141–150 of 276 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over time, my 'urban legend' bullshit detector has been refined, and is much improved from earlier in my life. I have, on a few occasions, found myself relating some 'fact' or 'story' and realized immediately that it was likely an urban legend. Both times, the detector was right, and a quick search cleared it up. I wonder if there is a good way to intentionally 'paw through' your repository on purposes, and apply you…
very interesting
I don't like the flavor of this post. It feels very much like navel-gazing and, if it wasn't for the domain name, it likely would have been lost to /newest. Where is the knowledge here? That we don't have immediate recollection of retained information? Knowledge is based on a beginning and ending context.
Secondly, your summary of pg post doesn't do justice to the its contents. To me it's about the distinction between mere reduction of information, akin to jpg compression, and building a model from it. A model is Turing-complete, a jpg is not. The distinction is important, in that it directs the effort required to correct misconceptions later in life.
Does anyone know what this is referring to? Searching for "stephen fry singing trauma" doesn't return anything useful except pg's essay.
I recently met some people who swore that photoreading was legit and that because of it they'd read about 10 thick books per week. Not knowing what it was, I looked it up and immediately didn't believe the premise. There's something to be said for speed reading (at a rate slightly faster than normal) but photoreading just seems ridiculous. Not only can no real content/meaning be gained from doing it, but no mental mo…
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2000001...
I have an interesting take on this. Most of the books I've read, I have a copy of. A while back, I endeavored to cut, scan and OCR them all into my computer. One idea was then I could do a full-text search, limited to what I've already read rather than what google thinks is relevant. So far, I've found it very handy to find something if I at least remember which book it was in. But I need a program that can extract t…
If the PDFs already have OCR text, calibre (GUI or CLI, Linux or Windows) can convert to .txt and many other formats. The recoll.org search engine will index PDF files that have OCR text.
This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I've had this exact feeling about books I read, films I've watched, conversations I've had, work projects I've completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive impression on me.
I've always felt guilty about this, especially when I see others who don't seem to have the same problem when they talk about the books they've read, etc. I've also found that recall can be greatly improved by repeatedly talking about the specific topic with multiple people.
The strange thing is that I have an excellent memory for certain things - information about people and relationships. In light of our evolutionary history as a social species, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.
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…
When I look back, I find that most of the things I've learned that I enjoyed the most, am the most proud of, or have been most helpful, have in fact been accidental, and not a result of planning. I found so-and-so article then downloaded so-and-so package, experimented with it and realized it could benefit a certain project I was working on. Sorta like going down a Wikipedia hyperlink rabbit hole -- very in the moment, just chasing your will and not questioning yourself, doing simply what feels right.
Look back at your bookshelf and pick what feels right. If you start reading it and it feels wrong, then put it back. Being told what to read is annoying, so why would you do that to yourself? Do what you're doing when you playing music improvisationally, but with your life instead.
>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…
The scientific method depends on the generation of testable hypotheses.
How do we generate hypotheses?