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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#161

Post by chubot »

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…

I'm not really sure what PG had in mind -- his comments are a bit vague, although perhaps a good starting point for a conversation.

I think if you just use this system for awhile, tons of ideas will come out. In fact you can generate a lifetime of work from it :) PG always talks about making something for which you are the customer.

EverNote is of course a company in this space. I used them for awhile; it's nice that they have iPad clients and the like. But I found their products to be a bit complex.

Here are some random things I want to fix:

- mobile access. In the past 10 years, this was a huge change. My Wiki is basically read-only on mobile devices. I have to go back to the desktop or laptop to really write anything. This is OK but I imagine there could be some mobile interface for typing or speaking and hyperlinking. EverNote partially addressed this.

- Data model for bookmarks. Actually I sort of poo-pooed the journal model in favor of a Wiki. But to be honest I've realized that a lot of things are links which I find on HN and the like, which need a date, "read" tag, and free form notes. It's basically delicious / pinboard, but with an emphasis on comprehension and connections to previous ideas.

- Unsurprisingly, I've found the need for a spreadsheet-like data model for finances, and certain kinds of research. Yes, I could just use a spreadsheet, but the hyperlinking and web hosting is huge. I use Google Spreadsheets now but would like something a bit faster and more under my control.

- I like having these notes as my data for all time. Delicious came and went in the last 10 years. A lot of the value for me is that it's personal, and not tied to any cloud service, which conflicts a bit with current business models.

- Search. Right now I have a fast full text scan with sqlite. I've wanted to write a script that would fetch bodies for all the links, put them in a full text indexer, and let me search quickly there. And maybe take screenshots with PhantomJS.

- Information curation. I have over 2000 pages now, and sometimes I probably forget to link back to stuff I should. I create duplicate pages by accident. This should be solveable with some hints.

- Stats on which pages I actually read. With 2000 pages, I need some kind of ranking now. Some are ancient/obsolete.

- Mirroring of my content hosted elsewhere... e.g. it would be nice to suck down my comments from HN and be able to search them later. I had a lot of good conversations on UseNet way back that I wish I still had :)

Not sure if any of these are good business ideas, but those are my thoughts :) A lot of them are partially covered by existing products. But the the thing I am suggesting is for particular programmers to build the particular thing for themselves. Everyone's preferred mode of information organization will be a little different. It's nice to have something you made for yourself. I think it's a good exercise, because you can start very simple and gets you in the feedback loop of product use / product design / implementation.

But it's possible it could lead to a company. For me it to led to some other technology, like a web server container variant of WSGI / CGI (both of these have problems). And backup / deploy stuff.

One problem is that companies are incentivized to go "wide" to acquire new customers. But I want to go "deep" into my own use cases. There are certain problems you only hit after you have 1000 pages. Probably 99.9% of EverNotes customers don't have that volume of content.

Re: How You Know

#162

Post by mirchiseth »

scobar wrote: post #123
arjunnarayan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

"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…

One way to better internalize information/concepts for me has been reading a lot of books on the same topic. For example at different times in my life I have been interested in Finance, Behavioral Finance, Stoic Philosophy, GISes etc.I typically read about 4-5 books on the same topic and it helps me internalize the concepts better.

Re: How You Know

#163

Post by randallsquared »

michaelochurch wrote: post #85
fumar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solut…

I found that one to be one of the less dystopian episodes. My explanation is linked because I don't want to spoil the episode. (Also spoils 15 Million Merits.) http://paste.lisp.org/display/144706

Phrasing to avoid spoilers for Black Mirror...

I think that the efficiency of technology shown in TV shows and movies shouldn't be assumed to imply something about the world therein, unless it's explicitly called out in the work itself. The writers are much more likely to have gone with something because it sounded cool than because there was a sound technological reason for it. The bit in the matrix where someone refers to someone else as "copper-top" is an example, I think.

Re: How You Know

#164

Post by scobar »

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?

>What's "important"? (That may seem like a misguided question, but it's not.)

I'm not certain if this question was meant for me directly. If it was rhetorical, I apologize for misunderstanding and answering.

I prefer not to define "important" in this context to avoid excluding any definitions subjective to those who may respond to my question. That way, I may learn both what makes a book important to someone and tips on remembering which were important.

Edit: Now that I know the question was intended for me, I'll provide a little more depth to my answer.

The first thought I had when considering what makes a book important is how strongly it resonated within me, and the intensity of my emotions when reflecting upon what I've learned or how my perspective changed shortly after reading it. I know those stronger emotions may derive from a bias I had at one point in my life, and may no longer have.

Therefore, I can't help but think my definition is wrong because it's relative to the period in my life which I read the book. So some books that were important before may not be now. That's why I was curious to learn others' definitions of "important" books, and how to identify them for rereading.

Re: How You Know

#165

Post by csallen »

arh68 wrote: post #36

It's not that you forget the content, it's that you forget how to phrase it concisely. If the author needed 70, or 200 pages to explain a concept, and you can at some point raise your hand and claim 'I get the point', it's not reasonable to expect a 12-word summary. What do I remember? Hard to put into words. Likewise, it's not reasonable to expect a perfect memory, reciting paragraph after paragraph of the original…

> If you really can summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the author have done that already?

Not only is this possible to do, but it's often done. The problem is that it's not necessarily useful or sufficient to hear a mere summary of something.

For example, let's say I tell you that "Idea X is important." That's a simple idea, right? It only too me four words to express it. But do you believe me? Probably not, because I haven't spent any time or effort convincing you that idea X is important. And do you understand what idea X is? Probably not, because I haven't spent any time or effort explaining that. Etc.

Even if you can summarize it, you probably need to write the entire book for people to get the background information necessary for them to find your summary useful, otherwise it will go in one ear and out the other.

Re: How You Know

#166

Post by chubot »

DenisM wrote: post #115
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…

Would you consider writing up your wiki design choices, and how they differ from the typical wiki?

I'm not sure it's that interesting, but I'll write a little here. I have used it for 10 years, so at least it's tested :) But only by one person.

I wrote a long comment above about future ideas.

I think the main interesting things are speed and and full text search.

The page loads in 150 ms, with the HTML loading in 75 ms (cold cache), using SSL. That's probably 5x slower than it should be, but it's also 5x faster than most products these days. To me, the speed makes a big difference. I decreased latency significantly 4 years ago, and I know my velocity of note taking has gone up, and it has paid off in terms of increased velocity/organization of the projects I plan with the wiki.

I think it took me 6 to 8 years to get to 1000 active pages, and then somehow I have active 2123 active pages now, after 10 years (although I do delete/archive pages, so this number is fuzzy).

Other features:

- I have a JavaScript "jot" button on my browser toolbar that submits the title and URL of the current page in the browser, and then opens up a form for jotting notes. Then this is appended to a selected wiki page.

- The notes are pretty heavily indented, outline-style, so the markup makes that easy.

- You can edit individual sections of a page, like Wikimedia.

Re: How You Know

#167

Post by tdaltonc »

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…

It's known to be impossible to create a consistent and axiomatic set of knowledge [1].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...

Re: How You Know

#168

Post by MichaelGG »

[deleted] wrote: post #152
arjunnarayan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

[deleted]

You're overestimating the difficulty of Facebook by over a factor of 50. Not to mention similar systems already existed. In fact, this is the first time I remember someone claiming that actually building the FB initial product was challenging (versus timing, acting on the idea, marketing, etc.)

Edit: parent comment was saying it's so much easier to with work with inexperienced people, and that an experienced "corporate" dev couldn't make Facebook if all the screens were given to them.

Re: How You Know

#169

Post by jakobegger »

napoleond wrote: post #105
nl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not that old theories are disproved, their supporters just die out". The best people adapt to new information, no matter their age.

The best people do, indeed. I'm still fairly young, but I'm starting to understand that "adapting to new information" is not something that happens by accident. "Continuous learning" is a lifestyle thing; I've never had to think about it. But forcing myself to re-evaluate things that I already thought I knew--that is a conscious and often difficult process.

The hardest part about this is accepting that you might be wrong. That your entire world view might be wrong, or one-sided. We humans have this uncanny ability to justify anything we just did, or said. It takes a lot of conscious effort to accept that the other person might be right.

But only if you truly realise that you are not infallible, can you learn new things, and continue to grow.

Re: How You Know

#170

Post by jayro »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #19
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 an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

"Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account." - http://mindhacks.com/2011/05/04/why-the-truth-will-out-but-d...

Original Paper: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/3/190

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