231–240 of 276 posts
> "when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing" Does anyone know what this is referring to? Searching for "stephen fry singing trauma" doesn't return anything useful except pg's essay.
he seems to mention it in his autobiography http://www.amazon.com/The-Fry-Chronicles-An-Autobiography/pr... (search for "singing")
I am able to grasp things pretty quickly, I am able to link two different things to get ideas to solve problems, and also, I have grown more confident in approaching challenging problems.
Albeit, with anecdotal evidence, I believe, taking interest in wide variety of fields may not give immediate benefits but it helps you in ways you don't imagine. The very fact about which I used to worry - not focusing on specialising and hoping from one thing to another, is what I think has helped me grow my skills in programming, in general.
If I had a magic device that recorded all of my experiences, it wouldn't do me much good because I'm too busy collecting new experiences to be remembered. It would be great to be able to search for details and trivia, but I wouldn't have time to peruse the archive to refresh myself about things that I had forgotten completely. Much in the way that google lets us search for and recall anything, except the things we don't remember the name of.
I'm going in the direction of reminding myself about things that I previously read or bookmarked, especially as they tie in to what I'm currently reading. I think one part of the solution is to display existing bookmarks and typed up book notes to myself in a near random fashion. It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. I think a plugin that relates past content to the current page might be a good idea, ie for this page I could see any previous bookmarks that involve memory and retention. And generally reminding myself to review things I've already learned, even if they don't seem relevant at the moment.
I don't have any great ideas yet, but I've been coding like heck for the past few days to try to take small steps toward a solution. I've been on a quest to make my brain work better, and this essay has definitely given me some ideas and helped to push me along.
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"Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story.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
This is what makes so many people getting "breaking" sensational headlines from partisan blogs so dangerous. It becomes calcified reality for the vast majority of people; most folk are not hygenic with their belief structures. I actively seek disconfirmation of my beliefs, but most people seek reinforcement only.
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 comp…
I've been thinking about this very issue recently, and coincidentally started working on software two days ago to help manage the problem of remembering things that I've read. Obtaining information in 2015 is remarkably easy. Retaining it is damn near impossible, at least for me. I read books and bookmark links from hn and reddit on a daily basis, consuming constantly. But I find that I recall very little of it. I do…
Go for it; simplicity works. I've pushed a few of my favourite passages to a simple web page which I can flip through randomly (http://www.jasimabasheer.com/amateur_reading/serendipity.htm...). As a bonus I can also link to it when relevant discussions come up.
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> 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.
I disagree with the parent that you still remember the content but can't summarize it concisely. I believe the opposite: you forget the specifics but retain the ability to summarize them.
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An interchange format will be needed for independently-developed deep apps.
Plain-text and a file system? See emacs' org-mode. It has many of the features parent listed. update I'd even add perhaps the solution is really to take the best ideas out of org-mode and give it a platform-integrated UI. It does basically what everyone here has been asking for and more... it's just buried in Emacs which is definitely not for everyone. Document sharing across devices is easy if you're comfortable sha…
I hear about org mode a lot when I talk about the Wiki, but I'm not an emacs user so it's not as appealing to me.
Can org mode export HTML? At least for reading, plain HTML is the format that works best across all devices, and gives fast access. Writing is a different story.
> Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. Hence the important art of keeping a journal. You can keep a transaction log of changes. The act of replaying the journal allows you to identify patterns in your thought processes and identify cognitive dissonances. The very act of reading should induce a reactive compulsion to write. As Burroughs taught in his later creative writing courses -- in orde…
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…
Search is indirectly via Windows Search / Indexing. Definitely, there are a couple of bugs with that and I have had to delete and re-build the entire search index in the past.
The problem with hand-rolled solutions is that you may end up working too much on the tool instead of your actual work.