Maybe the fuzziness of the match means that I effectively have access to much more stuff than someone else who’d read the same material but carefully indexed it. Which has both benefits and costs.
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Replying to @Meaningness
I've worried a lot about this very particular point, for the obvious reason (I worry that memory systems may damage creativity). Can make a pretty case in both directions, without anything particularly dispositive.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @Meaningness
The most interesting pro-case was after using memory systems to really pull apart a particular proof (of the spectral theorem): http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics Afterward, totally unexpectedly, I went on a long walk, and found many new and totally different proofs simply arising
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @Meaningness
in waves as I walked. The effect faded, but on the rare occasions I think much about mathematics I will find ideas obviously somehow connected to that proof often arise in a delightfully generative fashion; the process encoded not just details...
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @Meaningness
... but also the fuzzy generative stuff in a particularly effective fashion. This isn't quite n=1 (I've done the same, not quite as successfully, a few other times), but it is small n.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
omg this is super cool! I suspect this hard-to-describe thing of “mental modes” or “states of cognitive awareness,” especially the non-ordinary states of cognitive awareness, is enormously important and almost entirely unstudied.
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
Many of my projects require specific non-ordinary cognitive modes to proceed, and it usually takes me about three full-time days to get myself into the relevant state. Any significant interruption aborts the process.
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
This is incredibly inefficient; I need five clear days to get two days of work done (three in cognitive-state prep) and how often can that be arranged?
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
“Hacker trance” is the best-known example of this, although less extreme. You’ve finally managed to get the structure of a large codebase in your head and you are working out a refactoring and either (a) you work 48 hours nonstop to get it done or (b) your pointy-haired boss
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
But there’s other non-ordinary cognitive states we have no names for, and which probably few people ever access because they don’t know about them and don’t have circumstances in which it would be feasible to enter them. And these are where the breakthroughs come from…
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And maybe they are extraordinary breakthroughs only because particular sorts of cognitive work can only be done in particular non-ordinary states hardly anyone knows about, and
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
and maybe if we taught how to access them, those kinds of work would become common, and the specific kinds of results they produce would become common and wouldn’t seem like breakthroughs anymore which would be a very good thing!
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