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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#131

Post by DenisM »

karolisd wrote: post #59

Knowledge is an interesting subject. When I read, I don't remember the exact order of words. Especially in the age of Google, we have a choice of what to burden our memory with and what to leave to Google. Are names and dates important? What's important is to have models of how things work in your mind. It is through the process of reading that we develop and refine these models.

Approximate dates are important to find connections with other contemporary events, and more broadly to put things into the context of the prevailing culture at the time.

Re: How You Know

#132

Post by wwweston »

programmarchy wrote: post #124
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…

This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchec…

> This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles

That sounds... time consuming.

> "Philosophizing in midstream"

Since you're picking axioms/first principles, isn't it all philosophizing in midstream to one degree or another?

Re: How You Know

#133

Post by walterbell »

naraghi wrote: post #100
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 only recently started taking notes in my own books and already see the flaws with doing so. I like that you approached the problem with a more direct solution. I wonder about future technology when PG says "Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them." I also wonder about the iterations between now and then. What do you think could be an intermediate step (compan…

ConnectedText, an offline personal wiki with some auto-generated hyperlinks, http://www.connectedtext.com/manfred.php

1945, As We May Think, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...

Re: How You Know

#134

Post by kissickas »

patrickdavey wrote: post #116
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…

Just to chime in here.. I _really_ like keeping notes on books now. I put them in my vimwiki, write it in (github flavour) markdown, and publish statically. Very handy.

Ah, vimwiki looks perfect. I've been swayed away from hosting my own wiki every time I considered it because editing is such a chore (opening new pages, delayed feedback, etc), but vim is the perfect environment for one.

Re: How You Know

#135

Post by weinzierl » 

    Reading and experience train your model of the world. 
    And even if you forget the experience or what you read, 
    its effect on your model of the world persists. Your 
    mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source 
    of. It works, but you don't know why.
I often feel like that, but much more in regard to people than to books and experiences. It's strange, how much others have formed me, but how little I do remember about them. How little I remember about my parents, but how big a part of my compiled program they are.

Of all the time I spend with my daughter, of all the activities we do, she probably will not remember much in a few years, but at least I can hope it will have an effect of her model of the world that persists.

Re: How You Know

#136

Post by nikki93 »

programmarchy wrote: post #124
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…

This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchec…

But what if parts of your model are based on 'feeling'? Like improvisation in music, for example, or art. There is no 'filtering through logic' here -- of course there is some element of technique, such as mixing of colors or how you hit a drum -- but ultimately it is all about a human element that is complex and hard to convert into logical statements.

It seems as if becoming proficient at something indeed involves moving more knowledge into intuition, same as how you had to purposely look at the rear view mirror and watch cars closely as you learned to drive but now it becomes something of intuition. You had to pay special care to syntax and to grammar initially, but now all of that is habit and you can concentrate on the 'design' of a program, or the 'characters' and 'themes' in a piece of literature.

What if these 'logical arguments' we make for things are simply retrofitted justifications on top of our feelings? Pro-choice 'feels right,' but of course that won't fly in court and so I'll make up some argument for it, becoming disingenuous thus not just to others but even to myself, distancing myself from who I am and causing some amount of strife within. I hope to think I am a perfect rational thinker, but am I really? I am driven by drives, by passions. Maybe I should become aware of this and proceed, acknowledge the person inside me rather than attempt to destroy it with reason. Maybe I should just stop and listen and stop trying to rationalize, both to others and to myself, stop thinking, open my eyes and see life in HD.

Re: How You Know

#137

Post by walterbell »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #128
scobar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times." For me, this quote was the most powerful. I strongly and immediately agreed, yet I hadn't consciously considered the idea before. I now ask myself the question, "Which ones were the important books?" Some seem obvious, but I may have a deeply rooted worldview estab…

What types of books are important to you?

Questions vs. Answers: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

Re: How You Know

#138

Post by [deleted] »

jimbokun wrote: post #107
gatehouse wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an example of this, ask yourself: What is the world population? The longer it has been since you checked, the further off the number will be. https://www.google.com/search?q=world+population

My kids recently caught me claiming the world population is 6 billion people. Having learned the number more recently, they had the more accurate value.

[deleted]

Re: How You Know

#139

Post by walterbell »

nikki93 wrote: post #136
programmarchy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchec…

But what if parts of your model are based on 'feeling'? Like improvisation in music, for example, or art. There is no 'filtering through logic' here -- of course there is some element of technique, such as mixing of colors or how you hit a drum -- but ultimately it is all about a human element that is complex and hard to convert into logical statements. It seems as if becoming proficient at something indeed involves…

A 1990 quote from Heinz von Foerster, http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html

"Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.

Why?

Simply because the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer." In some cases it may go fast, in others it may take a long, long time, but ultimately we will arrive, after a sequence of compelling logical steps, at an irrefutable answer: a definite Yes, or a definite No.

But we are under no compulsion, not even under that of logic, when we decide upon in principle undecidable questions. There is no external necessity that forces us to answer such questions one way or another. We are free! The complement to necessity is not chance, it is choice! We can choose who we wish to become when we have decided on in principle undecidable questions.

This is the good news, American journalists would say. Now comes the bad news.

With this freedom of choice we are now responsible for whatever we choose! For some this freedom of choice is a gift from heaven. For others such responsibility is an unbearable burden: How can one escape it? How can one avoid it? How can one pass it on to somebody else?"

Re: How You Know

#140

Post by icebraining »

eaurouge wrote: post #109
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…

There's always a danger that you'll introduce a bug in your code at some point, right? If you 'pull' from a lot or sources, at some point one of those sources will introduce a bug. But if you have a lot of high quality committers (book authors) and you continue to pull (read) from those sources, you stand a good chance of discovering and squashing these bugs eventually. In fact, as your code (mind) matures, you start…

"You can take my life, but you will never take my .gitignore"?
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