Augmenting Long-Term Memory

there is great value in learning to “think in more memorable ways”.

This places us in a curious situation: we have enough understanding of memory to conclude that a system like Anki should help a lot. But many of the choices needed in the design of such a system must be made in an ad hoc way, guided by intuition and unconfirmed hypotheses. The experiments in the scientific literature do not yet justify those design... See more

I know many people who try Anki out, and then go down a rabbit hole learning as many features as possible so they can use it “efficiently”. Usually, they're chasing 1% improvements. Often, those people ultimately give up Anki as “too difficult”, which is often a synonym for “I got nervous I wasn't using it perfectly”. This is a pity. As discussed e... See more

What you get from deep engagement with important papers is more significant than any single fact or technique: you get a sense for what a powerful result in the field looks like. It helps you imbibe the healthiest norms and standards of the field. It helps you internalize how to ask good questions in the field, and how to put techniques together. Y... See more

I personally find it fascinating that Telstar was put into orbit the year before the introduction of ASCII, arguably the first modern digital standard for communicating text. Humanity had a telecommunications satellite before we had a digital standard for communicating text!

It's particularly worth avoiding lonely orphans: single questions that are largely disconnected from everything else. Suppose, for instance, I'm reading an article on a new subject, and I learn an idea that seems particularly useful. I make it a rule to never put in one question. Rather, I try to put at least two questions in, preferably three or m... See more

Of course, instead of using Anki I could have taken conventional notes, using a similar process to build up an understanding of the paper. But using Anki gave me confidence I would retain much of the understanding over the long term.

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.

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. – Richard Feynman