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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#181

Post by argumentum »

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…

He did mention Stephen Fry discovering a "bug" in his mind related to childhood trauma.

Re: How You Know

#182

Post by d23 »

japhyr wrote: post #121

One of the most significant books I ever read was A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. He graduated college in the 70's, wasn't sure what to do, and decide to walk from New York to the Pacific ocean. This book covered the first half of the walk; he wrote it while taking a break in Louisiana along the way. That book was hugely influential to me. I graduated college and spent two years teaching. The summer after my…

May I ask what in your perspective on the book changed? What made you think it was so great the first time and so bad the second?

Re: How You Know

#183

Post by noonespecial »

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…

Worse still many of these are formed in childhood from large misunderstandings. I'm constantly finding myself "closing out" old bogus lines of thought decades old.

Re: How You Know

#184

Post by d23 »

csallen wrote: post #165
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…

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this has absolutely nothing to do with what PG was referencing in the article. I'm guessing he could at least give some broad overview of the book he's referencing. The issue seems to be that it seems so small in comparison to the book itself.

Re: How You Know

#185

Post by scoofy »

What i found shocking here, is how casually pg talks about what i believe is the fundamental point of philosophy. That is the mapping of our minds inductive model of the world, and our deductive one.

>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.

Here, he is pointing out the the relevant information you perceive, your empirical data, is only retained insofar as it effects your deductive model of the world, that is, the model we use to determine truth and falsity. The rest of the data is generally trivial. This is a very sensible insight in my mind, and kudos to him. The dance between empirical data and deductive truth is one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. This as a model for data retention is something i'd not thought of.

>Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.

Here, i find this problematic. In Soros's terms, the mind is reflexive. Thus, in reviewing the data, we are experiencing new data. If we edit our thoughts, do we not remember editing them? I don't see away to take away the reflexive nature of self examination, that in creating changes, we create new data about the changes.

Re: How You Know

#186

Post by blake8086 »

mherdeg wrote: post #173
jayro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

I've always wanted a short name for this phenomenon, where a lie takes hold and never leaves no matter how thoroughly it is debunked. Maybe the 'swift boat effect'?

Perhaps "cached thoughts"? http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/

Re: How You Know

#188

Post by anigbrowl »

ejstembler wrote: post #130

Having read Carl Sagan's Cosmos in my youth, I always feel guilty re-reading a book: “If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Don't feel guilty, Sagan's quantitative approach is a teribly shallow view of reading. If you feel you want to read something again it's because you expect to get something out of it - perhaps to refresh your memory, perhaps to pay more attention to the subtext of the work, perhaps to study the author's literary or rhetorical techniques. You wouldn't assume that you had learned everything about a complex musical composition or painting from single listening or viewing, why assume you've learned everything worth knowing from a single reading of a book?

The only reading I ever feel guilty about is my aversion to leaving a book unfinished. I'm pretty good at picking what to read, but about once every year or two I encounter some real stinker that is a literal waste of my time, and I feel a bit annoyed with myself for plowing through to the end even though I have long ceased to expect any literary or intellectual payoff.

Re: How You Know

#190

Post by npizzolato »

debacle wrote: post #21
larrys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes me think of a saying. One that I remember. "Sophia Loren without a nose is not Sophia Loren". Here's another one "if my grandmother had balls she'd be my grandfather". The point is PG wrote it so just like if anyone of note wrote it it would be more of interest than the same thought from anyone else. After all these are analog thoughts and subjective this isn't science.

When a renowned writer writes something weak, it doesn't give credence to the piece, it takes credence from the writer.

I'm also surprised people actually find the contents of this blog post insightful, but I suspect it has far more to do with who wrote the article.

I mean, is it not obvious that you can take away new ideas from reading a book multiple times at different stages of your life? As a simplified example, movies with twist endings hinge on exactly that fact -- armed with new information, events you have already experienced take on new meaning. More "important" things will have more significance, but it's the same idea.

Is it not obvious that your own world views are the result of your own experiences and others who you have contact with, even if you cannot precisely remember everything that would lead to that world view?

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