michael_nielsen

1/ One thing I changed my mind about this year: I used to believe one should outsource as much of their memory to their "exocortex" (note taking system) as possible, dedicating their brain to its comparative advantage of processing, not storing

2/ I now think of it as: the quality of your thinking is as good as the insights you can tap into with a very low latency — and there's a qualitative difference between an exocortex' 2 seconds (at best) and the 0.1s of committing something to memory

3/ To carry the computing metaphor, your memory's like your L1 cache. But it's different in 2 important ways: its capacity is infinite, and it becomes smaller and slower the less you use it. So there's a lot of upside in using it a ton.

4/ I still take notes all the time, and find it super useful (3k pages in the last 2y), but I've also been building a spaced repetition habit to remember the most important bits (inspired by @michael_nielsen and @ncasenmare) and now I always try to think of mnemonic devices