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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#71

Post by Clor »

agentultra wrote: post #54
chubot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely a fan of taking notes on things you've read (among other things, the effort to write notes makes you choose what you read more carefully). And I agree that it will help you remember the sources for various ideas. But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would rarely go back and look at things, and i…

Why not have both? For my technical journals I keep while working I use org-mode in Emacs. You can slice-and-dice your entries in many different ways using that package. However when I'm reading specifically I keep notes in paper journals. First I find the immediacy of pen to paper to be intuitive. Second, and more importantly, the serial nature of the journal forces me to explain my thoughts. It is this specific con…

Perhaps it's not the most 'private' solution, but you might enjoy keeping a diary at www.dabble.me , you get an email everyday with an earlier entry (like from 1yr ago). It's a great source of relativation to track your old emotions and to rediscover old insights. I think you can run it on your own private server if you want to.

https://github.com/parterburn/dabble.me

Re: How You Know

#72

Post by bcbrown »

Kluny wrote: post #68
bcbrown wrote: post #25

A few years ago I started an annual tradition, where around the new year I'll re-read the Pragmatic Programmer. This year will be the third year, and I expect I'll continue to gain new insights from future rereadings.

How long does it take you to get through it? I struggle with reading non-fiction books, and gave up at around 100 pages in last time I tried it. Sucks, cause I've heard that it's one of the more readable books go, in terms of programming manuals.

Under a week. I've coincidentally also had off from Christmas-New Years the past three years, though, so I have plenty of free time. I also read a lot of nonfiction, and read a couple of technical textbooks every year.

Re: How You Know

#73

Post by chrdlu »

proveanegative wrote: post #55

>Reading and experience train your model of the world. This sounds convincing but then an argument against reading fiction follows since fiction trains your model of the world with fake data.

Hmm this is a very interesting point, but we would have to dive a bit deeper and acknowledge there are many different types of fiction.

I would argue that certain types of fiction may actually be beneficiary such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye (vs something like 50 Shades of Gray). Those sorts of fictional settings allow the writer to present the experiences and specific feelings/situations to readers. Even though, say Lord of the Rings, isn't exactly relevant to our present day world, the morals and spiritual emotions involved reflect humanity (what makes a human?)

I guess your comment has some parallels in art: why should we draw abstract things when we can recreate what we see? Isn't recreating what we see more important/better art than something that would never end up existing?

While it's not a perfect analogy, I believe reading and looking at the creative arts ultimately benefits your model of the world through bettering your model of humanity.

Re: How You Know

#75

Post by nl »

not_that_noob wrote: post #46
nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

In practice, people rarely if ever revise their mental model as the world around them changes. Which is why a younger generation without this baggage inevitably rises to supplant the older one.

"It's not that old theories are disproved, their supporters just die out".

The best people adapt to new information, no matter their age.

Re: How You Know

#76

Post by finid »

It takes a deeper understanding of the mind and how it works to grasps these things.

When you learn about the four aspects of the mind and how each plays a role in your outlook, then you have the key to this "mystery".

Re: How You Know

#77

Post by fumar »

amatix wrote: post #64
nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

An article by Ted Chiang: The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling -- talks about some of these issues from a couple of different & interesting perspectives which I found really intriguing. One of which being a thought exercise about what it would mean to have the ability to accurately replay everything we'd ever seen or done. And how two people who went through the same experiences can come out with vastly different…

The idea of replaying moments of our lives reminds me of a Black Mirror episode from Season 1. "Set in an alternative reality where most people have a 'grain' implanted behind their ear which records everything they do, see or hear. This allows memories to be played back either in front of the person's eyes or on a screen, a process known as a 're-do'." Without giving too much away, the episode explores how new solutions to human-problems create unforeseen issues.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You

Re: How You Know

#78

Post by cyanoacry »

Raphmedia wrote: post #37
chubot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely a fan of taking notes on things you've read (among other things, the effort to write notes makes you choose what you read more carefully). And I agree that it will help you remember the sources for various ideas. But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would rarely go back and look at things, and i…

I've heard a few people tell they use a Wiki. Do you host it on your own server? Is is a public wiki, or a private one? I'm very curious.

I host a private MoinMoin wiki on my own server, as a place to collect links as well as thoughts. It's a fairly easy setup, and allows you to make sure that you can write down even private thoughts (well, as much as you trust your own security setup that is).

Re: How You Know

#79

Post by cliffcrosland »

When I was a freshman in college, I was in a humanities class that focused on the intersection between humans and machines. We had an assignment to build and test out a "prosthesis", i.e. a technology that extends human capability, in Second Life.

I created a simple wristwatch accessory that was scripted to upload a copy of all of your chatbox text to an external service. Later, you could log in to this external service and search through a history of all of the conversations your character ever overheard.

Real-world versions of this technology appear inevitable as digital storage costs trend to zero. A rudimentary digital copy of the physical world is being created in services like Google Maps. The Google self-driving car records a 3D copy of its surroundings with accuracy at the centimeter level. Dropcam uploads video and audio data from within your home to cloud storage.

A world with fully recorded life experiences seems creepy at first blush, but I believe we'll discover a mechanism for trust that will allow everyone to safely record a digital copy of their lives that is inaccessible to third parties. Perhaps in the future we'll each own an open-source private cloud container of CPU and storage resources. Instead of processing your data on external servers, third-party services might provide code that runs in your own container under tight network permission restrictions. Such a system might be able to maintain the benefits of continuous software deployment while allowing consumers to keep their data under their control.

Re: How You Know

#80

Post by michaelochurch »

I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?

I've gone through this exact anxiety. Access into past experiences (whether they're books, vacations, or pieces of visual art) isn't random-access. We seem to have a lot of on-demand knowledge but struggle to retain deep knowledge of something in an independent, self-encapsulated state. Depth of knowledge seems to form, in us, emergently and subconsciously. It makes a case for the Buddhist argument that all things are interconnected and interdependent; certainly, in our knowledge bases, that becomes true very quickly.

For me, the solution was to learn to enjoy the process of learning rather than completed act of having acquired knowledge, it being difficult to summarize any acquired knowledge without coming up with a trite, denatured reduction. It took a while because I was secure in the realization that, yes, I had read that 500-page book even if I couldn't reproduce more than a few pages of "raw" and independent knowledge.

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