Personal staff and underlings are the solution. And friends and family are a great backup. This system works out well if you do a good job of remembering and meeting their needs. Keep notes on the needs of each person you care about. They will then put up with all kinds of forgetfulness and go out of their way to keep you on track.
Are we losing our ability to remember?
41–50 of 170 posts
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#42I second, second brain. heh. I invested like 20 hours setting up my notion just right, and it's so worth it. It's so much more organize than my mucky/intangible brain. I also believe in the GTD philosophy that your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#43I am experiment the same problem. As a software developer, I spend all my day on computer and mobile phone. Recently, I have a the feeling that it take me a while to recall the name of a friend. Or even searching for a solution. It could be the side effect of all of the autocomplete and search result which are accessible within my palm.
This sounds more like aging.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plato's Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.E.) > ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ... http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html
The irony of reading this, over two thousand years later, translated into a different language, presumably by someone who is, even after all this time, still able to read the original--it's almost like writing helps us remember, as a species, in ways that would have otherwise been almost completely impossible.
Yes - and writing is a way to extend your memory as well. You can work more complex ideas with yourself, using the paper as storage for what you have already thought through.
Can you imagine doing some even simple Calc-type proofs without paper? Not possible. Many things are like that.
You give up maybe better memory in your head in exchange for being able to make progress that your couldn’t have made without the tool of writing.
Humans are ultimately tool-using animals more or less... makes sense that we use tools that are valuable.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#45Wasn’t there a Greek philosopher who lamented how the youngs are losing their ability to remember because this newfangled invention called “writing” is making them lazy?
Yes but its us that live in era of weaponized attention grabbing. People are being paid millions to figure out how to hijack your attention, how to use yourself (body, mind functions) against you. Writing is a tool, it doesn't try to work against you, or have an agenda that might not be aligned with yours.
Greek oration was all about weaponized attention grabbing and getting people to join your school not those other terrible terrible oh so bad schools.
We’ve had weaponized attention grabbing as long as wemve had humans I bet.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#46[deleted]
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#47I second, second brain. heh. I invested like 20 hours setting up my notion just right, and it's so worth it. It's so much more organize than my mucky/intangible brain. I also believe in the GTD philosophy that your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
I used to think this way at the beginning of my career, and I've almost completely changed course since then. I found that organizing and storing information is somewhat overrated unless you are very, very good at knowing ahead of time whether information you have come across will be useful in the future. If you don't, then it's better to just let your brain do the means-testing there naturally -- does something make the cut and you keep coming back to it month after month, year after year? Good news, you'll probably commit it to memory as your brain needs to do so.
The problem is that if you overindex on what you choose to organize, you just end up with a bunch of junk and then you have to go back and tend it and delete it and figure out what makes the cut or not. It's such a time intensive chore that takes away useful cycles that I'd rather be spending on deep work. My deep work is rarely information retrieval and organization, but instead handling strategic concerns in the moment and planning for the future -- both of which I need to balance and do with proper judgment.
And unfortunately, I do not find setting up a knowledge management system very useful for that. An old-fashioned journal that lets me get out my thoughts in the moment and log it at a point in time is really the best tool for that.
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#48I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references. I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on. I think the trend today is to prime the brain…
Ditto.
This reminds me of write-up by Morgan Housel: long-term knowledge vs expiring knowledge[0]. To optimize that trade-off, I generally try to review, on a weekly basis, what I consume from the internet-verse. This has helped me in some ways. Not sure if it's gonna work or not for other people... Plus, moving the scale towards consuming long-forms is also helping me out. (I guess it depends on what type of bubble you are wrapping yourself into. For instance, only visiting specific sub-reddit and LW topics intentionally has been advantageous to me...)...
[0] - https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowle...
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#49I honestly fear what will happen when we attach more directly to the brain/eye the type of infrastructure and capabilities of a modern smartphone / search engine / assistant device that we now carry in our hands. Like Google Glass or whatever, but more invisible and immersive. I already feel so distracted; memory and focus and analysis sideloaded onto devices, and I'm not even a big phone user.
Kids in school are already struggling with these things. What happens when every child is walking around with facts available instantly and constantly, but no context to manage it?
Re: Are we losing our ability to remember?
#50I honestly fear what will happen when we attach more directly to the brain/eye the type of infrastructure and capabilities of a modern smartphone / search engine / assistant device that we now carry in our hands. Like Google Glass or whatever, but more invisible and immersive. I already feel so distracted; memory and focus and analysis sideloaded onto devices, and I'm not even a big phone user. Kids in school are alr…
Exactly, I agree. Think about 100 years from now — our bodies won't have evolved quick enough (much like our fight or flight mechanism dealing with the stresses of today) to be able to cope.