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This week's Commonplace post is about neuroplasticity, and why it's mostly a useless idea: commoncog.com/blog/neuroplas But the general principle is actually what is more interesting to me: you want to grok ideas at the right level of abstraction. Not too high, and not too low.

commoncog.com

Neuroplasticity is a Pretty Useless Idea for Practice

Neuroplasticity is an oft-quoted scientific idea, used to explain skill acquisition. But it's not actually that useful to the practitioner. Here's why.

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Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Oct 29, 2020

It sounds like it might be more fruitful to mine the very rich, very large, and very deep literature on spaced repetition, in order to investigate all the ways spaced repetition has failed over the years. gwern.net/Spaced-repetit I'd say that LTP is too low level to be useful.

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Replying to

@ejames_c

Ok, *as useful; I'd much rather read research on stimulant medicine, instead of reading about underlying neuro-chemistry, the consensus on which seems to change every decade. (For instance, people still don't fully know why modafinil works; except that it does).

9:05 AM · Oct 29, 2020TweetDeck