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How You Know
- weinzierl 12y agoReading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why. I often feel like that, but much more in regard to people than to books and experiences. It's strange, how much others have formed me, but how little I do remember about them. How little I remember about my parents, but how big a part of my compiled program they are. Of all the time I spend with my daughter, of all the activities we do, she probably will not remember much in a few years, but at least I can hope it will have an effect of her model of the world that persists.
- snide 12y agoThis goes both ways. Sometimes I avoid rereading books for the same reason. There was a Summer where Catcher in the Rye felt very important. I'd hate to reread it under my new, adult perspective. I'd prefer to let it linger in nostalgia.
- hudathun 12y agoI had the same same thing with the much less erudite Stranger in a Strange Land. Re-read it 20 years later and was disappointed. On the positive side, I should consider how much I've moved forward in that time :) or sideways :-S
- snide 12y agoThe nice thing about Heinlein is he has a book for all stages. As I've gotten older I really prefer his "Time Enough for Love" novel, which is about looking back on a long life.
- thirdtruck 12y agoThe same thing happens to me with video games on a regular basis. Younger me simply had much lower expectations and poorer taste, back when a NES controller (with all of four buttons and a D-Pad) sufficed.
- larrys 12y ago"The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. " I also find that this rings true with movies as well.
- debacle 12y agoI don't like the flavor of this post. It feels very much like navel-gazing and, if it wasn't for the domain name, it likely would have been lost to /newest. Where is the knowledge here? That we don't have immediate recollection of retained information? Knowledge is based on a beginning and ending context.
- larrys 12y agoWhich makes me think of a saying. One that I remember. "Sophia Loren without a nose is not Sophia Loren". Here's another one "if my grandmother had balls she'd be my grandfather". The point is PG wrote it so just like if anyone of note wrote it it would be more of interest than the same thought from anyone else. After all these are analog thoughts and subjective this isn't science.
- debacle 12y agoWhen a renowned writer writes something weak, it doesn't give credence to the piece, it takes credence from the writer.
- npizzolato 12y agoI'm also surprised people actually find the contents of this blog post insightful, but I suspect it has far more to do with who wrote the article. I mean, is it not obvious that you can take away new ideas from reading a book multiple times at different stages of your life? As a simplified example, movies with twist endings hinge on exactly that fact -- armed with new information, events you have already experienced take on new meaning. More "important" things will have more significance, but it's the same idea. Is it not obvious that your own world views are the result of your own experiences and others who you have contact with, even if you cannot precisely remember everything that would lead to that world view?
- vehementi 12y agoNo, those things aren't obvious FYI. And if your summary was "boy, new ideas from different stages" you kind of missed it.
- sinak 12y agoIf you haven't seen it, S01E03 of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, deals exactly with what PG describes at the end of this post: technology that lets you review and relive your past. It's very much worth watching, and was recently added to Netflix's library: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/ http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=3325852 http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=33258...
- vanadium 12y agoWithout seeing your comment I made the same recommendation to one of my lead devs a few minutes ago with the same segue, having also recommended this article. Fantastic episode.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- berberous 12y agoI just watched the whole series, and I wanted to go ahead and recommend that everyone watch more than that single episode (although I think it's one of the strongest). It's only 6 episodes total (each season has 3 episodes). I think this audience would especially like the series: 'Black Mirror is a British television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker that shows the dark side of life and technology. Brooker noted, "each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality. But they're all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes time if we're clumsy."'
- adcuz 12y agoThere's a new episode being broadcast tomorrow evening in the UK.
- coderholic 12y agoI remember reading something very similar to this (but can't remember where, ha), where it said the important thing about reading is how if affects your general thinking rather than the individual pieces of information that you're likely to remember (or not). I spent several years reading a ton of different books on economics and I can recall very few facts from those books, but it did and has completely altered my world view of many things. pg's analogy of a program where you've lost the source code doesn't feel quite right, because you can't make modifications to the program without the code. Some sort of machine learning model seems more appropriate, where you've lost the original training data but can still update the model later with fresh data (a new book), and end up with a better/different model, but then lose that training data again.
- eoi 12y agoI think a machine learning model provides a nice version of Graham's "The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life." Using an artificial neural net analogy instead of a compilation analogy: "The same book would optimize your neural net towards a different local minimum at different points in your life."
- agentultra 12y ago> Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. Hence the important art of keeping a journal. You can keep a transaction log of changes. The act of replaying the journal allows you to identify patterns in your thought processes and identify cognitive dissonances. The very act of reading should induce a reactive compulsion to write. As Burroughs taught in his later creative writing courses -- in order to become a better writer one must first learn to read (I'm paraphrasing here). Part of becoming a better thinker is learning how to think. In order to do that one must catch one's self in the act.
- chubot 12y agoI'm definitely a fan of taking notes on things you've read (among other things, the effort to write notes makes you choose what you read more carefully). And I agree that it will help you remember the sources for various ideas. But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would rarely go back and look at things, and it's not searchable, and paper is not editable. For the last 10+ years, I've used a Wiki. Hyperlinks are huge. They really do model the associations your brain already makes. I have wiki pages that are 10 years old and that still grow new associations. I think it takes a big load off your brain to have all that stuff written down, and searchable with ease. (I had to write my own Wiki to get it fast enough though.)
- Pyret 12y agoI use Anki to remember and memorize the written info. Pretty effective.
- Raphmedia 12y agoI've heard a few people tell they use a Wiki. Do you host it on your own server? Is is a public wiki, or a private one? I'm very curious.
- cyanoacry 12y agoI host a private MoinMoin wiki on my own server, as a place to collect links as well as thoughts. It's a fairly easy setup, and allows you to make sure that you can write down even private thoughts (well, as much as you trust your own security setup that is).
- nilkn 12y agoThere's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.
- etrautmann 12y agoGreat point - a possible explanation for a wide range of phenomenologically bizarre viewpoints (e.g.: anti-vaccers, birthers, chem-trails, creationists, etc.)
- VLM 12y agoMost of your examples are social membership tests. You have to publicly say "XYZ" to join the club, where "XYZ" doesn't necessarily mean anything, but joining the club does. Like saying Abracadabra to open a door. (Spoiler alert don't read till the 26th) Do you believe in Santa? I believe in Santa. Oh how nice you also believe in Santa. Aren't we all happy members of our club? It would be so antisocial for someone to say Santa doesn't exist, because then how would we tell who is in our club? This is the best club ever. Santa? Who's that? We just talk about him to pledge allegiance to each other, we don't actually care about fat dudes in red suits.
- larrys 12y ago"What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?" Well for one things it gives you pleasure. You could also say "what's the point of listening to music" or "what's the point of watching comedy". Other than pleasure, as a generality, you might read because it makes you feel good to do so. I find that a key to good mental health (that works for me) is not to question what harmless things make you feel good and why. If I did that it would make me unhappy. Just go with the good feeling. One thing that I'm sad about is that I don't get the same pleasure that I used to from browsing books at Barnes and Noble. With the internet there is to much to read already. I don't find the same utility that I used to from books that are essentially a single perspective (at least the ones that I used to buy, non-fiction).
- gdulli 12y agoHe wasn't actually questioning the value of reading. That question was only a rhetorical device that led into his main point. It was put there as a straw man to start the process of disproving that there's no value to reading if you don't remember details. And that it's unnecessary to lament not remembering details.
- sbensu 12y agoI experienced this phenomenon starkly when I started a book, and felt it was filled with obvious remarks and little novelty. It took me 50 pages to realize I had already read it.
- lmkg 12y agoThis is the primary downside of reading without a bookmark. Any book I've read on public transportation, I would guess on average each page gets read about twice (with some chapter intros reaching double-digits). It's hard to figure out if it's really something you've read before, or if it's just a very logical continuation of what you read yesterday. I also feel obligated to one-up you. One time in high school English class, the teacher put a sample student essay up on the projector and picked it apart in front of the class. It took me half an hour to realize that I had written the essay in question, and by that point I had concluded that I did not completely agree with it. I learned something that day about writing.
- sbensu 12y agothat is a great story! I saw the book at my friends house and thought it looked interesting. After borrowing and reading 50 pages I realized I had it in my shelf.
- Gravityloss 12y agoWeird. I always notice from the first sentence or so if I've already read a page, so it's relatively quick to find the page I was at with binary search...
- andyjdavis 12y ago>Any book I've read on public transportation I suspect this is also a key part of your inability to determine whether or not you have read a given page before. You are reading in an environment that does not lend itself to creating notable memories. This is purely personal conjecture but I suspect that if you went and read somewhere more interesting your memory of what you are reading would magically improve. Books I read while at home or similar tend to disappear into some sort of memory hole. Meanwhile books I have read while visiting other countries tend to be easier to recall, both in terms of the book's contents and the circumstances I was in when reading it.
- Alex3917 12y agoWhy not take notes? Whenever I read a book I want to remember, I just pencil a dash in the margin next to any key fact, insight, or quote. Then after I'm done with a few chapters I retype these sections into a mindmap. It probably only adds 10 - 20% extra time, but you're getting 1000% more value. In general what matters isn't how much you read, but how much you retain and what sorts of connections with past and future insight and information. It's important to have the full experience of having realizations and making connections while you're reading, which is why I just make a dash in the margins as opposed to taking actual notes in real time, but I feel like by not circling back later you're cheating yourself out of the true value of learning. Especially since you have no idea if the books you're reading are even true or not until you vet the facts with primary sources.
- Qwertious 12y agoThe problem with taking notes is that you'd have to do so for literally every book or article or video you ever watched, and then you'd have to refer to it every time you remembered any facts from them.
- sbensu 12y agoThe problems is figuring out which books provide those useful mental models. I found that fiction usually doesn't but a list with recommendations in the comments would be great.
- sbensu 12y agoThe Conquest of Happiness - the greatest men had the same problems we all do and managed to be great in spite of it El Aleph - how small we are in this universe, and much much more Steve Jobs bio - how to focus
- agentultra 12y agoA good article on the importance of fiction from a scientifically validated point of view: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/04/28/why-fiction-good-for-you-how-fiction-changes-your-world/nubDy1P3viDj2PuwGwb3KO/story.html http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/04/28/why-fiction-good... Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury L'Etranger - Albert Camus Frankenstein - Mary Shelley Metamorphosis - Ovid Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood The Picadilly Papers - Charles Dickens Permutation City - Greg Egan Fiction allows us to experience the most intimate thoughts of people we've never met in a way we cannot emulate in reality. We can visit places we've never been to and experience situations we'd try our best to avoid. We sit for hours hallucinating vividly reading these stories as we download these characters, concepts, and ideas into our meat. And if the story resonated with us we walk away a different person: new connections in our synapses, reinforced signals in existing ones. Stories are one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal; perhaps even more so than mathematics or computation.
- sbensu 12y agoI agree that good fiction book can be an eye opener. I'll give the ones from you list I haven't read a try. By non-fiction I didn't only mean science but also historic novels and biographies. I find they come with connections and lessons that no human could have come up with.
- agentultra 12y ago
- applecore 12y agoIt's deeply heartwarming to see another “OG” PG essay enter the canon. (Obscure reference to historical French prose in the introductory sentence? Check!)
- OoTheNigerian 12y agoI think this is the phenomenon that forms the basis for Gladwell's BLINK. It took me a while to learn that almost everything I have heard or seen has already been stored. The problem of memory is in retrieval. This also applies to creative work. When you have seen quite a lot of things, it ends up influencing stuff you could swear was original.
- ctchocula 12y agoI really enjoyed Paul's compilation analogy. It reminds me of a quote by Robertson Davies. "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight." It also reminds me of that MIT paper that gives advice on how to do research. The part it talks about why it is that when your colleague gives you a paper to read and says it's particularly poignant, but when you read it it doesn't seem like anything special. Maybe it's because your colleague had the dependencies in his state of mind that you did not have in yours, so it didn't seem as memorable to you as to him when the code compiled.
- temuze 12y agoYeah, his analogy extends to art pretty well. Let's say we use Tolstoy's definition of art, that art is about communicating a feeling to others via a medium. There are times in our lives where our state of mind makes us more likely to be moved by a piece of art. It's why you should revisit your favorite books from your youth - you'll often find the same words mean completely different things later on.
- icementhols 12y agoCare to link the MIT paper ? edit: found it http://web.cs.dal.ca/~eem/gradResources/MITAIResearch.html http://web.cs.dal.ca/~eem/gradResources/MITAIResearch.html
- bcbrown 12y agoA few years ago I started an annual tradition, where around the new year I'll re-read the Pragmatic Programmer. This year will be the third year, and I expect I'll continue to gain new insights from future rereadings.
- Kluny 12y agoHow long does it take you to get through it? I struggle with reading non-fiction books, and gave up at around 100 pages in last time I tried it. Sucks, cause I've heard that it's one of the more readable books go, in terms of programming manuals.
- bcbrown 12y agoUnder a week. I've coincidentally also had off from Christmas-New Years the past three years, though, so I have plenty of free time. I also read a lot of nonfiction, and read a couple of technical textbooks every year.
- kiyoto 12y agoThis theory explains why many smart people also read a lot. Not necessarily books or even any body of text, but reading as a generic behavior to find meanings in various objects and events in life (Books, I feel, is just one of the easiest things to read). Because they read a lot, they have broader and deeper mental models, which they use to model new/different things/events well. Also, in my experience, what sets the smartest people apart from "just" smart people is their ability to retain the how: not only do they have broad and deep models, but they also know how these models are built and can adapt them quickly as they acquire new information. Most people need to run a disassembler of their compiled thoughts, and after a certain point in life, their binaries are so bloated that they can't decompile them at all.
- mempko 12y agoSo apparently the metaphor that our brains are computers is still used? And that they "compile" experiences (though we don't understand how). What if our brains are not easily shaped? And maybe our brains are good at forgetting experiences?
- lifeisstillgood 12y agoI strongly advise pg to go find a DVD of Black Mirror a horribly under-rated TV series from the excellent Charlie Brooker - the one on replaying ones memories suggests just reading will be a lot less troublesome ! I do suspect we will be less likely to record our lives for later playback than have them analysed at or near the time for feedback on how to improve. Twitch TV is (I am told) full of streams of top rated people playing WoW and commenting on their actions (so others can learn, or be entertained). It's probable that there are shows now or soon that have players commentating on other players streams, and a fairly short leap from that to commenting on videos of me training my dog, or performing reps or basically anything in the life coach / therapy repertoire. Audio and visual analysis already allows therapists to zoom in on the important parts of observed patients (certainly in sleep therapy) and will only get better. Whilst the unexamined life is not worth living, there is no reason you have to be the only examiner. We shall all have our own life long therapists.
- smeyer 12y ago>go find a DVD of Black Mirror It also recently made it to Netflix. I've been hearing about it all over among my friends the last few days as they've been watching it there (and watched the first couple of episodes myself.)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ojbyrne 12y agoI hate this: "What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?" Because reading is enjoyable?
- worklogin 12y agoDid you read the article? There are multiple reasons for reading, and though many of them feed into enjoyment, it's not always the end.
- ojbyrne 12y agoI did read it, and found it trite and obvious. My problems with it were essentially summarized by the particular sentence I quoted.
- kissickas 12y agoI found it obvious, which pg admits, until this quote: "The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life." A nice analogy, as others have pointed out, and that is the thirteen-word summary I'll remember from this essay. Not bad, considering most thousand-page books will be compressed down to a page of take-away memories.
- fab13n 12y agoTL;DR: a healthy brain accumulates wisdom, but won't bother archiving the sources of that wisdom.
- arh68 12y agoIt's not that you forget the content, it's that you forget how to phrase it concisely. If the author needed 70, or 200 pages to explain a concept, and you can at some point raise your hand and claim 'I get the point', it's not reasonable to expect a 12-word summary. What do I remember? Hard to put into words. Likewise, it's not reasonable to expect a perfect memory, reciting paragraph after paragraph of the original text. If you really can summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the author have done that already? Maybe it's time for me to reread Cryptonomicon. There are parts of that book I have absolutely no memory of, flipping through it, yet other parts I remember all too often (bicycle sprockets, comets of pee, bisecting alligators, van eck phreaking). (also... > seige warfare ?)
- csallen 12y ago> If you really can summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the author have done that already? Not only is this possible to do, but it's often done. The problem is that it's not necessarily useful or sufficient to hear a mere summary of something. For example, let's say I tell you that "Idea X is important." That's a simple idea, right? It only too me four words to express it. But do you believe me? Probably not, because I haven't spent any time or effort convincing you that idea X is important. And do you understand what idea X is? Probably not, because I haven't spent any time or effort explaining that. Etc. Even if you can summarize it, you probably need to write the entire book for people to get the background information necessary for them to find your summary useful, otherwise it will go in one ear and out the other.
- d23 12y agoI'm gonna go out on a limb and say this has absolutely nothing to do with what PG was referencing in the article. I'm guessing he could at least give some broad overview of the book he's referencing. The issue seems to be that it seems so small in comparison to the book itself.
- csallen 12y agoWell, exactly. The book as a whole accomplishes much more than a brief summary of it does, which is why it feels bad to lose all of that additional information. I disagree with the parent that you still remember the content but can't summarize it concisely. I believe the opposite: you forget the specifics but retain the ability to summarize them.
- rmason 12y agoI also think that its equally important to reread books that gave you great insight. A few years later with more experience and knowledge you derive more from it. On first read you have a few key points and years later sometimes those end up knitted together forming a greater insight that eluded you previously.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- drawkbox 12y agoThe idea of compilation without the source is a great way to put it. A beginners mind is a good way to look at things and learn. With a beginners mindset when needed, maybe temporarily you can recompile portions to take down the filters and walls in your current binaries, with that mindset maybe you can update and refresh from the basics.
- d0m 12y ago> Intriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books. We can see it clearly with the functional paradigm renaissance right now. The same arguments already existed 40 years ago, but _something_ changed recently where the perception of some people toward functional paradigm completely changed.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y agoProbably because we hit a threshold where dealing with mutability started to get unmanageable. Another area of interest is "microservices", for the same reason.
- phkahler 12y agoPerhaps because OOP was the big thing for so long, younger people learned on OOP. Those arguments from 40 years ago were either not taught or not emphasized. As a result, functional seems fresh and interesting. Throw in a few problems that become trivial with it and people get very excited and it becomes the "new thing".
- gxs 12y agoI've read other takes on this interesting subject as well. They too, convinced me reading is worthwhile despite our memory limitations. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.htm... http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-curse-of-reading-and-forgetting http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-curse-of-read...
- proveanegative 12y ago>Reading and experience train your model of the world. This sounds convincing but then an argument against reading fiction follows since fiction trains your model of the world with fake data.
- chrdlu 12y agoHmm this is a very interesting point, but we would have to dive a bit deeper and acknowledge there are many different types of fiction. I would argue that certain types of fiction may actually be beneficiary such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye (vs something like 50 Shades of Gray). Those sorts of fictional settings allow the writer to present the experiences and specific feelings/situations to readers. Even though, say Lord of the Rings, isn't exactly relevant to our present day world, the morals and spiritual emotions involved reflect humanity (what makes a human?) I guess your comment has some parallels in art: why should we draw abstract things when we can recreate what we see? Isn't recreating what we see more important/better art than something that would never end up existing? While it's not a perfect analogy, I believe reading and looking at the creative arts ultimately benefits your model of the world through bettering your model of humanity.
- walterbell 12y agoFiction could be viewed as "fake data" or "possible data". The scientific method depends on the generation of testable hypotheses. How do we generate hypotheses?
- drcomputer 12y agoReal data can train your model of the world falsely : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statisti...
- DenisM 12y agoLearning is not limited to events, it also includes approaches, backgrounds, attitudes. Those are all reusable. But yeah, if you read a "fact" one too many time you will take it to granted despite fictitious provenance. There is danger in that.
- karolisd 12y agoKnowledge is an interesting subject. When I read, I don't remember the exact order of words. Especially in the age of Google, we have a choice of what to burden our memory with and what to leave to Google. Are names and dates important? What's important is to have models of how things work in your mind. It is through the process of reading that we develop and refine these models.
- DenisM 12y agoApproximate dates are important to find connections with other contemporary events, and more broadly to put things into the context of the prevailing culture at the time.
- irln 12y ago> Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. Like most things this may have unintended consequences. I think our ability to forget is an important "feature" of cognition. What would happen if we were unable to forget even petty squabbles between friends, loved ones, supposed enemies? How far could this escalate? Our ability to forget and put things behind us may be the reason we're still around.
- whattimeisitnow 12y agoI'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure it's quite important. Autistics I believe have lost some of this filtering (forgetting).. non-autistics like probably you and I capture our environment photographically but ditch the things our brain thinks is unimportant
- pacalleri 12y agoWhile I was reading came to my mind the Borges's short story "Funes the memorious". It's about someone who can't forget any detail. He remembers absolutely all the things and the infinite instances of them through the time. At some point of the story Borges conjectures: "I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget the difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details."
- themodelplumber 12y agoGreat passage. As a digital artist who works with fractals, that really resonates with me. Visual fractal detail quite often converges to visual noise (and looks remarkably like a noise function as expressed on e.g. a TV set). I usually need to remove or de-emphasize that noise in order to clarify the direction and abstract intent of the work. One of my favorite films that works along these lines is the 1998 Japanese film "After Life," in which a small party of workers attempt to recreate others' memories with very basic film studio equipment. I absolutely treasure the loss of detail in the various recreation scenes, and the way it suggests that there is actually a satisficing point at which we might realize, "yes, I'm actually reliving that memory right now." So I agree with Mr. Graham's conclusion that technology can bring this about. On an unrelated note, PG's essays always bring to mind the Meyers-Briggs INTJ type. Essays about the annoyance of accumulating "stuff", a focus on abstract / intuitive learning styles, and clever writing which quickly establishes a theoretical framework which is then thrown against the world's (audience's) experience, rather than starting from first principles hoping to eventually reveal a framework as others might do. His seems to me very much a "systems thinker" approach.
- applecore 12y agoI've noticed that whenever truly original thinkers encounter a problem, they'll quickly establish a workable model—even if it's known to be flawed or wrong—just so they can begin testing it “against the world's experience.” (I had no idea this style of thinking was associated with INTJ types.)
- esfandia 12y ago
- finid 12y agoIt takes a deeper understanding of the mind and how it works to grasps these things. When you learn about the four aspects of the mind and how each plays a role in your outlook, then you have the key to this "mystery".
- cliffcrosland 12y agoWhen I was a freshman in college, I was in a humanities class that focused on the intersection between humans and machines. We had an assignment to build and test out a "prosthesis", i.e. a technology that extends human capability, in Second Life. I created a simple wristwatch accessory that was scripted to upload a copy of all of your chatbox text to an external service. Later, you could log in to this external service and search through a history of all of the conversations your character ever overheard. Real-world versions of this technology appear inevitable as digital storage costs trend to zero. A rudimentary digital copy of the physical world is being created in services like Google Maps. The Google self-driving car records a 3D copy of its surroundings with accuracy at the centimeter level. Dropcam uploads video and audio data from within your home to cloud storage. A world with fully recorded life experiences seems creepy at first blush, but I believe we'll discover a mechanism for trust that will allow everyone to safely record a digital copy of their lives that is inaccessible to third parties. Perhaps in the future we'll each own an open-source private cloud container of CPU and storage resources. Instead of processing your data on external servers, third-party services might provide code that runs in your own container under tight network permission restrictions. Such a system might be able to maintain the benefits of continuous software deployment while allowing consumers to keep their data under their control.
- michaelochurch 12y agoI've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them? I've gone through this exact anxiety. Access into past experiences (whether they're books, vacations, or pieces of visual art) isn't random-access. We seem to have a lot of on-demand knowledge but struggle to retain deep knowledge of something in an independent, self-encapsulated state. Depth of knowledge seems to form, in us, emergently and subconsciously. It makes a case for the Buddhist argument that all things are interconnected and interdependent; certainly, in our knowledge bases, that becomes true very quickly. For me, the solution was to learn to enjoy the process of learning rather than completed act of having acquired knowledge, it being difficult to summarize any acquired knowledge without coming up with a trite, denatured reduction. It took a while because I was secure in the realization that, yes, I had read that 500-page book even if I couldn't reproduce more than a few pages of "raw" and independent knowledge.
- ejstembler 12y agoHaving read Carl Sagan's Cosmos in my youth, I always feel guilty re-reading a book: “If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
- anigbrowl 12y agoDon't feel guilty, Sagan's quantitative approach is a teribly shallow view of reading. If you feel you want to read something again it's because you expect to get something out of it - perhaps to refresh your memory, perhaps to pay more attention to the subtext of the work, perhaps to study the author's literary or rhetorical techniques. You wouldn't assume that you had learned everything about a complex musical composition or painting from single listening or viewing, why assume you've learned everything worth knowing from a single reading of a book? The only reading I ever feel guilty about is my aversion to leaving a book unfinished. I'm pretty good at picking what to read, but about once every year or two I encounter some real stinker that is a literal waste of my time, and I feel a bit annoyed with myself for plowing through to the end even though I have long ceased to expect any literary or intellectual payoff.
- jeffbush 12y agoI think it was Thomas Hobbes who said "If I had read as many books as other men, I should have been as ignorant as they are."
- thoughtpalette 12y agoKind of a tangent but I love this quote of his. "A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called 'leaves') imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic."
- ontoillogical 12y ago> e.g. when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing That sounds fascinating, does anyone have a reference for this?
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- snowwrestler 12y agoThis comment will run the risk of sounding condescending, but I believe it's true so I'm going to post it anyway. Thought processes like the ones captured in pg's post are fostered by education in critical analysis--the sort of analysis that one learns in the humanities. Art, literature, philosophy, history, etc. are the products of human thought, and learning to critique them is in part an exploration of how humans think. Not the physics or neurology, but how influences can shape each person's mental model. Part of this is exploring the influences that affected the mental model of the person writing or creating the art. Another is exploring the mental model(s) that the artist or writer sought to create. (This is what we experience when we "get into" a book.) So, if you're looking for a reason that CS or engineering students should take humanities courses, I think one is illustrated in this post: it teaches you how to read books consciously. It gives you a framework for exploring how the thoughts of others (and therefore yours as well) are influenced and shaped by the information that is consumed during a lifetime.
- david927 12y agoThis essay reminds me of a NY Times essay: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.htm... Interestingly, if shown a series of hundreds of images, we wouldn't remember many in the list. But if we're shown alternates (was it a goldfish or a watch?), we would instantly recognize the item. We didn't forget, we just couldn't access the memory on demand. The conclusion is the same: it's there, influencing us and adding to our lives, even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes.
- WalterBright 12y agoI have an interesting take on this. Most of the books I've read, I have a copy of. A while back, I endeavored to cut, scan and OCR them all into my computer. One idea was then I could do a full-text search, limited to what I've already read rather than what google thinks is relevant. So far, I've found it very handy to find something if I at least remember which book it was in. But I need a program that can extract the OCR'd text from .pdf files - anyone know of a simple one? (I can do it manually, one at a time, by bringing it up in a pdf reader, but that's too tedious and slow.)
- sixdimensional 12y agoThis is a great idea. Full-text search for "my knowledgebase", books I've read, thing's I've written, etc. is an area with potential that still seems unfulfilled. Some ideas: - Apache PDFBox https://pdfbox.apache.org/ https://pdfbox.apache.org/ - command line: https://pdfbox.apache.org/commandline/#extractText https://pdfbox.apache.org/commandline/#extractText - XPDF has a command line tool you can use in Windows - http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ - pdftotext - If you're going for accuracy, Tesseract is one of the most accurate https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ - Apache Tika is often used the way you suggest: http://tika.apache.org/ http://tika.apache.org/
- walterbell 12y agoAbbyy Finereader (paid, Windows) is one of the best OCR programs, most of the books on archive.org are OCR'ed with Abbyy. If the PDFs already have OCR text, calibre (GUI or CLI, Linux or Windows) can convert to .txt and many other formats. The recoll.org search engine will index PDF files that have OCR text.
- WalterBright 12y agoThanks guys, this is great info! (I just tried pdftotext, and it does just what I wanted.)
- pitchups 12y agoAn associated problem caused by a change in the mental model due to reading is the "Curse of knowledge" principle - which essentially states that "....better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties." Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to include the new information, you have a difficult time understanding why others don't see what you see. This is compounded by the fact - as highlighted by pg in the essay - that you also forget how and when your mental model changes. This is one reason why not every expert is a good teacher - as they fail to see the world from the point of view of students. But it is also relevant and useful to remember this in the world of startups. Established large companies routinely get disrupted by novice startups - often because the experts at the large company fail to see problems the way novices do. It is impossible to become an expert at something while continuing to view the world from the eyes of a beginner. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
- awolf 12y ago>better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties Reading this made me think of poker. Calibrating to the skill level of lesser players is often very difficult for intermediate and lower-advanced players. Being able to synthesize the less sophisticated thought technologies beginners are using is surprisingly difficult. Failure to adjust often leads better players to play incorrectly against newbies. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of beating medium/high stakes cash games only to lose in home games with your friends for 1/1000th the stakes will know what I mean.
- sixdimensional 12y agoThis is also why it is so incredibly important to treat everyone's input with respect and consideration - you don't always know what you don't know, or someone could give you an experience or new input that reframes how you think about a particular thing. I think this is one of the elements of human interaction that I value and enjoy the most - being able to try to learn how other people think, and what they think about, and sharing how I think and what I think about.
- sinamdar 12y ago'Reliving experiences' is part of the Exposure Therapy that is used to treat PTSD. I remember watching on NOVA or some science program how virtual reality was being used to treat veterans suffering from PTSD. By reliving a dangerous situation in the VR world, they are able to 'recompile' the program in a safer context than it actually happened. EDIT: Found the link http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_Virtual_Reality_to_Treat_PTSD.htm http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_V...
- zenogais 12y agoI think this is part of a larger point. Books aren't just collections of facts. Deleuze and Guattari perhaps said it best in the introduction to "A Thousand Plateaus" - "A book itself is a little machine..." They then go on to say: "We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with..." Books are machines you plug into your understanding of the world and they either have an effect on you or they have no effect at all. What and how a book plugs into your understanding and works on it is more important than the content of the book itself under this view.
- personlurking 12y agoI recently met some people who swore that photoreading was legit and that because of it they'd read about 10 thick books per week. Not knowing what it was, I looked it up and immediately didn't believe the premise. There's something to be said for speed reading (at a rate slightly faster than normal) but photoreading just seems ridiculous. Not only can no real content/meaning be gained from doing it, but no mental models can be formed. I'd love to be proven wrong, though...
- marvy 12y agoI once read a about a small scale study on some super-duper speed reading method. By small scale I think there were like two participants. One was a an expert in the method. The other was the guy doing the study. There were 3 main findings. 1. Yes, you will "read" much faster. 2. If you take a standard reading comprehension test on what you've read, you will score much lower. 3. If you don't take such a test, you will be under the mistaken impression that you absorbed more than you did from the book. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20000011599.pdf http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2000001...
- brd 12y agoI am a firm believer in actively curating a mental model. At work I could be accused of over-communicating and I demand the same from those around me. I do so because my goal is to help refine the mental model of myself and all my coworkers so that everyone has a better intuitive understanding of the system/process/organization we're working with. By this process I've been able to internalize much of a massively complex system (SAP) in a relatively short period of time.
- japhyr 12y agoOne of the most significant books I ever read was A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. He graduated college in the 70's, wasn't sure what to do, and decide to walk from New York to the Pacific ocean. This book covered the first half of the walk; he wrote it while taking a break in Louisiana along the way. That book was hugely influential to me. I graduated college and spent two years teaching. The summer after my second year of teaching, I had no obligations to anyone else for the first time in my life. I remembered Peter Jenkins' story, and decided to bicycle across the US. I knew I wanted to travel under my own power as he had done, but I wanted to go a little faster than he did. Bicycling was perfect for me. I ended up doing two cross-country trips over successive summers, and then I spent a year living on my bicycle, circumnavigating North America. I reread A Walk Across America some years after doing my own trips. I was amazed at how bad I thought the book was. pg observes that The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. This is absolutely true. Now that I'm in my 40's, I'm going to go back and reread the most influential books of my 20's. I might even have to change my HN username after doing so, but I hope not.
- d23 12y agoMay I ask what in your perspective on the book changed? What made you think it was so great the first time and so bad the second?
- jordanbrown 12y ago"Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why." -- love this
- arasmussen 12y agoI don't like the use of the word "compiled". It's more like a program that modifies it's source at runtime. This reminds me of how JavaScript used to be simply interpreted but now with V8 (and friends) the hottest paths are optimized at runtime so that the result is more performant than any compilation because you have more information than you do statically.
- Qwertious 12y agoYou're describing JIT.
- zeeshanm 12y agoI think one of the points from this essay can be made that "content" discovery is going to be a hot problem to crack if it is not already has been. Because good discovery mechanism leads to more user engagement that ultimately results in creating products with lasting impact.
- a3_nm 12y ago> "when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing" Does anyone know what this is referring to? Searching for "stephen fry singing trauma" doesn't return anything useful except pg's essay.
- Tycho 12y agohe seems to mention it in his autobiography http://www.amazon.com/The-Fry-Chronicles-An-Autobiography/product-reviews/B005GL492I?pageNumber=5 http://www.amazon.com/The-Fry-Chronicles-An-Autobiography/pr... (search for "singing")
- michaelcrn 12y agoWhat
- igonvalue 12y ago> And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I've had this exact feeling about books I read, films I've watched, conversations I've had, work projects I've completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive impression on me. I've always felt guilty about this, especially when I see others who don't seem to have the same problem when they talk about the books they've read, etc. I've also found that recall can be greatly improved by repeatedly talking about the specific topic with multiple people. The strange thing is that I have an excellent memory for certain things - information about people and relationships. In light of our evolutionary history as a social species, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.
- philwelch 12y agoI've found that when I reexpose myself to the same subject or book or whatever, I recall or relearn the information a lot more easily than I did the first time. A lot of times it was just in cold storage the whole time.
- Tycho 12y agoOr put a slightly different way, reading book is a way to test/validate your model of the world. It's like running unit tests on your assumptions.
- lutorm 12y agoI experience this phenomenon powerfully reading scientific articles. You read a bunch of articles when you are trying to wrap your head around some topic, but if you then go back and read them again after you've worked on it for a while, you'll find all kinds of things that now are very meaningful while they previously didn't seem important to you.
- locksley 12y agoThe mind is a sophisticated algorithm with a shit database. So why not replace that database by taking notes?
- levlandau 12y agoThis makes a lot of sense. However, a machine learning model + data analogy feels more satisfactory (and accurate?) to me. We throw away the data but our model as well as its parameters are retained. The model as well as the parameters get refined with experience and it's possible that the model is recursively made up of multiple models and that combination is governed by parameters which are also governed by experience. Realizing this has always been fascinating to me and it makes it clear that exposing the brain to more data in pretty deliberate ways can yield profound results. The "smarter" you are the less data you need. If you are not so smart/knowledgeable you need more data. The data you need is also specifically of the question-answer form i.e. examples of what it is you are trying to learn. Anyways before i go down the rabbit hole, I think these metaphors are extremely helpful for the purpose of self analysis and improvement.
- calebm 12y agoThere's a quote which I (ironically) can't remember about how a mind is made up of the books it has read in much the same way as a lion is made of of the animals it consumes. Or to put it another way, "you are what you eat."
- swah 12y agoOn some level we don't really forget - when you reread a book it comes back to you like a stream, all the insights and connections appearing stronger and clearer than before.
- robg 12y agoNot for nothing, the laying of new memories in the brain is exactly context sensitive. The hippocampus is actively weighting new information based on what we already know. And emotion hacks the hippocampal patterns that much more.
- scoofy 12y agoWhat i found shocking here, is how casually pg talks about what i believe is the fundamental point of philosophy. That is the mapping of our minds inductive model of the world, and our deductive one. >Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Here, he is pointing out the the relevant information you perceive, your empirical data, is only retained insofar as it effects your deductive model of the world, that is, the model we use to determine truth and falsity. The rest of the data is generally trivial. This is a very sensible insight in my mind, and kudos to him. The dance between empirical data and deductive truth is one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. This as a model for data retention is something i'd not thought of. >Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be. Here, i find this problematic. In Soros's terms, the mind is reflexive. Thus, in reviewing the data, we are experiencing new data. If we edit our thoughts, do we not remember editing them? I don't see away to take away the reflexive nature of self examination, that in creating changes, we create new data about the changes.
- BeoShaffer 12y agoSee also, the psycological litterature on source amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia
- porter 12y agomaybe this is more an argument for taking notes while you read rather than just reading.
- oh_dear 12y agoI'm just really happy to hear that I'm not alone in my anxieties about needing to re-read books and my inability to remember everything written in a book!
- foobarqux 12y agoSchopenhauer said it first and better: "However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them." -- Schopenhauer
- ghobs91 12y agoThis helps alleviate the fear of potentially "wasting time" if a startup or project we're working on doesn't take off. Either way, the things learned while undertaking the endeavor will affect our mindset, usually for the better.
- davemel37 12y agoI am in middle of reading a fascinating book that discusses how the brain, processes, interprets, and retains information as it passes from your Sensory Information Storage to your short term memory to your long term memory, as well as how you retrieve information from your long term memory. (The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis) The book was written as a guide to CIA Analysts to understand the limitations their own filters and mental models place on new information they process. One important point that I find applies to this essay is that the way we retrieve information is through schema that associate various memories with each other. Creativity is about mapping new pathways through your memory or applying other patterns and schema on top of existing memories. So, reading a book a second time, or even "forgetting" what you read, can not only give you new patterns and schema to apply to your other mental models and memories and stimulate creativity. I highly recommend everyone read The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis... or if you want the abridged version you can read my brief recap. http://www.davidmelamed.com/2014/12/05/internet-marketers-cia-hedge-funds-business/?hvid=2UkF6u http://www.davidmelamed.com/2014/12/05/internet-marketers-ci...
- tvvocold 12y agoAnybody know how to rss his feed? i try with http://paulgraham.com/rss.html http://paulgraham.com/rss.html but seems not a full article.
- sytelus 12y agoThis is great essay. Few points: 1. The more correct analogy would be training data and machine learned model rather than source code and compiled binary. 2. Lot of people move from book to book, always reading some book at any point in time. This provides great dopamine hit to brain and keeps boredome away. However one need to reflect on what they read to gain any significant "take always". The act of reflecting enforces recall which in turn induces analysis and memory storage. I try to create a book review to formalize my reflection process after I complete a book. 3. These days I also get digital (usually pdf) copies of most books I'm reading. This allows me to use tools like GoodReader to highlight striking statements and make notes of my opinions as I read along. You can sure just use pencil and margin of book :). This habit has rewarded me greatly because it makes me take a pause and think about what I read. I can come back to book anytime and refresh it 10X faster. It's also fun to know what my opinion used to be on some of the things years ago.
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- adam419 12y agoThe funny thing is I had just posted on hear to ask about how others help improve their reading retention, since I've been feeling bad about forgetting thing after I read them.
- sopooneo 12y agoRegarding the retention from books, it's often the case that I could fill a dozen pages with correct answers to questions that I only know from having read a particular book, even if I could only fill one page with unprompted recollections.
- rezaur 12y ago" The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times." -- I loved this statement most.
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- sirsar 12y agoMost people equate the term "memory" with what is more accurately termed episodic memory - little movies in your head. Most people can't remember when "Christmas" was first defined for them, but they can rattle off many things about it - the date, the religious meaning, the corporate meaning, etc. This is semantic memory, and together they form your conscious explicit memory or declarative memory (there are differences between the two that are not relevant here). The brain often throws away the episode but keeps the concept, and that is what Paul is talking about here. But there's more to it than that. Your unconscious implicit memory includes things you can't even articulate. That's the difference between the date of Christmas and how to ride a bike: the latter is nondeclarative. Learning a different way to ride a bike, or approach programming, is even more difficult than recomputing semantic memory. You can (and should) read a new books and gain new episodes to base your facts and opinions on. Read diverse material with abandon. But when learning something nondeclarative, like a weight-lifting technique, it can be well worth seeking out an expert and learning it right the first time. With nondeclarative memory, what you don't know can hurt you. For more on the science and classification of memory, the Wikipedia page is as good a starting place as any. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory
- shubhamjain 12y agoI started reading books about an year ago - read about 16 this year and I am not sure if it just a phony hunch or a real thing but I feel reading has helped me a lot in programming. I am able to grasp things pretty quickly, I am able to link two different things to get ideas to solve problems, and also, I have grown more confident in approaching challenging problems. Albeit, with anecdotal evidence, I believe, taking interest in wide variety of fields may not give immediate benefits but it helps you in ways you don't imagine. The very fact about which I used to worry - not focusing on specialising and hoping from one thing to another, is what I think has helped me grow my skills in programming, in general.
- karmacondon 12y agoI've been thinking about this very issue recently, and coincidentally started working on software two days ago to help manage the problem of remembering things that I've read. Obtaining information in 2015 is remarkably easy. Retaining it is damn near impossible, at least for me. I read books and bookmark links from hn and reddit on a daily basis, consuming constantly. But I find that I recall very little of it. I don't know if Stephan Hawking was right about black holes destroying information, but my bookmarks folder comes pretty close. Links go in and then are never seen or heard from again. I take copious book notes and type them up, only for them to be consigned to the void of my hard drive file system. I've tried evernote and anki and several other tools, but it's always a one way ticket. My trouble isn't remembering what I've read, but remembering to remember. No matter how I've tried, I can't change my daily work flow to set aside time to review the notes and information that I've already collected, rendering it useless. If I had a magic device that recorded all of my experiences, it wouldn't do me much good because I'm too busy collecting new experiences to be remembered. It would be great to be able to search for details and trivia, but I wouldn't have time to peruse the archive to refresh myself about things that I had forgotten completely. Much in the way that google lets us search for and recall anything, except the things we don't remember the name of. I'm going in the direction of reminding myself about things that I previously read or bookmarked, especially as they tie in to what I'm currently reading. I think one part of the solution is to display existing bookmarks and typed up book notes to myself in a near random fashion. It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. I think a plugin that relates past content to the current page might be a good idea, ie for this page I could see any previous bookmarks that involve memory and retention. And generally reminding myself to review things I've already learned, even if they don't seem relevant at the moment. I don't have any great ideas yet, but I've been coding like heck for the past few days to try to take small steps toward a solution. I've been on a quest to make my brain work better, and this essay has definitely given me some ideas and helped to push me along.
- jasim 12y ago> It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. Go for it; simplicity works. I've pushed a few of my favourite passages to a simple web page which I can flip through randomly (http://www.jasimabasheer.com/amateur_reading/serendipity.html http://www.jasimabasheer.com/amateur_reading/serendipity.htm...). As a bonus I can also link to it when relevant discussions come up.
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- easytiger 12y ago> "a perfect formulation of a problem is already half its solution." Is that simply rubber ducking?
- rluedeman 12y agoThis is a really interesting perspective on cognition, and it all kind of makes sense if you consider the brain to be a black box pattern recognition machine with various built-in biases. New data is always added to the model, but not in an entirely rational fashion. The updated model is likely to slightly overfit new data ("compiled at the time they happen"), and particularly salient bits and pieces of old data (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) are disproportionately weighted.
- yarek 12y agoFascinating. A corollary would be: be careful what you read and be critical of what you read. There is danger of manipulation, particularly by others. The plus is that you could manipulate yourself, change personal perceptions and mode of thinking.
- meta-coder 12y agoQuote: There are no facts, only interpretations. --Friedrich Nietzsche
- hrjet 12y agoThis raises two interesting questions to me: 1. Are technological advances required for re-living experiences? Wouldn't (some forms of) meditation achieve similar results? Personally, I have found myself remembering many past events, a few days into the start of meditation. 2. When we re-read books, we often choose to re-read those that we liked. But could there be some benefit in re-reading books that we didn't like (and surpasses a minimum threshold of quality).
- dimfisch 12y ago"Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why." Nice.
- normloman 12y agoI will never understand why this guy's essays are so revered. I'm expecting some profound conclusion, but the only message of the essay is "reading and experience form mental models." Well, duh! Whats worse, he doesn't support his claims with evidence, besides a single anecdote. Am I missing something here?
- Dragonai 12y agoWell, Paul's essays aren't all meant to be mind-shatteringly revolutionary. He simply likes to share his thoughts and advice on a wide range of subjects that have helped shape who he is and what he knows, and the general public respects both him and his essays because a.) he's got the credibility to back them up, and b.) because it shows in his work and in his writing. I personally think this essay is some pretty nice food for thought.
- normloman 12y agoI have a problem with sharing every thought that pops in your head. If you don't have something new to contribute to the discussion, why add to the noise? As for "food for thought," have you really never thought about how reading and experience shape your beliefs? I thought this was pretty basic stuff. Maybe I'm wrong.
- Empact 12y ago“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
- herodot 12y ago"Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why."