3 ms·

Maybe you already know quite a lot about physics? Or maybe you have an unusually large working memory and didn't go far enough down the wikipedia hole until you

Maybe you already know quite a lot about physics? Or maybe you have an unusually large working memory and didn't go far enough down the wikipedia hole until you got lost? The working memory limit explained in the article must apply to you unless you have some sort of a very special form of photographic memory

aappleby 4y ago
That's the thing though, I never get "lost". I've never studied quantum mechanics aside from snippets I picked up through pop science articles or such, so it's not like I started with a big body of knowledge already in place. It's hard for me to imagine what feeling "lost" in Wikipedia would be like. Maybe reading some article about a complex historical battle would do it - lists of people with important names would probably become a jumble without really clear identifiers of who did what and why.
- p-christ 4y ago
  Ok how about this more difficult experiment to prove the hypothesis: I'm going to send you a wikipedia page written in chinese. You're going to read it once. For every chinese word you're allowed to look up the meaning on google translate once as you read. You're not allowed to do any other form of learning besides reading. Do you think in this case you'd also not get "lost"?
  - aappleby 4y ago
    I think I would get lost, but only due to the vocabulary and translation load and the "once" restrictions - not due to the content of the article itself. In practice I end up reading the same wiki articles dozens of times as I go up and down the link trees, with each pass connecting various ambiguous ideas together. If I could annotate the pages with arbitrary amounts of translation notes as I read them, I could probably get through the article though it would take a very long time.
    - p-christ 4y ago
      Ok but the point stands that there is a limit to your working memory. Your limit sounds a lot higher than most peoples but it is still limited otherwise you’d never get lost even if you could only read things once.
      - aappleby 4y ago
        I don't _feel_ like my working memory is particularly large, but that's also a hopelessly subjective assessment. Maybe it's more like my working memory can hold more things by aggressively discarding details until I need them - same capacity, but with better lossy compression. Not sure if I could measure that either, but it feels closer.
deleted 4y ago
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aappleby 4y ago

That's the thing though, I never get "lost". I've never studied quantum mechanics aside from snippets I picked up through pop science articles or such, so it's not like I started with a big body of knowledge already in place. It's hard for me to imagine what feeling "lost" in Wikipedia would be like. Maybe reading some article about a complex historical battle would do it - lists of people with important names would probably become a jumble without really clear identifiers of who did what and why.

p-christ 4y ago
Ok how about this more difficult experiment to prove the hypothesis: I'm going to send you a wikipedia page written in chinese. You're going to read it once. For every chinese word you're allowed to look up the meaning on google translate once as you read. You're not allowed to do any other form of learning besides reading. Do you think in this case you'd also not get "lost"?
- aappleby 4y ago
  I think I would get lost, but only due to the vocabulary and translation load and the "once" restrictions - not due to the content of the article itself. In practice I end up reading the same wiki articles dozens of times as I go up and down the link trees, with each pass connecting various ambiguous ideas together. If I could annotate the pages with arbitrary amounts of translation notes as I read them, I could probably get through the article though it would take a very long time.
  - p-christ 4y ago
    Ok but the point stands that there is a limit to your working memory. Your limit sounds a lot higher than most peoples but it is still limited otherwise you’d never get lost even if you could only read things once.
    - aappleby 4y ago
      I don't _feel_ like my working memory is particularly large, but that's also a hopelessly subjective assessment. Maybe it's more like my working memory can hold more things by aggressively discarding details until I need them - same capacity, but with better lossy compression. Not sure if I could measure that either, but it feels closer.

deleted 4y ago

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