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

zettelkasten.de

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

#81

Post by hennell »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #2

It’s the same with math. A lot of people say they don’t need to be able to do basic arithmetic because they can use a calculator. But I think that you can process the world much better and faster if at a minimum you have some intuition about numbers and arithmetic. It’s the same with a lot of other things. AI and search engines help a lot but you are at an advantage if at least you have some ability to gauge what sho…

I used to find it weird how many people would make an excel formula on data they couldn't intuitively check. Like even basic level 'what percentage increase is a8 from a7' - they enter a formula then don't know if it's correct. I always wrote formulas on numbers I can reason with. If a8 is 120, and a7 is 100 you can immediately tell if you've gone wrong. Then you change for 1,387 and 1,252 and know it's going to be accurate.

People do the same with AI, ask it about something they know little about then assume it is correct, rather than checking their ideas with known values or concepts they might be able to error check.

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

#82

Post by low_tech_punk »

This piece reminds me of another article musing on the necessity of manual memory: https://numinous.productions/ttft/#how-important-is-memory.

That article articulated the reason slightly differently, arguing you need to hold multiple concepts in your head at the same time in order to develop original ideas.

Still, I'm not sure you have to remember everything, but I agree you have to remember the foundational things at the right abstraction layer, upon which you are trying to synthesize something new.

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

#83

Post by mallowdram »

bccdee wrote: post #77
mallowdram wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, kids lack the foundational ability to remember, reason, imagine because their phones cauterize their basic intelligence foundations in sharp wave ripples: navigation, adventurous short-cuts, vicarious trial and error, these are the basis for memory consolidation. And we build this developmentally until we are 16 or so. Once we offload this dev to phones, we are essentially unintelligent buffoon, lacking the ba…

No, you're just saying that. There's no evidence that using phones makes teenagers stupid.

Anyone who understands the development of intelligence and creativity is directly linked to the allocortex's ability to navigate freely, use vicarious trial and error, to invent novel short-cuts, built from both egocentric (landmark memories) and allocentric (extra body mapping) up until around the age of 16 in order to develop the basics of memory consolidation can take anecdotal evidence of kids that can't take a walk without a cellphone's help and extrapolate that these kids lack critical thinking skills.

It's elementary deduction from basic learning practices we've known since O'Keefe in 1973.

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

#84

Post by bluGill »

darepublic wrote: post #55

At my first software dev internship my manager asked me to code in languages I was not trained in. I told him I would need some time to study up on these. He scoffed and said just look up what you need on Google. Initially I resisted, I felt like it was too shallow. That it was akin to copying answers I didn't really comprehend. However it didn't take long to pick up the habit. Learning is like going to the gym now,…

That is because learning a computer language is not hard. Learning to program in the first place is hard, but once you know that the language itself is not hard to learn. However it is easy to verify someone knows the syntax of some specific language and hard to check if they actually know how to program.

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

#85

Post by bluGill »

procaryote wrote: post #44
dghlsakjg wrote: post #37

The irony here is using fitness as an example of knowable things. Fitness guidelines is very much not a settled science, and is highly variable per individual beyond the very basics (to lose weight eat fewer calories than you burn, to build muscle you should lift heavy things). For every study saying that 8-12 reps x3 is the optimal muscle growth strategy there is another saying that 20x2 is better, and a third sayin…

They're very knowable, it's just that there's a lot more money in making things up

They are not very knowable. It is expensive to design a study that would work. All too often a real world attempt to figure this out conclude "despite our best efforts we couldn't get people to behave in the needed way". So we have proxy studies that we hope mean something, but might not. Mixed in are lots of people making data fit their conclusion, and then selling it as fact.

Few people have the time to figure things out and so it isn't knowable even though all the steps are easy to lay out.

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

#87

Post by mars009 »

mmargenot wrote: post #18

> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work. You don't have to remember everything. You have to remember enough entry points and the shape of what follows, trained through experience and going through the process of thinking and writing, to reason your way through meaningful knowledge work.

[dead]

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

#88

Post by mmargenot »

rafaquintanilha wrote: post #72
mmargenot wrote: post #18

> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work. You don't have to remember everything. You have to remember enough entry points and the shape of what follows, trained through experience and going through the process of thinking and writing, to reason your way through meaningful knowledge work.

"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.

It's weird to read this from zettelkasten.de, given that the method is precisely about cultivating such a graph of knowledge. "Knowing enough to begin" seems to me to be the express purpose of writing and maintaining a zettelkasten and other such tools.

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

#89

Post by mmargenot »

palmfacehn wrote: post #51
HPsquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit like the memory palace. One memory leads to another. Not random-access.

You only need the initial seed to restore the full state, provided you can reason your way from there. If you haven't applied yourself to problem solving, then perhaps you might need to memorize the full state.

Executing on meaningful knowledge work also might require many different paths, depending on the context and the environment. To me it's more about the method of inquiry and how you begin than it is the specific content. Sure, more individual facts help to guide that inquiry, but at any given moment you're only truly going to be able to recall a subset of those.
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