Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains.
We evolve with technology, and it evolves with us. We might be losing our ability to remember, but if it is because we don’t “need” to remember because technology has augmented us... Well, this is why I also am fond of telling people that I have a difficult time separating technology from nature. Even though the two don’t seem like the same thing, technology too becomes part of the natural ecosystem as organisms invent and rely on it.
Also, another way of thinking about this is, maybe the ability to recall small detailed facts was evolutionarily less important than building models in our brains. So, we offloaded recording small facts, while I think we still ingest and build/train our neural nets just fine in our brains.
Then the only problem I see is, if life becomes all about mental models, when our ability to form new mental models degrades with age, what then? Especially with the rate of technological change, I do see a real likelihood that old mental models get left behind and without the ability to adapt, organisms (i.e.) us could be hosed.
Edit: ..and the last sentence could be why the big push for AI and machine learning too - to ensure the models get encoded into the technology too... and be discovered faster, changed more fluidly, etc. Another evolutionary tool.
Orwell wasn't prescient enough to imagine the type-remember, where you kept your entire perception of the world on machines that weren't controlled by institutions with your best interests at heart.
That had to wait for Fahrenheit 451 to create an entire administration and police force to get rid of your old encyclopedias.
[1] - The story in written form - http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html
[2] - An audio recording - https://librivox.org/the-machine-stops-by-e-m-forster/
[3] - Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
https://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-Kelly/dp/...
It's true, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile risk. Nor does it imply that the other approach is risk-free / has no downsides.
Marshall McLuhan wrote that in 1964 in "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man".
They're not a technology that enhances or melts with the human who uses it, it doesn't vanish into the background, the car doesn't even evolve much, rather the environment changes to fit the car, if anything hindering evolution, it displaces the natural ecosystem, it doesn't become part of it.
The same can be said about technologies weakening memory. They look like an enhancement maybe, but they may actually just cause impairment of function, becoming a crutch.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/storyoflife/player?clipID=20160713-...
Yeah. Kinda. Not really. I bet people had to walk more before cars though.
I agree. But these two examples are different in a way that is important to me: my personal wiki is under my control; Google is not. Therefore, when I find important things in Google, I sometimes still take care to rewrite them into my wiki, using my own words.
Using the wiki feels like extending my brain. Using Google feels more like outsourcing it.
I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on.
I think the trend today is to prime the brain with content depending on the context. E.g. before giving a talk, an engineering meeting or leading a training session you can use flash cards to warm up the cache and strategically dump what is not important to remember.
Not exactly sure how I feel about that.
You've got the people who consume a lot of "information" yet can't make much sense of it, or at least in a way that lines up to shared reality. I'd say this represents the average person. The main coping mechanism for these people is to consume information as entertainment and otherwise not think about what they're taking in. Otherwise, they might subscribe to prefab reality "lenses" that effectively give them the orders they need to make executive decisions in life.
Then you have those who actually can remember lots of trivial knowledge, but can hardly think beyond the level of factoids. In other words, they think that the world can be explained by what's directly in front of them, ignoring the need to distill, synthesize, and extrapolate in order to make predictive models of the world. I know a few intellectuals that insist on this thought process, and their predictions are usually wrong, yet they don't adjust their belief that memorizing a bunch of facts makes them more accurate thinkers. Likewise to the common person, the trivial knowledge archetype sometimes subscribes to existing world views so they can cherry pick knowledge that fits those views, mistakenly believing that their views are original and not assigned to them.
There's also the opposite of the last archetype, which is the overly abstract thinker who can't remember many specific facts at all, so they cope by passively consuming large amounts of "data" and distilling it down into a models of the world that make sense to them. This is the camp that I fall into. It's not that I don't remember anything specific, but individual factoids must be of significant interest for me to commit them to concrete memory. Even if my models of reality don't line up on a factual basis, the more important thing to me is whether I get results. The problem with people like I am is that we can think in terms of big picture but sometimes fail when thinking in a micro-scale actually counts for something. This becomes even worse when there is too much information to consume, because any bit of compelling data causes the distilled reality models to expand in ways that might not be justified.
Without specific memories, how can you tell whether or not you have been getting results? :)
It's a blessing and a curse. And one I find very few careers favour.
I used to store as much info as I could somewhere (a personal wiki) but over the years I realized there's just too much there and most of it I never need, and if I do need something, I can look it up again anyway.
I think it's possible to become something of an information pack rat. It's true that for me learning something new feels productive somehow, but if I were to be honest, most of the knowledge I seek out online doesn't really provide me with direct value. The act of seeking it out as well is time that could've been used to do something else.
The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful than looking at the note again imo.
This reminds me of write-up by Morgan Housel: long-term knowledge vs expiring knowledge[0]. To optimize that trade-off, I generally try to review, on a weekly basis, what I consume from the internet-verse. This has helped me in some ways. Not sure if it's gonna work or not for other people... Plus, moving the scale towards consuming long-forms is also helping me out. (I guess it depends on what type of bubble you are wrapping yourself into. For instance, only visiting specific sub-reddit and LW topics intentionally has been advantageous to me...)...
[0] - https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowle...
It's all too much information. I worked on cdrom technology 20 years ago. I don't want to know the sector size is 2532 bytes, but I do.
* How often did you Google this week?
* What was the last thing before the last thing that you Googled?
Later, I shoot another question:
* What is the last thing you read, that you googled before, top to bottom?
The use case I optimize websites for is:
* Users do not know when they Google.
* Users do not know what they Google.
* Google is an extension of their thinking.
* They do not read what they find.
* It just need to move them forward in a way.
* How often did you read articles in newspapers this week?
* What was the last article before the last article that you read?
* What is the last newspaper article that you read, top to bottom?
* How often did you read manpages this week?
* What was the last manpage before the last manpage that you read?
* What is the last manpage that you read, top to bottom?
Both by myself and many other friends:
But he, his own affections' counsellor,
Is to himself--I will not say how true--
But to himself so secret and so close,
So far from sounding and discovery,
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.
Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow.
We would as willingly give cure as know.This doesn't mean I don't remember them, but my memories of these events are not structured as a temporally ordered list.
I can say with high likelihood some of the things I googled recently, and a good selection of the reasons I was googling, just as I can talk about things I discussed recently, even if I can't index them, but expecting that to be addressed in a sorted list is to confuse the simplicity of formulation of the question with simplicity of implementation.
1) I can look up a thing I can't remember (or don't know) both specifically and immediately. 40 years ago this might have taken a week and an inter-library loan. I'd certainly be sure to remember what I'd learned afterwards. And,
2) Things that I once looked up can be silently changed or removed the next time I try to look them up.
I don't think it's useful to handwave the material differences away with a general "People always say stuff about everything."
IMHO, what we remember is the task and its outcome, not the trivialities that brought us from one to another. Which makes me wonder why the last question puzzles people.
I don't readily remember my search history, because I just discard the memories of reaching for something (unless there was something exceptional, which is rare). It's like driving to the restaurant, when there are multiple ways to get to the place. I do remember the outcome (dinner) but unless something happened on the road I probably would need to think/reconstruct if I'd be suddenly asked about the particular roads I took.
Same with the articles - I do remember what I was interested in today (as opposed to "what I've searched for", a subtle difference), and what were the results - things I've read top-to-bottom. Although maybe not in true historical order, but typically the last one is still correct.
To summarize:
- "How often" - unimportant, as the count rarely has a value. Need to enumerate and count things, and that's quite a tedious mental process.
- "What was the last thing before the last" - typically unimportant, as historical order of unrelated events rarely has a value. Needs some mental processing to sort things.
- "What is the last thing you read" - beats me, I do remember what I've read. May need some mental processing (going through my "reading history" and confirming that I've reached this by searching), but besides a possible surprise factor not really a puzzling question.
I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it. This seems more powerful.
And for things you do often, you will probably memorize it anyway.
Lack of focus leading to not remembering the content of a meeting is problematic though. I don't have this issue fortunately.
In my experience, older employees are able to recall information to solve a problem, but the recall may be incomplete, leading to a quicker, but less effective solution. Whereas, younger employees often need more time because they don't specifically remember solutions, but they are able to find, categorize, and process information faster, often leading to a slower, but more complete and robust solution.
Not sure if it's a product of education and upbringing in different worlds, or a product of experience, but it's fascinating to me.
I also don't try hard to memorise things I know I can trivially lookup.
Other things I have a directory called `useful_things` that has markdown files broken down by category I can quickly grep for that thing I remember I needed but not how to do.
It even comes to inbox organization. All the older team members her have folders etc to organize everything. The younger ones - we have one large inbox with everything and just search by remembering how to look for it (“oh yeah, that email had the word “altruistic” in it and it Jeff was involved)
If you think about it, that’s just how Google and constant internet connection programmed us... knowing how to find information became more valuable than knowing information.
Fun fact: this is Ken Jennings method for practicing for Jeopardy, mental models of items and triggers with surrounding facts.
[paraphrase] "I wrote it down so I don't HAVE to remember." --quote from Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade
Seems similar to Einstein's "Never memorize what you can look up.".
I can look up all the definitions and grammar rules of English, but without memorizing them, I wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone around me.
This approach is called Transactive Memory, and you do it with Google, with your note-taking software, with your friends and colleagues. You do it with your pet.
One of our biggest employable strengths as hackers is that we know where to find information. We make a habit of learning where to find different kinds of knowledge, then do a deep dive into a particular subject. We are masters of transactive memory.
We as a species are rapidly shifting to a more transactive memory in general as it further compresses our knowledge into a small space by storing metadata instead of the knowledge itself, allowing for rapid acclimation to a given task based on the wealth of knowledge around you.
> ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ...
http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html
Socrates never wrote anything down, but Plato did, so ironically now we know about Socrates' disdain of writing through Plato's writings (in this case, the Phaedrus). Quoting a paraphrase from Wikipedia [1]
"... writing can do little but remind those who already know. Unlike dialectic and rhetoric, writing cannot be tailored to specific situations or students; the writer does not have the luxury of examining his reader's soul in order to determine the proper way to persuade. When attacked it cannot defend itself, and is unable to answer questions or refute criticism."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Rhetoric,_...
Sure, you could read these teachings and move on with your life, but can you recite what you just read, or even what you just wrote? Not a chance. Your memory of text is fleeting compared to if you gave focused mental effort committing that text to memory through oral repetition.
People are being paid millions to figure out how to hijack your attention, how to use yourself (body, mind functions) against you.
Writing is a tool, it doesn't try to work against you, or have an agenda that might not be aligned with yours.
We’ve had weaponized attention grabbing as long as wemve had humans I bet.
“One of the most dangerous things you can believe in this world is that technology is neutral.”
from https://thecompassmagazine.com/blog/is-technology-morally-ne...
Is there more value in being able to remember who the specific philosopher was, or more in knowing how to find that information quickly and easily?
To take it a step further - is there more value in individuals remembering the specific philosopher, or in society, anyone in society being able to find out that same information?
If you feel your memory is limited in an area you do value instant recall that doesn't inherently produce regular repetition, there are ways to steer your long term memory consolidation. For example, you can train yourself to remember everyone's names when you meet them, if you value that. If you don't value it or put any particular effort into training it, there's no reason to think you've gone senile if you forget the name of most people you meet the first few times.
For most things, I think the second brain solution is ideal. You value something enough to want to be able to recall it at a moment's notice, but you don't have any real need to instantly recall it without reference. We're not taking closed book exams outside of school [1]. This is where all the Zoom notes and book quotes are placed, where you can further digest, interpret and later recall them if and when they become relevant.
[1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-...
Frances Yates - The Art of Memory,
and the one I'm planning to read next:
Mary Carruthers - The Book of Memory.
One of the most interesting aspects for me is how the concept of memory in the middle ages was much more closely associated (sometimes conflated) with imagination than it is now. Most people I know now would consider memory and imagination as two quite distinct mental faculties.
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
And for what? I get nothing out of it, maybe a little pissed off every now and then. Most articles I read are forgettable and have no impact on my life. There is literally nothing that I've learned on the internet over close to two decades of use that I couldn't learn more thoroughly with a book or by looking at a newspaper, and in recent years it's been getting impossible to find actual factual subject information on the internet that isn't some half assed SEOified article that doesn't even have my answer.
I think I'm just gonna pull the plug and block these websites with some browser extension, because I am just too compulsive at this point, too engrained into this automatic unconscious action of cmd+t->news.y->tab->enter to do it under my own volition. Sometimes I sit down and I don't even remember opening HN, but there I am scrolling through the front page.
I still need the internet for emails, stack overflow, or finding articles in my field, but that sort of use I will allow because I take that information and synthesize it into something novel and useful. I'm going to pull the plug on being a mindless internet consumer, who leaves no time for actual thinking in between the rampant consumption.
Good bye, HN, hopefully for good but we will see how long I'm able to remain disciplined. I'm kinda excited about what sort of mental clarity this might bring me and how much that will improve my life.
- Turn off auto-complete on your desktop browser. The "cmd+t > news.y" or "cmt+t > r" is a real catalyst for mindless browsing sites like Hacker News and Reddit.
- Uninstall apps like Reddit, Facebook, or Instagram on your phone. If you really want to access them, then use the web experience through the mobile browser. It's enough to get the job done, but not good enough to be addicting (no auto-play videos, notifications, and the UX is slightly degraded).
- Turn off all non-pertinent notifications on your phone, especially things like news, email, and social media. The only daily apps which have I notifications enabled for me are Messages, a sports app, and daily habit reminders.
- If I feel like I'm using a social media site too much on a laptop, then I change the hosts file to re-direct to localhost. Bam, access revoked for a while. I've found that this works better than browser extensions. With extensions, I used to just right-click > disable, then go to my time-wasting website. With the hosts file method, I need to figure out the path to the hosts file (I never remember it), open it in a text editor, type in my changes, then save the file with sudo permissions. I thought about scripting it, but I think the manual process is more effective at preventing me from constantly enabling/disabling access. There's more intention behind the action.
- Pay for a newspaper subscription. It's so refreshing to consume quality journalism vs trendy click-bait articles. My recommendation would be read one national outlet (NY Times, Wall Street Journal) and your local newspaper. Instead of browsing Reddit/HN in the morning, open up your newspaper app.
Halfway through the book the author tells about how much he had struggled to write and had to isolate himself from technology for a while, but only temporary. He then came back and felt the "shallows" once again.
Zoom and the like is far from natural and I find myself searching for words during sentences that I know I would not have in the past.
But I'm fascinated by your statements. Can you go more in-depth, please?
Since the pandemic I have moved out of the city and into a more rural isolated area (Did not see any benefit to paying high rent prices in a city when all the facilities were shut down). All of my work has moved to remote working using video conferencing etc.
Before we would use Slack a lot, but in-person meetings were a common occurence and I would spend quite a lot of time outside of work with friends or colleagues discussing various topics.
Since being in this isolated environemnt I feel that because those interactions are far more rare when they do happen I struggle to recall words or phrases that were once commonplace in my vernacular.
This is all very anecdotal evidence of course, but it's somethig i've observed in myself of a number of occasions now.
Kids in school are already struggling with these things. What happens when every child is walking around with facts available instantly and constantly, but no context to manage it?
Personally that sort of stuff is where I draw the line, since it's a redundant consumer product with things I already own. Technology in recent decades has shown that the only utility it provides is analogous to something that already exists and works fine, because companies would rather ship something fast and 'new' than something clever that took time to think about. Like the smartwatch: $300 to poorly replicate half the things your phone in your pocket can already do, oh and you have to charge it every day unlike your automatic watch that was powered by your moving wrist alone. Or smart glasses, which would only serve to distract me in the middle of whatever I was doing at the time (probably with increasingly intrusive advertising like we see in every piece of technology in recent decades), and once again, is entirely redundant with 1/10th of the functionality that my phone in my pocket can do (including AR).
The problem is that if you overindex on what you choose to organize, you just end up with a bunch of junk and then you have to go back and tend it and delete it and figure out what makes the cut or not. It's such a time intensive chore that takes away useful cycles that I'd rather be spending on deep work. My deep work is rarely information retrieval and organization, but instead handling strategic concerns in the moment and planning for the future -- both of which I need to balance and do with proper judgment.
And unfortunately, I do not find setting up a knowledge management system very useful for that. An old-fashioned journal that lets me get out my thoughts in the moment and log it at a point in time is really the best tool for that.
Though the beauty of any system is you design it. You get some kind of say in what's important. I trust that more than randomly depending on your brain. The brain can be a weird place. I have embarrassing memories from my childhood, I don't know if it serves me anymore, but they're there.
Also, I get distracted too easily, having a list of tasks I'm working on keeps me on track.
Except it's fairly normal under stress for people's memory to function more poorly and since we're experiencing a Global pandemic that has completely up ended our normal mode of living I would expect baseline stress for almost every one to be up considerably.
So that's my hypothesis, which requires less assumptions than "people are losing the ability to remember because of computers" but doesn't result in a blog post where I can talk about Anki or equivalents.
// This loss of ability to remember is real and personal. To combat it, once a year, I undertake a two to three week digital detox. No devices, no media, only long form traditional books. Takes a week to overcome agitation from not being able to “consume” digital micro-info-bursts on demand. Following that, my brain begins to restore its ability to build and maintain concepts, built up like Jenga towers or houses of cards while reading. That ability remains until I get lazy, quit taking notes by hand and go back to digital.
It’s something you have to exercise with some consistency to keep from atrophying.
And it's not just memory, but the processing or "thinking" of that memory. Let's take just one sense, sight, for our example.
When you see something, eventually the signal gets to your "conscious" mind (also, there is a slight delay as your brain processes things). But at the same time that information is processed by the "recognization" part of your brain which will eventually store that information, also, in long term memory. There are a few interesting facts about this that I've seen:
1. there are people who are blind, but not because their eyes are damaged, but because the connection is severed to their "conscious". But their "recognization" connection is still intact. Because of this, even though they can't see, they can recognize faces and even stop before running into a wall. This is because the regognization happens even though you're not consciously aware of it. Something like face blindness is (probably) the opposite. 2. When you're in a parking lot looking for your car and you see your friend, you won't recognize them - this is because the "recognization" processing is only single threaded! 3. You can recognize someone you know from much further than you can make out their face consciously. 4. Recognization looks for very complex patterns - especially faces. Just ask yourself "how" you tell one face from another? That feeling of being being watched may be just that there's something face like in the environment. 5. The recognization will store its information and your conscious mind will look for it where its stored but they don't talk directedly!. So, again, when you see something, that information is sent to both places. But sometimes, especially if you have a chemical issue (e.g. serotonin) (even just a minor issue for that moment, not necessarily a big issue), the recognization process will be fast but the conscious process will be slow. So the recognization will store it, then the conscious brain will check to see if it's stored - and it's there! So your con
For example, I've looked up numerous PHP functions on www.php.net, numerous Python functions on docs.python.org, numerous Perl modules on metacpan.org or with the perldoc command, and numerous JavaScript functions on MDN.
It would be neat if there was something that could automatically note what I've looked up, and turn that into flash cards for use with something like Anki.
I humbling say my exobrain is Evernote as I throw a lot of thing in there after adding some tags. I'm fast approaching the 3000 item mark, which is interesting because I'm gradually losing the capacity to find things as I can't remember what's in there to be searched/found. Day to day things like receipt photos are in some way at the top of my mind, but unique events from past years may be forever buried in there.
Another evidence: I saved an article from 2017 just to find out days later when I searched for its title that I had actually saved the same article back in 2017.
Well, I can't even imagine how this second brain will be like in 2027.
I guess smartphones may further reduce what we need to commit to memory, which will probably have some implications in terms of neuro-plasticity - i.e. it may well shrink (or at least change) parts of our brains.
I think as technology evolves, we may see a better version of this idea. The ultimate version of this would be what Connor Macleod is gifted at the end of Highlander 2.
He has this ability to see people's thoughts and help them work together to solve huge problems in the world.
We have lots of chat apps that give us instant communication, but it is not very organized or easy to search like the idea of direct access to someone's thoughts.
It's like my brain realises I am intending to go back and read the string 2 numbers at a time, over and over again, so it doesn't bother remembering. But if I just read it out once and don't think about it until I need to recall it, my brain has the information available for me.
I do review certain things I want to remember in my downtime, but I don't think that is somehow inherently changing some larger picture like my information consumption.
Semi-related, do you guys tend to get headaches after long information binges?
Names, grey deeds, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovereign voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain
and deify me,
as if some blithe wine or bright elixir
Peerless I had drunk,
and so became immortal.
- Keats, from memory.
edit: Ok, I had to double check and I made a mistake!
* Lack of sleep * Stress * Age
Usually all three hit at once, as our career peaks in intensity around our late 30s, while also having kids.
I am concerned that people seem increasingly unable to draw coherent conclusions.
Is this really a problem if you think about it from the standpoint of human evolution?
If that is the case, it may be really hard for us to actually reverse our destructive trend against the natural world and then we are really in trouble.