We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

"It is requisite that a man should arrange the things he wishes to remember in a certain order, so that from one he may come to another: for order is a kind of chain for memory" – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Not ironically I found the passage in my Zettelkasten.

Yeah I think this is what I've tried to articulate to people that you've summed up well with "You've compressed all your thinking work, back-to-back, and you're just doing hard thing after hard thing" - Most of the bottleneck with any system design is the hard things, the unknown things, the unintended-consequences things. The AIs don't help you much with that.

There is a certain amount of regular work that I don't want to automate away, even though maybe I can. That regular work keeps me in the domain. It leads to epiphany's in regards to the hard problems. It adds time and something to do in between the hard problems.

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It's like a cache level issue.

In the old world, you had your wet brain memory. You needed to fill it with the order of the alphabet, so that you could make use of paper reference works. You also needed some arithmetic and some English style notes, in case you wanted to express yourself. You had to remember things like there/their/they're and that kind of thing. You needed a small encyclopedia so that you could have a clue about where general knowledge could be found.

On top of this, you were expected to layer on your professional knowledge. If you were a doctor, a huge number of Latin terms. A more detailed understanding of how the body works that you got from the base installation. Something about how the profession works. You would get a sense for what was likely through experience. A BS detector, in some ways.

All because your brain ain't gonna get bigger, and paper information technology was what it was: found in a library, limited in size, hard to search, slow to update.

Nowadays, the brain cache is no different in capability. But the external memory system you are accessing is completely different. It's massive, it can update in real time, and it's very searchable.

So you need to keep different things in your brain cache to take advantage of this.

But what do you need?

The only component that really matters is the BS detector.

Not only do I not need to be able to do long division, I don't even need to know that a calculator exists for calculating my tax, a calculator containing the Haversine formula is out there somewhere, and a so on. I just assume something like epochconverter exists, and that I can plug a timestamp into it and get something readable out.

I just assume that I will be able to find things that I want, the tradeoff being that I don't have sit there and refresh my math knowledge to calculate distances on a sphere, type out a program, and run it for a single output. The other side of this coin is of course, I don't know whether the guy whose work I am borrowing did it correctly, whether he has some sort of interest he's not disclosed, and whether it's safe. I also have to compromise on any variation between what he built and what I wanted.

I do this with almost everything now. I can't help it, having grown up and been educated before the internet exploded, and having started work just as the explosion was happening.

So I'd say you actually don't have to remember everything, but you do have to use your judgement in everything.

I am either too stupid or too lazy to remember everything. Or my version of ADHD specifically restricts my ability to remember things, or to have sufficient energy to engage daily with the process needed to memorize information (e.g. build and review anki decks).

I gave up on Anki. I abandoned org-roam and switched to trillium with very simple summaries of hand written notes. I don't summarize articles I read, I simply save them to my bookmarks with good tags.

I might be stupider now, I don't know. My mandarin improves at the same pace it did before, when I was doing daily flashcards, according to my mandarin teacher. Except now I don't have the torturous Todo item of "do mandarin flashcards" weighing on me every day, or the huge catch-up if I miss even two days (again, I am stupid - I usually miss 20% of my cards, daily. Often the same cards. I have forgotten the same word over 100 times.)

But, the other day I went to trivia in Cambridge UK, where I was probably the dumbest person in the town and almost certainly in the pub! And everyone was answering very interesting questions with correct answers, about geography, history, science, even the geography of the Americas which as an American should at least have been something I knew better than my British colleagues! Nope. It made me regretful that I grew up in suburban America and didn't get a nice bit of background education like Europeans do, or maybe for me being dumb or having ADHD. It I always admired smart people and I always wanted to count myself amongst them - it's why I brute forced my way into engineering by picking the lowest barrier to entry bit (frontend) and gritting my teeth and smashing pencils through hour after hour of tutorial and project until I finally had a portfolio I could get hired off of. And still almost always, dumbest person in the company (there have been less productive than me, though), and no idea how to change it. I'm wondering again if there's something I can do to be smarter.

I am fascinated by the promise of zettelkasten, spaced repetition, fish oil, whatever, but none of it seems to deliver!