11 ms·

How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

214 points by goerz 7y ago

GoodGOYIM 7y ago
Why tho?
hos234 7y ago
Programmers/computer scientists will make better progress on "transformative" "tools of thought" if they spend a few years collaborating with psychologists/sociologists/political scientists/economists/historians on their problems first. Those that do will have a leg up over those that dont. Right now it's like watching people working on calculus without spending enough time on algebra and geometry.
xamuel 7y ago
Extremely boiled down TL/DR: The author's invention is a spaced repetition system built into an essay, so instead of having the cards isolated, the cards are embedded in the text itself. At a technical level, that's certainly innovative, but I'm doubtful about whether it's actually an improvement on classical SRS. In my experience, one of the most important things for an SRS deck is speed of reviewing: a given card should take less than 1 second to review and rate. This is necessary if you're going to maintain decks with tens of thousands of cards. I find my brain does a remarkable job of reconstructing the surrounding context, so having the cards embedded in the original text would just be a time sink for me, I think.
- gwern 7y ago
  From reading earlier discussions of the quantum computing tutorial, I am pretty sure most of its readers do not even use classical SRS in the first place.
  - xamuel 7y ago
    Yes, I was struck by the really exceptional and beautiful presentation/layout of OP's page. Perhaps the real contribution is less "build a better mousetrap" and more "market the hell out of mousetraps". If OP can show more people the light of SRS, that will be fantastic!
Jun8 7y ago
This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes. 2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the way baby brains gather information and are trained are limited by their bodily abilities, which are puny. 3) The answer seems to be to devise a way to feed information-reach, highly non-normal stimulus to young brains, e.g. using heads up displays. This is the method described in Mimsy Were the Borogoves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves) This sounds nightmarish and we also don't have the technology currently. But in the intense competition for colleges/high-schools and even middle schools who knows what can happen? P.S. Also wanted to mention Hinton's models/toys with which he claimed to have learned to intuitively think about 4th dimensional objects, they are described in his book https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourth-dimension/ https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourt....
- xamuel 7y ago
  Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.
  - pretendscholar 7y ago
    Memory palace
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein The techniques aren’t secret. You can buy books about them on amazon. It’s like memorizing the Iliad, Odyssey or the Koran, completely doable for a human of normal intelligence but a lot of work.
  - 1propionyl 7y ago
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
Honestly this is the area I'm most excited about. SRS is just one facet---correct choice of input media, datatypes, and mental models are a big deal here. I'm a math undergrad. And one thing that drives me crazy is how mich rewriting I do. What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree manipulation ux actions" are is another thing. Similarly--am I the only one tired of typing? I'd kill for a gait analyzer or a haptic glove that let me program while walking through the park. Some of this stuff sounds farfetched, but looking at emacs, or chorded stenotype machines, or paredit, really drives it home that we could be doing so, so much better, with very little new tech required. When I was a kid I had mild synesthesia where I'd tie the words "fourth" and "favorite" with a feeling of "reaching." I still today associate clojure's map with spreading butter, or reduce with "rolling up." Chinese abacus math, developed to the point where thr actual abacus is no longer necessary, is a thing to behold. The human mind seems to make these connections easily and automatically. Why not leverage that? I'd love if text became just the shared human-legible bytecode for our own personal interfaces. (Check out this clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70 where some people get fed targeting data from an AI plugged into all the camera feeds---and note especially around the middle of the video how the girl customizes the interface on the fly)
- csande17 7y ago
  > What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. It definitely seems like there's a gap in the computer-math ecosystem: you've got systems like LaTeX that are great for typesetting math you've already mostly figured out, and you've got systems like SymPy that are good if you want the computer to do the vast majority of the work, but I'm not aware of much in between. It would be really cool if there was something like Photoshop for math, where you could work with expressions in a visual, semi-tangible way and the computer would give you "smart" tools to help you out.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
rantwasp 7y ago
here is a different idea: we don’t need [new] tools for though. Our entire history is made up of using tools to basically enhance our abilities - mental, communication, design you name it. Our native possibilities are quite limited (eg you cannot hold a list of more than 5-7 things in your head at once). We figured this out a long time ago and have tooling to augment these abilities. Writing, Language, Computers they are all tools that literally make us superhuman.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  5 or 7?? I can easily imagine much more things simultaneously: 1, 2: 2 cars are parked at the side of the road 3: a third car is driving and going to pass the 2 parked cars. 4: a cat runs out from between the parked cars on the street 5: a dog chases the cat 6: with a pulled taut leash 7: pulling the dog's owner on the sidewalk out of balance, 8, 9: causing the owners hat to fly off, and her groceries to fall out of her free arm 10: a fourth car crashes into the surprised car 11: an elderly couple looking at the scene in pure horror ... Now if you meant we could only hold 5 or 7 scenes or complex thoughts at once, then yeah, that could be true depending on the complexity of those thoughts or scenes.
reubens 7y ago
As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it’s just a way to avoid the mental effort of real comprehension (roughly analogous to a google search for a solution rather than solving a problem yourself). Edit: I love Michael Nielsen’s work, but I don’t love his glorification of this tool.
- cepp 7y ago
  I'm in agreeance. In this case, I don't think SRS offers a lot of benefit, i.e. the tool isn't the hard part, it's the content you put into it. EX: I recently (5ish months) started moving Kindle highlights to Anki. I've found my ability to retain the facts has increased but it is also directly correlated with how I designed the card (cloze, length, etc). I think we should put more focus on extracting key points for later learning rather than focus on automating the review of those points.
- goerz 7y ago
  The key insight that Nielsen is advocating for is to use spaced repetition for concepts, not just facts. Understanding comes first, and then you deliberately try to cement a rich network that understanding in your long term memory. Personally, I’ve found this a revolutionary approach to learning.
  - reubens 7y ago
    As another commenter below notes, a recommendation is to spend one second reviewing each card. Thus, your cards are generally quite simple. This can very easily lead to a patchwork of simple details, but no glue holding them together. I’ve come to believe that the mental effort it takes to understand something should be prioritised over memorisation. If you’re relatively busy and spending a lot of time doing Anki cards, you may be limiting your opportunities for this kind of challenge.
Cybiote 7y ago
This was a fascinating and wonderful read. As someone who also works on tools for thought, here's my review and criticisms. The material is long so this will be longish too. Review The bulk of the essay is on what the authors refer to as "the mnemonic medium". A mnemonic medium, of which they use their work, Quantum Country, as a motivating case-study is an essay format which embeds flash cards containing carefully constructed questions and combines them with spaced-repetition to improve recall of the presented material. The authors argue very convincingly that memory is an important and undervalued aspect of expertise. Much of the initial struggle in learners is from a lack of basic fluency in the vocabulary of an area. They show, including with supporting data from the aforementioned work, that this significantly increases recall of material (nearly all if the reviews were done properly). Even if you want creativity and think you can just look things up as needed, having the material readily available in memory will serve as a potent catalyst to one's creativity. The over-head is reasonable, they estimate 4 hours to read the material and ~100 minutes of spaced review to achieve months or more of retention on material. They talk about the more typical sense of mnemonics, such as the method of loci and memory palaces. Such methods they argue, do not generalize well to different learning domains, especially more abstract areas. They also point out the weaknesses of their method. Including requiring general motivation, a reason to learn the material and difficulty of crafting good atomic connected questions. Finally, they discuss why not much progress has been made in the area (funding of public goods problem), other mediums such as video and the executable book/notebook format and what inspirations can be drawn from video-games interface-wise and art generally from an evocative and emotional perspective. Criticism The simplest criticism is if the results will generalize. The topic matter on the technical aspects of quantum computing has already selected for a probably uncommon sort of person. It is the authors' stated goal that they produce a method with broad applicability. Although they spend some time on the weaknesses of their approach, they could have spent a bit more on nearby failures. Engelbart had a bootstrap program, where each set of tools propelled us to ever more powerful augmentations. One major problem Engelbart found was that once people reached proficiency at one level, they had no interest in further gains. The complexity of peripherals has gone down over time (from multibutton mice and chorded keyboards to pointing with fingers) and people simply were not interested in learning complex peripherals. Some discussion of the difficulties faced by http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ at getting something with broad applicability and lessons from it would have been informative. There is much work to be done in ending the dumb users trope and also in educating people that many things worth doing will be difficult. Engelbart often pointed (he was against voice as a primary control) out that you can't talk your way down a ski-slope yet people are happy to learn the difficult task of skiing. How to get that engagement generally? The next major criticism is the difficulty of content creation. Writing a text is already difficult but writing one that is clear and with carefully crafted embedded questions will be much more difficult again. We can see hints of this in the quite low publishing rate of the Distill publication where a large aspect of the low rate is due to the difficulty of content creation. We are still several generations out from tools which ease the creation of interactive and tasteful (where interactivity is actually illuminating rather than a distraction as is often the case) executable notebooks. The authors mention differential geometry as an example. Such texts are difficult not only from subject matter but also because they are often presented in a user hostile manner. With key information, including on notation, left out. This has been fine historically because these books are meant to be used in a supporting environment with lecturers and assistants. However, learning these autodidactically adds in an immense artificial layer of difficulty from ambiguity. It seems like an obvious thing but material written in a clear manner with no external support needed is already rare. Going beyond that will be a tall ask. The fairly self-contained aspect of quantum computing might not transfer to differential geometry. To do that properly, one would also need to have material for adjacent topics such as multilinear algebra, differential forms, calculus of variations (for some motivating problems), analysis and some topology. That is a very large stack to get through and can be quite discouraging for the learner even with the dream of near perfect recall. The time investment might scale differently too and might require more of a fraction of study time. For the creators, by the time you get to multimedia, and the need to do this is an accessible (accessible to blind, deaf, etc) manner, an already difficult task becomes nearly unmanageable. Perhaps, narrow AI tools (the authors do point this out too but also see Rainbows End by Vinge for a fictional take on this) will ease some of this but basic UX and API design for interactive education will also be pivotal and are sorely lacking. I do not believe the authors sufficiently acknowledge this. The authors seem to make the mistake that experts will be the best authors of such media. I am skeptical of this. Very few experts maintain the empathy required to communicate with novices. I suspect the best approach and this is hinted at by the author with their example of Norvig's notebook, is someone either with exceptional empathy or who has just mastered the material, recording notes for themselves and then sharing. But it will take a while yet before such tools are in place. Finally, the authors also discuss BCIs. Their examples of new modes of thought suffer from the same criticisms they have for the Logo programming language and creating properly motivated and connected questions, perhaps worse. From what little we know, this will not be just a matter of interfacing with visual areas but also with broad wide reaching networks in the intraparietal sulcus, inferior temporal cortex, angular gyrus, hippocampus and frontal areas just for a start. These are all involved in complex problem solving and will differ in detail from person to person. How to get a non-superficial interface beyond super low latency I/O is a great challenge and simply beyond the horizon of what is today imagineable. This is as long as I'd feared it would be but I hope someone finds it useful.
sh53 7y ago
Had a feeling it was the quantum country guy from the start, besides focusing on just techniques on the brain and mnemonics we also need to see the various inhibitors, it was earlier posted here in HN https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/
babesh 7y ago
If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible. Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human potential.
- deleted 7y ago
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- TuringTest 7y ago
  There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there. Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred knowledge for building and adapting the available tools. A widespread literacy for building automations would change the current focus of smartphones for media consumption and multiply common people as builders of automations (with all its implications in society in terms of security and new dynamics of people interacting with automations of varying quality).
  - demircancelebi 7y ago
    I second this. I believe apps like Coda/Notion will make a big difference in how people work, think and interact with their computer and mind. Not everyone would invest the time and effort to build what is basically an extension of the mind with these tools, but the ones who do will have an edge in thinking/planning/coordinating/executing I believe.
    - TuringTest 7y ago
      That's the core value proposition, yes :-) Though I still have to find a Nocode platform that combines the powerful tracking tools of developer's IDEs with the simplicity for building automations in a functional language found in a spreadsheet.
kkwteh 7y ago
Daniel Dennett introduced the introducing notion of Intuition Pump, which I would say definitely qualify as transformative tools for thought. They are thought experiments designed to focus attention on important features of a question and to deflect them from getting bogged down in hard-to-follow details. Google talk by Daniel Dennett on Intuition Pumps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0
cryptica 7y ago
The premise of the article doesn't make sense. Tools can only train thinking ability, they cannot extend it. Thinking and reasoning must be fixed at the root.
- AriaMinaei 7y ago
  A quick read to see how mediums and tech fundamentally affect "thought" is Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death".
  - cryptica 7y ago
    The fact that my comment was down-voted makes me feel like 'John the savage' from 'Brave New World'. From my PoV, it seems that most people don't really understand what 'thinking' means.
    - AriaMinaei 7y ago
      I'm curious (genuinely) how you define thinking in a way that it's unaffected by the dominant mediums of communication and culture. Maybe you can recommend some reading material?
      - cryptica 7y ago
        In my view 'critical thinking' is real thinking. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of what we perceive as knowledge is in fact rhetoric. You need to learn to take everything with a grain of salt; sometimes that means you need to unlearn things along the way. Doubt is important. I think it's good to read a variety of books with opposing viewpoints or with viewpoints which contradict popular ideas. For non-fiction, the books 'Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness' by Nassim Taleb were eye-openers for me. Also, I found an interesting synergy between Nassim's books and the book 'Thinking fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman (which is a book about human psychology). Also, I enjoyed reading 'Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World'. I don't read much fiction but it can be interesting sometimes. I read 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley many years ago and it's a book that appears to be becoming more relevant with time. I find that watching foreign films can also help to diversify my thinking.
ivan_ah 7y ago
Here is a related blog post by one of the authors that describes the "classical" ways of thought transmission (background for the current project). https://andymatuschak.org/books/ https://andymatuschak.org/books/ [VERY LONG] via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887424
DoctorOetker 7y ago
I have this idea that refuses to leave me alone, but I don't really have the time and dedication to investigate it, so I'll just give this one away here: I believe a lot of effort in reading stems from parsing: words can be ambiguous in sense ("ball" could mean a spherical object or a festive event; "work" could mean a result of working, or it could be the verb [they work], or it could be an imperative [work!], ...). So disambiguating sentences containing words of degeneracy G1, G2, G3, ... have a total disambiguation space of G1 x G2 x G2 x ... interpretations. Then there is also grammatical disambiguation. There was the recent paper showing how transformers effectively provide each instance of a word with not just it's sense but also its grammatical position encoded as vectors, with the root at the origin, its children a unit distance away, and their children another unit distance away from their parent etc... This turned out to be essentially the Pythagorean theorem. Now let's make another oversimplification: let's pretend the human ear hears volume logarithmically (or at least understands the logarithmic scale for intensity, very plausible since different resonators emit exponentially decaying sound with half-lives that depend on the properties of the object [transmission at the boundary conditions]). On top of that make the assumption that the discernible frequency bins form essentially a constant Q transform (i.e. equal temperament bins, a good but rough approximation, see Plomp and Leveldt). This insinuates we can present a vector as a list of decibels for each frequency bin. My choice for audio is mostly because it would take 0 effort for the listener to align the auditory sensors: even if we rotate or move our heads very fast, there will be no appreciable doppler effect to a speaker, let alone headphones. If we chose visual intensities or graphs, we would have to either look at the same point on the screen for prolonged periods of time, or alternatively shift the image in our brains. So the idea would be to have a fraction of the frequency bins correspond to the sense vector, and the rest of the bins for the grammatical positioning vector. Then sequentially play the vectors in a sentence (or in any order really, since in theory the grammatical position is encoded in part of the spectrum). We could create multiple choice questions by playing a sentence (senses and grammar positions), then repeating the sound of a word of choice's sense without grammar frequency bins, and have the user select the right word in a different sentence, to make sure we are recognizing the sense specifically. Then "hear" pre-parsed texts, but scramble the word order to force the user to rely on the grammar vector component of each word. Then, later, generate sentences that are ambiguous without grammar vectors: the unordered set of {cat, mouse, sees, the, the} "rendered to sound" twice with different grammar vectors: once with the meaning "the cat sees the mouse" and once with the meaning "the mouse sees the cat" and the user cas to connect the sentence audio to the right written sentence, to verify the user is interpreting the grammar vectors. Who knows how fast we could be hearing text? Could we learn to hear text as fast as we can see and abstract visual scenes, if parsing is done for us by transformers? "A picture says a thousand words"
barakados 7y ago
Here is a link to an interactive explorable that focuses on much of the same content: https://ncase.me/remember/ https://ncase.me/remember/

214 points by goerz 7y ago

Why tho?

Programmers/computer scientists will make better progress on "transformative" "tools of thought" if they spend a few years collaborating with psychologists/sociologists/political scientists/economists/historians on their problems first. Those that do will have a leg up over those that dont. Right now it's like watching people working on calculus without spending enough time on algebra and geometry.

xamuel 7y ago

Extremely boiled down TL/DR: The author's invention is a spaced repetition system built into an essay, so instead of having the cards isolated, the cards are embedded in the text itself. At a technical level, that's certainly innovative, but I'm doubtful about whether it's actually an improvement on classical SRS. In my experience, one of the most important things for an SRS deck is speed of reviewing: a given card should take less than 1 second to review and rate. This is necessary if you're going to maintain decks with tens of thousands of cards. I find my brain does a remarkable job of reconstructing the surrounding context, so having the cards embedded in the original text would just be a time sink for me, I think.

gwern 7y ago
From reading earlier discussions of the quantum computing tutorial, I am pretty sure most of its readers do not even use classical SRS in the first place.
- xamuel 7y ago
  Yes, I was struck by the really exceptional and beautiful presentation/layout of OP's page. Perhaps the real contribution is less "build a better mousetrap" and more "market the hell out of mousetraps". If OP can show more people the light of SRS, that will be fantastic!

Jun8 7y ago

This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes. 2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the way baby brains gather information and are trained are limited by their bodily abilities, which are puny. 3) The answer seems to be to devise a way to feed information-reach, highly non-normal stimulus to young brains, e.g. using heads up displays. This is the method described in Mimsy Were the Borogoves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves) This sounds nightmarish and we also don't have the technology currently. But in the intense competition for colleges/high-schools and even middle schools who knows what can happen? P.S. Also wanted to mention Hinton's models/toys with which he claimed to have learned to intuitively think about 4th dimensional objects, they are described in his book https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourth-dimension/ https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourt....

xamuel 7y ago
Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.
- pretendscholar 7y ago
  Memory palace
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein The techniques aren’t secret. You can buy books about them on amazon. It’s like memorizing the Iliad, Odyssey or the Koran, completely doable for a human of normal intelligence but a lot of work.
- 1propionyl 7y ago

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

Honestly this is the area I'm most excited about. SRS is just one facet---correct choice of input media, datatypes, and mental models are a big deal here. I'm a math undergrad. And one thing that drives me crazy is how mich rewriting I do. What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree manipulation ux actions" are is another thing. Similarly--am I the only one tired of typing? I'd kill for a gait analyzer or a haptic glove that let me program while walking through the park. Some of this stuff sounds farfetched, but looking at emacs, or chorded stenotype machines, or paredit, really drives it home that we could be doing so, so much better, with very little new tech required. When I was a kid I had mild synesthesia where I'd tie the words "fourth" and "favorite" with a feeling of "reaching." I still today associate clojure's map with spreading butter, or reduce with "rolling up." Chinese abacus math, developed to the point where thr actual abacus is no longer necessary, is a thing to behold. The human mind seems to make these connections easily and automatically. Why not leverage that? I'd love if text became just the shared human-legible bytecode for our own personal interfaces. (Check out this clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70 where some people get fed targeting data from an AI plugged into all the camera feeds---and note especially around the middle of the video how the girl customizes the interface on the fly)

csande17 7y ago
> What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. It definitely seems like there's a gap in the computer-math ecosystem: you've got systems like LaTeX that are great for typesetting math you've already mostly figured out, and you've got systems like SymPy that are good if you want the computer to do the vast majority of the work, but I'm not aware of much in between. It would be really cool if there was something like Photoshop for math, where you could work with expressions in a visual, semi-tangible way and the computer would give you "smart" tools to help you out.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

rantwasp 7y ago

here is a different idea: we don’t need [new] tools for though. Our entire history is made up of using tools to basically enhance our abilities - mental, communication, design you name it. Our native possibilities are quite limited (eg you cannot hold a list of more than 5-7 things in your head at once). We figured this out a long time ago and have tooling to augment these abilities. Writing, Language, Computers they are all tools that literally make us superhuman.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DoctorOetker 7y ago
5 or 7?? I can easily imagine much more things simultaneously: 1, 2: 2 cars are parked at the side of the road 3: a third car is driving and going to pass the 2 parked cars. 4: a cat runs out from between the parked cars on the street 5: a dog chases the cat 6: with a pulled taut leash 7: pulling the dog's owner on the sidewalk out of balance, 8, 9: causing the owners hat to fly off, and her groceries to fall out of her free arm 10: a fourth car crashes into the surprised car 11: an elderly couple looking at the scene in pure horror ... Now if you meant we could only hold 5 or 7 scenes or complex thoughts at once, then yeah, that could be true depending on the complexity of those thoughts or scenes.

reubens 7y ago

As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it’s just a way to avoid the mental effort of real comprehension (roughly analogous to a google search for a solution rather than solving a problem yourself). Edit: I love Michael Nielsen’s work, but I don’t love his glorification of this tool.

cepp 7y ago
I'm in agreeance. In this case, I don't think SRS offers a lot of benefit, i.e. the tool isn't the hard part, it's the content you put into it. EX: I recently (5ish months) started moving Kindle highlights to Anki. I've found my ability to retain the facts has increased but it is also directly correlated with how I designed the card (cloze, length, etc). I think we should put more focus on extracting key points for later learning rather than focus on automating the review of those points.
goerz 7y ago
The key insight that Nielsen is advocating for is to use spaced repetition for concepts, not just facts. Understanding comes first, and then you deliberately try to cement a rich network that understanding in your long term memory. Personally, I’ve found this a revolutionary approach to learning.
- reubens 7y ago
  As another commenter below notes, a recommendation is to spend one second reviewing each card. Thus, your cards are generally quite simple. This can very easily lead to a patchwork of simple details, but no glue holding them together. I’ve come to believe that the mental effort it takes to understand something should be prioritised over memorisation. If you’re relatively busy and spending a lot of time doing Anki cards, you may be limiting your opportunities for this kind of challenge.

Cybiote 7y ago

This was a fascinating and wonderful read. As someone who also works on tools for thought, here's my review and criticisms. The material is long so this will be longish too. Review The bulk of the essay is on what the authors refer to as "the mnemonic medium". A mnemonic medium, of which they use their work, Quantum Country, as a motivating case-study is an essay format which embeds flash cards containing carefully constructed questions and combines them with spaced-repetition to improve recall of the presented material. The authors argue very convincingly that memory is an important and undervalued aspect of expertise. Much of the initial struggle in learners is from a lack of basic fluency in the vocabulary of an area. They show, including with supporting data from the aforementioned work, that this significantly increases recall of material (nearly all if the reviews were done properly). Even if you want creativity and think you can just look things up as needed, having the material readily available in memory will serve as a potent catalyst to one's creativity. The over-head is reasonable, they estimate 4 hours to read the material and ~100 minutes of spaced review to achieve months or more of retention on material. They talk about the more typical sense of mnemonics, such as the method of loci and memory palaces. Such methods they argue, do not generalize well to different learning domains, especially more abstract areas. They also point out the weaknesses of their method. Including requiring general motivation, a reason to learn the material and difficulty of crafting good atomic connected questions. Finally, they discuss why not much progress has been made in the area (funding of public goods problem), other mediums such as video and the executable book/notebook format and what inspirations can be drawn from video-games interface-wise and art generally from an evocative and emotional perspective. Criticism The simplest criticism is if the results will generalize. The topic matter on the technical aspects of quantum computing has already selected for a probably uncommon sort of person. It is the authors' stated goal that they produce a method with broad applicability. Although they spend some time on the weaknesses of their approach, they could have spent a bit more on nearby failures. Engelbart had a bootstrap program, where each set of tools propelled us to ever more powerful augmentations. One major problem Engelbart found was that once people reached proficiency at one level, they had no interest in further gains. The complexity of peripherals has gone down over time (from multibutton mice and chorded keyboards to pointing with fingers) and people simply were not interested in learning complex peripherals. Some discussion of the difficulties faced by http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ at getting something with broad applicability and lessons from it would have been informative. There is much work to be done in ending the dumb users trope and also in educating people that many things worth doing will be difficult. Engelbart often pointed (he was against voice as a primary control) out that you can't talk your way down a ski-slope yet people are happy to learn the difficult task of skiing. How to get that engagement generally? The next major criticism is the difficulty of content creation. Writing a text is already difficult but writing one that is clear and with carefully crafted embedded questions will be much more difficult again. We can see hints of this in the quite low publishing rate of the Distill publication where a large aspect of the low rate is due to the difficulty of content creation. We are still several generations out from tools which ease the creation of interactive and tasteful (where interactivity is actually illuminating rather than a distraction as is often the case) executable notebooks. The authors mention differential geometry as an example. Such texts are difficult not only from subject matter but also because they are often presented in a user hostile manner. With key information, including on notation, left out. This has been fine historically because these books are meant to be used in a supporting environment with lecturers and assistants. However, learning these autodidactically adds in an immense artificial layer of difficulty from ambiguity. It seems like an obvious thing but material written in a clear manner with no external support needed is already rare. Going beyond that will be a tall ask. The fairly self-contained aspect of quantum computing might not transfer to differential geometry. To do that properly, one would also need to have material for adjacent topics such as multilinear algebra, differential forms, calculus of variations (for some motivating problems), analysis and some topology. That is a very large stack to get through and can be quite discouraging for the learner even with the dream of near perfect recall. The time investment might scale differently too and might require more of a fraction of study time. For the creators, by the time you get to multimedia, and the need to do this is an accessible (accessible to blind, deaf, etc) manner, an already difficult task becomes nearly unmanageable. Perhaps, narrow AI tools (the authors do point this out too but also see Rainbows End by Vinge for a fictional take on this) will ease some of this but basic UX and API design for interactive education will also be pivotal and are sorely lacking. I do not believe the authors sufficiently acknowledge this. The authors seem to make the mistake that experts will be the best authors of such media. I am skeptical of this. Very few experts maintain the empathy required to communicate with novices. I suspect the best approach and this is hinted at by the author with their example of Norvig's notebook, is someone either with exceptional empathy or who has just mastered the material, recording notes for themselves and then sharing. But it will take a while yet before such tools are in place. Finally, the authors also discuss BCIs. Their examples of new modes of thought suffer from the same criticisms they have for the Logo programming language and creating properly motivated and connected questions, perhaps worse. From what little we know, this will not be just a matter of interfacing with visual areas but also with broad wide reaching networks in the intraparietal sulcus, inferior temporal cortex, angular gyrus, hippocampus and frontal areas just for a start. These are all involved in complex problem solving and will differ in detail from person to person. How to get a non-superficial interface beyond super low latency I/O is a great challenge and simply beyond the horizon of what is today imagineable. This is as long as I'd feared it would be but I hope someone finds it useful.

sh53 7y ago

Had a feeling it was the quantum country guy from the start, besides focusing on just techniques on the brain and mnemonics we also need to see the various inhibitors, it was earlier posted here in HN https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/

babesh 7y ago

If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible. Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human potential.

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TuringTest 7y ago
There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there. Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred knowledge for building and adapting the available tools. A widespread literacy for building automations would change the current focus of smartphones for media consumption and multiply common people as builders of automations (with all its implications in society in terms of security and new dynamics of people interacting with automations of varying quality).
- demircancelebi 7y ago
  I second this. I believe apps like Coda/Notion will make a big difference in how people work, think and interact with their computer and mind. Not everyone would invest the time and effort to build what is basically an extension of the mind with these tools, but the ones who do will have an edge in thinking/planning/coordinating/executing I believe.
  - TuringTest 7y ago
    That's the core value proposition, yes :-) Though I still have to find a Nocode platform that combines the powerful tracking tools of developer's IDEs with the simplicity for building automations in a functional language found in a spreadsheet.

kkwteh 7y ago

Daniel Dennett introduced the introducing notion of Intuition Pump, which I would say definitely qualify as transformative tools for thought. They are thought experiments designed to focus attention on important features of a question and to deflect them from getting bogged down in hard-to-follow details. Google talk by Daniel Dennett on Intuition Pumps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0

cryptica 7y ago

The premise of the article doesn't make sense. Tools can only train thinking ability, they cannot extend it. Thinking and reasoning must be fixed at the root.

AriaMinaei 7y ago
A quick read to see how mediums and tech fundamentally affect "thought" is Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death".
- cryptica 7y ago
  The fact that my comment was down-voted makes me feel like 'John the savage' from 'Brave New World'. From my PoV, it seems that most people don't really understand what 'thinking' means.
  - AriaMinaei 7y ago
    I'm curious (genuinely) how you define thinking in a way that it's unaffected by the dominant mediums of communication and culture. Maybe you can recommend some reading material?
    - cryptica 7y ago
      In my view 'critical thinking' is real thinking. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of what we perceive as knowledge is in fact rhetoric. You need to learn to take everything with a grain of salt; sometimes that means you need to unlearn things along the way. Doubt is important. I think it's good to read a variety of books with opposing viewpoints or with viewpoints which contradict popular ideas. For non-fiction, the books 'Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness' by Nassim Taleb were eye-openers for me. Also, I found an interesting synergy between Nassim's books and the book 'Thinking fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman (which is a book about human psychology). Also, I enjoyed reading 'Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World'. I don't read much fiction but it can be interesting sometimes. I read 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley many years ago and it's a book that appears to be becoming more relevant with time. I find that watching foreign films can also help to diversify my thinking.

ivan_ah 7y ago

Here is a related blog post by one of the authors that describes the "classical" ways of thought transmission (background for the current project). https://andymatuschak.org/books/ https://andymatuschak.org/books/ [VERY LONG] via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887424

DoctorOetker 7y ago

I have this idea that refuses to leave me alone, but I don't really have the time and dedication to investigate it, so I'll just give this one away here: I believe a lot of effort in reading stems from parsing: words can be ambiguous in sense ("ball" could mean a spherical object or a festive event; "work" could mean a result of working, or it could be the verb [they work], or it could be an imperative [work!], ...). So disambiguating sentences containing words of degeneracy G1, G2, G3, ... have a total disambiguation space of G1 x G2 x G2 x ... interpretations. Then there is also grammatical disambiguation. There was the recent paper showing how transformers effectively provide each instance of a word with not just it's sense but also its grammatical position encoded as vectors, with the root at the origin, its children a unit distance away, and their children another unit distance away from their parent etc... This turned out to be essentially the Pythagorean theorem. Now let's make another oversimplification: let's pretend the human ear hears volume logarithmically (or at least understands the logarithmic scale for intensity, very plausible since different resonators emit exponentially decaying sound with half-lives that depend on the properties of the object [transmission at the boundary conditions]). On top of that make the assumption that the discernible frequency bins form essentially a constant Q transform (i.e. equal temperament bins, a good but rough approximation, see Plomp and Leveldt). This insinuates we can present a vector as a list of decibels for each frequency bin. My choice for audio is mostly because it would take 0 effort for the listener to align the auditory sensors: even if we rotate or move our heads very fast, there will be no appreciable doppler effect to a speaker, let alone headphones. If we chose visual intensities or graphs, we would have to either look at the same point on the screen for prolonged periods of time, or alternatively shift the image in our brains. So the idea would be to have a fraction of the frequency bins correspond to the sense vector, and the rest of the bins for the grammatical positioning vector. Then sequentially play the vectors in a sentence (or in any order really, since in theory the grammatical position is encoded in part of the spectrum). We could create multiple choice questions by playing a sentence (senses and grammar positions), then repeating the sound of a word of choice's sense without grammar frequency bins, and have the user select the right word in a different sentence, to make sure we are recognizing the sense specifically. Then "hear" pre-parsed texts, but scramble the word order to force the user to rely on the grammar vector component of each word. Then, later, generate sentences that are ambiguous without grammar vectors: the unordered set of {cat, mouse, sees, the, the} "rendered to sound" twice with different grammar vectors: once with the meaning "the cat sees the mouse" and once with the meaning "the mouse sees the cat" and the user cas to connect the sentence audio to the right written sentence, to verify the user is interpreting the grammar vectors. Who knows how fast we could be hearing text? Could we learn to hear text as fast as we can see and abstract visual scenes, if parsing is done for us by transformers? "A picture says a thousand words"

barakados 7y ago

Here is a link to an interactive explorable that focuses on much of the same content: https://ncase.me/remember/ https://ncase.me/remember/