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Are we losing our ability to remember?

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Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#161

Post by WarDekar »

ohduran wrote: post #121
pessimizer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that the most terrifying thing in the book 1984 (and the most relevant to the pending future) was that people weren't allowed tools to write anything down, they had to use the "speakwrite," which would monitor the user and refuse to write things that weren't allowed to be written. Orwell wasn't prescient enough to imagine the type-remember, where you kept your entire perception of the world on machin…

I always thought that Brave New World was more prescient than 1984: you won't be forbid to write, we'll instead give you something more fun and distracting to do instead.

Brave New World Revisted [0] has several references and comparisons to 1984. BNWR was written by Huxley in 1958, 26 years after BNW was published (1932) and 9 years after 1984 (1949).

It has been a few years for me, but there were several prescient chapters when I last ready it during the rise of populism around the globe (2015), namely sections IV, V, VI, and VII:

  Foreword
  I Over-Population
  II Quantity, Quality, Morality
  III Over-Organization
  IV Propaganda in a Democratic Society
  V Propaganda Under a Dictatorship
  VI The Arts of Selling
  VII Brainwashing
  VIII Chemical Persuasion
  IX Subconscious Persuasion
  X Hypnopaedia
  XI Education for Freedom
  XII What Can Be Done?
Would recommend the read to anyone that found 1984, BNW, F451, etc. interesting.

[0] https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ (full text)

Edit: formatting

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#162

Post by curtainsforus »

Buttons840 wrote: post #140
sixdimensional wrote: post #61

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with…

"Are we losing our ability to walk?" Yeah. Kinda. Not really. I bet people had to walk more before cars though.

mobility scooters

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#163

Post by allenu »

asdff wrote: post #133
allenu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think we consume more information that we need. I think we also tend to overvalue getting that information and retaining it. The HN crowd is biased towards analysis and information, but just look at the abundance of note-taking systems posted. I used to store as much info as I could somewhere (a personal wiki) but over the years I realized there's just too much there and most of it I never need, and if I do ne…

The fetishism with notetaking is rampant, both on here and online. People make good money writing articles about the latest notetaking app and serving ads. Personally, I've never needed to crack open an old notebook after the relevant project has passed. I have a stack of them from college at my parent's house and they are simply collecting dust. Even if I had everything digital I would never feel the need to go back…

That's how I treat note-taking today. I keep a physical notebook that I jot down ideas and draw diagrams in. It's sort of my canvas for sketching things out and seeing if I understand the problem and solution I'm working on.

Like you, I have a bunch of old notebooks as well that I only ever flip through for nostalgia. I generally only review my notebooks for design notes if the notes are at most 3-6 months old.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#164

Post by Viliam1234 »

sixdimensional wrote: post #61

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with…

> take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains.

I agree. But these two examples are different in a way that is important to me: my personal wiki is under my control; Google is not. Therefore, when I find important things in Google, I sometimes still take care to rewrite them into my wiki, using my own words.

Using the wiki feels like extending my brain. Using Google feels more like outsourcing it.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#165

Post by mofosyne »

asdff wrote: post #132
ohduran wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that Brave New World was more prescient than 1984: you won't be forbid to write, we'll instead give you something more fun and distracting to do instead.

So many parallels between Brave New World and our current world. It's honestly disturbing. The class divide between rich and poor is in there. The intellectual divide between knowledge workers and laborers is in there. The dopamine consumption cycle that stymies creative thought of the masses is in there. The willful ignorance of there being any problems at all is in there. That book is disturbingly prophetic. It's h…

Why not both? Brave New World for the masses and 1984 for the few that rock the boat.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#166

Post by freetonik »

simongray wrote: post #68
freetonik wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second this recommendation, I enjoyed that book very much. However, I felt defeated by the end, because I couldn't act on the presented information in any meaningful way. Halfway through the book the author tells about how much he had struggled to write and had to isolate himself from technology for a while, but only temporary. He then came back and felt the "shallows" once again.

They did a good follow-up with the author on the Ezra Klein Show podcast a few months back: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klei...

Oh, this is great, thank you.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#167

Post by shrugthug »

asdff wrote: post #138
shrugthug wrote: post #54

For anybody interested in diving deeper into this subject, I would recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was written in 2011, but is still very applicable today. Brain plasticity is a real concept and our constant connection to the Internet affects us. https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

Very scary and I do get a sense that my recall ability and general focus is severely diminished after a decade of being active on reddit and other places like here. The problem is I'm on this dopamine treadmill. I see a thread with an interesting topic and a lot of comments, and I want to dive in and spend an hour sifting through it. I check my subreddits and HN every day. And for what? I get nothing out of it, maybe…

Good luck to you! I feel all of the sentiments that you mentioned in your comment. Here are some tips for you that have really helped me:

- Turn off auto-complete on your desktop browser. The "cmd+t > news.y" or "cmt+t > r" is a real catalyst for mindless browsing sites like Hacker News and Reddit.

- Uninstall apps like Reddit, Facebook, or Instagram on your phone. If you really want to access them, then use the web experience through the mobile browser. It's enough to get the job done, but not good enough to be addicting (no auto-play videos, notifications, and the UX is slightly degraded).

- Turn off all non-pertinent notifications on your phone, especially things like news, email, and social media. The only daily apps which have I notifications enabled for me are Messages, a sports app, and daily habit reminders.

- If I feel like I'm using a social media site too much on a laptop, then I change the hosts file to re-direct to localhost. Bam, access revoked for a while. I've found that this works better than browser extensions. With extensions, I used to just right-click > disable, then go to my time-wasting website. With the hosts file method, I need to figure out the path to the hosts file (I never remember it), open it in a text editor, type in my changes, then save the file with sudo permissions. I thought about scripting it, but I think the manual process is more effective at preventing me from constantly enabling/disabling access. There's more intention behind the action.

- Pay for a newspaper subscription. It's so refreshing to consume quality journalism vs trendy click-bait articles. My recommendation would be read one national outlet (NY Times, Wall Street Journal) and your local newspaper. Instead of browsing Reddit/HN in the morning, open up your newspaper app.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#168

Post by durandal1 »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #130
durandal1 wrote: post #104

Pretty sure the three main factors that decreases your ability to retain information is: * Lack of sleep * Stress * Age Usually all three hit at once, as our career peaks in intensity around our late 30s, while also having kids.

Late 30s is most certainly not old.

As someone over 40 I tend to agree, but it's also old enough to notice the effects on memory retention.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#169

Post by SstnMbgty »

nend wrote: post #127
xmprt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it important to remember everything that you've read especially in this day and age? 90% of stuff you Google is just to help you get a small task done or learn something that seemed important in the moment. Another 9% might be something you write down in a notebook to look back at later. Very few things are worth actively keeping track of in your mind and those are usually fundamental building blocks of a new…

>The brain is for thinking, not for remembering. I mean, millions of years of evolution would disagree. Seems pretty shortsighted to declare memory useless.

I suppose you could say that it's not useless, but it's use is subsidiary to the primary purpose of thinking, because it is thinking that actually solves problems.

This isn't necessarily true however, on a group selective level, remembering allows you to more effectively pass information to future generations, allowing your community to continue to adapt socially to your environment.

Sheep do this, with young sheep being explicitly taught how to handle a landscape by their parents, which is normally understood as showing them how to walk etc. but extends all the way to navigation and safe routes at least.

In our context that connection is far more obvious, even if that purpose has been in many ways assumed by tools; even if your brain remembers things solely for the purpose of thinking, it may not be for your thinking, and so we can say that memory, on an individual level, has a separate function.

Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?

#170

Post by SstnMbgty »

hyperbovine wrote: post #151
jp57 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if these things have always existed.

And yet not.

"It's almost as if" -

I want to say something ideological, interpreting a given piece of evidence in a simplistic way to assert that it can be reduced to my own assumptions, but I also want to sound clever about it.

I half feel like making a bot that goes through reddit and just says "it's almost as if" whenever it detects anyone has made an assertion of fact of any kind, in increasingly implausible and unconnected ways.

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