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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

#91

Post by shadowgovt »

Possibly worth considering the source: the author coaches on a mechanism for collecting and collating information. They have a vested interest in the notion you have to do the work (instead of letting the machine do it for you); indeed, they hope you do the work using this method they coach on...

(That having been said: I've used zettelkasten myself a bit and I'd say it's worth a try. Probably not for everyone but the underlying idea of "building out an artifact to supplement your memory and understanding of what you've seen" is an intriguing approach).

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

#92

Post by AndyNemmity »

Before the internet we asked people around us in our sphere. If we wanted to know the answer to a question, we asked, they made up an answer, and we believed it and moved on.

Then the internet came, and we asked the internet. The internet wasn't correct, but it was a far higher % correct than asking a random person who was near you.

Now AI comes. It isn't correct, but it's far higher % correct than asking a random person near you, and often asking the internet which is a random blog page which is another random person who may or may not have done any research to come up with an answer.

The idea that any of this needs to be 100% correct is weird to me. I lived a long period in my life where everyone accepted what a random person near them said, and we all believed it.

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

#93

Post by johongo »

It was a typical attitude among my physicist and mathematician friends that memorizing was for suckers, even though it was often required to reproduce long proofs or derivations. These were people to whom mathematics came naturally; their understanding, memory, curiosity, and experience just compressed that knowledge until it was trivial to memorize. Unfortunately, many walked away with a sense of not needing to know things until they need them, but good luck with that in a systems design interview.

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

#94

Post by nradov »

j_bum wrote: post #54
nradov wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the field of sports science and exercise physiology, we have very little in the way of facts. Much of what we once thought were facts have been disproven or at least called into question by later research. So we need to be humble, and very circumspect in what we label as a "fact".

Do you have any go-to examples of “facts” that were disproven in this field?

Zone 2 training is a good use of time for amateur endurance athletes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQnc6-z7AO8

Post exercise muscle soreness is caused by lactic acid buildup.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24521-lactic-acid

Icing is an effective treatment for minor musculoskeletal injuries.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/rice-protocol-for-injuries

Weight training for children will stunt their growth.

https://peterattiamd.com/belindabeck/

Stretching before exercise prevents injuries.

https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/nutrition-fitness/does-stretc...

I could go on and on but I think you get the point. Almost everything you hear in this field is opinions, extrapolations, and educated guesses rather than anything we could really call a "fact".

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

#95

Post by nancyminusone »

hn_throw_250910 wrote: post #27

A great deal of anti-AI posts as of late seem like milquetoast pearl clutching to me. They don’t want to outright say they feel threatened/devalued but the arguments they put forward are not only unconvincing, but in this case among many others actively work against them. nb. I tried really hard to not point out the smugness of Zettelkasten which I suspect emboldens this feeling of superiority, because I’d rather sit…

Fine, but I ask you what does it mean to "win" in this context?

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

#96

Post by bwfan123 »

Descartes' brief rules for the direction of the mind [1] is pertinent here, as it articulates beautifully what it means to do "thinking" and how that relates to "memory".

Concepts have to be "internalized" into intuition for much of our thinking, and if they are externalized, we become a meme-copy machine as opposed to a thinking machine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_the_Direction_of_the...

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

#97

Post by wduquette »

rorylaitila wrote: post #74
trjordan wrote: post #50

I was talking with somebody about their migration recently [0], and we got to speculating about AI and how it might have helped. There were basically 2 paths: - Use the AI and ask for answers. It'll generate something! It'll also be pleasant, because it'll replace the thinking you were planning on doing. - Use the AI to automate away the dumb stuff, like writing a bespoke test suite or new infra to run those tests. I…

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 w…

In my experience, a lot of the hard thinking gets done in my back-brain while I'm doing other things, and emerges when I take up the problem again. Doing the regular work gives my back-brain time to percolate; doing hard thing after hard thing doesn't.

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

#98

Post by wduquette »

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.

I arrange my code to follow a certain order, so that I can get my head back into a given module quickly. I don't remember everything; there's too much over the weeks, months, and years. But I can remember enough to find what I need to know if I structure it properly. Not unlike, you know, a Zettlekasten.

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

#99

Post by Animats »

"To find what you need online, you require a solid general education and, above all, prior knowledge in the area related to your search." And get off my lawn. That's more a criticism of search engines than AI, anyway.

Insisting that people know exercise physiology to work out is a bit much. That's what trainers and coaches are for. Now drop and give me twenty.

The real problem with LLMs remains that they can't really do the job of thinking yet, because they're wrong too often. They can both hallucinate and get lost. What the AI situation will be in five years, we don't know.

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

#100

Post by BinaryIgor »

klodolph wrote: post #56
trjordan wrote: post #50

I was talking with somebody about their migration recently [0], and we got to speculating about AI and how it might have helped. There were basically 2 paths: - Use the AI and ask for answers. It'll generate something! It'll also be pleasant, because it'll replace the thinking you were planning on doing. - Use the AI to automate away the dumb stuff, like writing a bespoke test suite or new infra to run those tests. I…

I’ve tried the second path at work and it’s grueling. “Almost certainly succeed” requires that you mostly plan out the implementation for it, and then monitor the LLM to ensure that it doesn’t get off track and do something awful. It’s hard to get much other work done in the meantime. I feel like I’m unlocking, like, 10% or 20% productivity gains. Maybe.

Exactly, same for me
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