Thought experiment. Take the top 7 books that have shaped your thinking as a “stack” in the software sense running on the hardware of your brain. Would someone else who shared your top 7 be able to follow along most of your thinking, say 80%?
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Don’t take the particular numbers seriously. Think of it as: do the first n books explain m% of your thinking where m(n) is a positive definite function? (ie the more books you share in your stack with me, in the same order, the closer your thinking to mine)... true or false?
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Many people seem to loosely operate on this assumption, which is sort of like a blank slate model where books get loaded in and interconnected, and a sort of “principal component analysis” yields books in order of explained fraction.
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We'll know for sure in about 30 years.
You need both the books and the order in which they were digested relative to life experience. It doesn't work all that well because life is like a factorial.
If you're dealt a royal flush at the wrong time, you win nothing.
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I don’t think it would work at all, ie no better than random. Books are a rounding error compared to complexity of other factors acting on you.
Better than random! You'd be able to gauge some amount of bias. Most people read fewer than 200 books in their lifetime. An avid reader can hit 26,000. Our brains can handle the equivalent of about 1 billion in theory.
Just a question of how close to the limit you are!
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