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Almost everything is worth knowing for a while or in specific situations. Almost nothing is worth knowing forever or in all situations. Most knowledge is only rent-worthy. When it degrades (a deeper, more irreversible kind of loss than mere forgetting) you should generally let it
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We often fetishize ignorance (stuff we’ve never yet known) by performing some sort of pious humility to exhibit our consciousness of it. But curiously, we have no cultural attitude towards stuff once known but now lost. Or at least stored in ways requiring restorative work.
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Temporal partitition of known-unknown: Once-known unknown: Stuff you used to know that’s now degraded Could-be-known unknown: Stuff you know is out there that you could know, like apartments you could rent Never-knowable unknowns: Stuff you know is beyond your learning reach
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Thing about knowledge degradation is that it is arbitrary and has only a weak relationship to retention desires. “It’s like riding a bike” effect. Ancient environment of evolutionary adaptation dictates that my somatic hardware retains bike-riding knowledge weirdly well. Shrug.
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2x2: Knowledge you’d like to retain/lose vs knowledge that actual sticks vs degrades. Aptitude = Stuff you’d like like to retain and naturally does get retained, making maintenance cheap (it sticks with little/no reinforcement like bike-riding, which I actually do want to retain)
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Curious that people find this to be a tragic line of thought. I find it liberating and am not really upset by it. In fact I kinda appreciate knowledge being naturally lossy.
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Replying to @vgr
Why would address book be full? You are probably just down because of corona. Your lifelong learning is just starting!
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“Use it or lose it” has a hugely important corollary: how much you have to use something to retain it varies enormously from “riding a bike” (afaict that’s once every decade after acquisition) to “must use every week and will be lost in months/years if not” like advanced math.
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Your knowledge degradations form a unique fingerprint that create a signature style of how how you do new things. Like the gold seams on a kintsugi bowl uniquely identify its past of cracks and breaks. It still holds stuff, but in a unique way. Your brain is a kintsugi bowl.
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Writing is a good example. Everybody retains/loses particular preferred/not-preferred words/idioms/usages that form a particular unique “voice” ... one that could be identified by an AI classifier and reproduced by gpt-2 type algorithms.
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Feels like Homo sapiens is ready to evolve past uncritical fetishization of knowing for the sake of knowing (Homo... studentus?) to actual “sapiens” ("discerning, wise, sensible") by treating knowing as a commodity rent/buy decision for the most part.
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Replying to
Erudition: What you know Wisdom: What you know about what you know Humbletalebry: What you don’t know Prowess: What you can do Nihilism: What you must do Scholarship: What you know about who knows what Craft: What you’ve forgotten Artistry: What has irreversibly degraded
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Religion: What you refuse to know Tribalism: What you refuse to do Bureaucratism: What others must know Imperialism: What others must be able to do
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Replying to
If reading is renting, is writing owning knowledge? I have forgotten most of what I’ve written in the past. Part of me is grateful for that, as not forgetting could put me in a rut. If writing is not owning, then what does owning knowledge look like? So many questions...
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