Augmenting Long-Term Memory

After the match where AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the strongest human Go players in history

I made several rapid passes over the paper in this way, each time getting deeper and deeper. At this stage I wasn't trying to obtain anything like a complete understanding of AlphaGo. Rather, I was trying to build up my background understanding. At all times, if something wasn't easy to understand, I didn't worry about it, I just keep going. But as... See more

virtuoso skill

Memory researchers have repeatedly found that the more elaborately you encode a memory, the stronger the memory will be. By elaborative encoding, they mean essentially the richness of the associations you form.

Joshua Foer, “Moonwalking with Einstein” (2011)

Richard P. Feynman, “What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character” (1989)

This suggests to me the need for a separate field of human augmentation. That field will take input from cognitive science. But it will fundamentally be a design science, oriented toward bold, imaginative design, and building systems from prototype to large-scale deployment.

One common criticism of systems such as Anki is that external memory devices – systems such as Google, wikis, and notebooks – really ought to be enough. Used well, such systems are, of course, extremely useful as a complement to Anki. But for creative work and for problem-solving there is something special about having an internalized understanding... See more

This confidence, in turn, makes the initial act of understanding more pleasurable, since you believe you're learning something for the long haul, not something you'll forget in a day or a week.

OK, but what does one do with it? ... [N]ow that I have all this power – a mechanical golem that will never forget and never let me forget whatever I chose to – what do I choose to remember? – Gwern Branwen