241–250 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")
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you've checked the number enough to have realized a pattern (in this case a growth rate).
People don't grasp exponential growth[1]. That pattern will be useful for a very short time, and then you are wrong again. And then, when you finally accept that you don't grasp it and start calculating with a formal growth rate, the growth rate suddenly changes. [1] Nobody does. Some people know they don't, some are completely naive, the others lie to themselves. The first group have a chance of dealing correctly wi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And if your summary was "boy, new ideas from different stages" you kind of missed it.
Is that simply rubber ducking?
Why not take notes? Whenever I read a book I want to remember, I just pencil a dash in the margin next to any key fact, insight, or quote. Then after I'm done with a few chapters I retype these sections into a mindmap. It probably only adds 10 - 20% extra time, but you're getting 1000% more value. In general what matters isn't how much you read, but how much you retain and what sorts of connections with past and futu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really follow this? It seems like someone following these rules would rarely be wrong, but that they'd be paralyzed by the cost of making decisions.
From my own experience and observing others, that indeed seems to be the logical conclusion of it, and it's something that I see happen a lot. "Analysis Paralysis" a friend of mines likes to call it. It can be mildly annoying at times, but it seems like something that a lot of people aren't able to help doing. Or at least not without a lot of practice and experience.
This is such a common occurrence in board gaming that it's frequently abbreviated as just "AP".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An article by Ted Chiang: The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling -- talks about some of these issues from a couple of different & interesting perspectives which I found really intriguing. One of which being a thought exercise about what it would mean to have the ability to accurately replay everything we'd ever seen or done. And how two people who went through the same experiences can come out with vastly different…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you've checked the number enough to have realized a pattern (in this case a growth rate).
People don't grasp exponential growth[1]. That pattern will be useful for a very short time, and then you are wrong again. And then, when you finally accept that you don't grasp it and start calculating with a formal growth rate, the growth rate suddenly changes. [1] Nobody does. Some people know they don't, some are completely naive, the others lie to themselves. The first group have a chance of dealing correctly wi…