with spaced repetition is a bette rway. I've also noticed that when I can tie ideas to a face, a person, I'm more likely to remember them. I think a good way for me to remember science and math is to learn the history of the subject, like who invented/discovered what in what order, where (possibly) and why, i.e. what's the story behind it all.
I don't like mnemonics, because they're basically garbage encodings. They make it possible to retrieve a memory, very slowly, but don't encode things in a way such that you can reason over them. It's the difference between one-hot encoding a word in NLP vs a semantic word embedding.
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#5> A few problems in, I noticed him pause when starting on a new problem, and after a brief moment, he wrote down an answer without any intermediate steps or work.
Isn't that pretty frequent for high school work? I'm not a genius, far from it, but I spent a big part of high school writing down solutions and being bothered by the professors to write the steps (that's how I felt at the time, I've since understood why they acted that way).
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#6I think this is an up-close look at a small part of a much larger overarching concept that most people never really come to grips with in the way that the author does: Life isn’t fair.
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#7Great article. From the perspective of someone who's getting older, you have to come to grips with the fact that your mind and brain change in ability just like your body does. At first it can be frustrating, and you see it only as a negative. But strangely, having your brain change a bit in terms of its speed or its ability to memorize and recall things can actually give you a new perspective on solving problems and thinking about things in general. I'm not saying it's a bed of roses, for the most part it's a loss. I'm just saying you can learn to accept that and move on with the capabilities you have at the moment, rather than wallow in self-pity and see every cup as half empty.
There's also the fact that as you get older you simply know more, you've seen more patterns and data. You're like a machine learning algorithm that's been trained on a larger corpus.
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#8Sönke Ahrens has a good point on forgetting in "How To Take Smart Notes". We view it as a negative thing, but if we remembered everything we would be drowned in details and we wouldn't be able to distinguish signal from the noise. He argues that forgetting makes us able to learn.
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#9Excepting von Neumann, I've recently enjoyed the parts in Turing's Cathedral on Nils Barricelli, and would encourage anyone interested to look into the sections about his kilobyte-scale genetic algorithms.
Re: The strange path of accepting how your brain works
#10Sönke Ahrens has a good point on forgetting in "How To Take Smart Notes". We view it as a negative thing, but if we remembered everything we would be drowned in details and we wouldn't be able to distinguish signal from the noise. He argues that forgetting makes us able to learn.
> if we remembered everything we would be drowned in details and we wouldn't be able to distinguish signal from the noise.
Not to mention how difficult it would be to distinguish past from present.