Intentionally shaping your thinking

I just watched a presentation on computer security where the speaker showed off a hack that I didn’t even know was possible. His example and explanation were eye opening. The additional related examples were helpful, but they didn’t have the same impact.

We don’t really remember what we read. I like how Nadia puts it

Somehow, I can barely remember any specific examples from the handful of Noam Chomsky books I read a few years ago. Still, I think some of the ideas are integrated into my world view although I can’t point to specific opinions. I finally read Seeing like a State recently. I enjoyed the examples, but I felt like a lot of the value came from building up and reenforcing the idea of legibility.

My friend Devon is an obsessive note taker. She has mentioned how helpful it is to review old notes every once and a while, but I don’t take a lot of notes myself so I didn’t really get it. My friend Omar takes a lot of screenshots and reviews them occasionally. Omar wound up making Screenotate so he can more easily dig through his old screenshots and hold on to references to the original material.

I studied with Anki in school, but since then I’ve failed to stick to spaced repetition. I really like Michael Nielsen’s ideas on using spaced repetition for deeply understanding concepts instead of just memorizing facts. For me, it feels like my creativity is bound by what is has been on my mind recently. If I could intentionally keep powerful ideas top of mind for as long as I want, maybe I can augment my creative process in interesting ways that don’t take away from spontaneity.

In an abstract way, I immediately liked Michael’s idea of using spaced repetition for understanding deep concepts. Recently, I’ve been using a service called Readwise which collects my Highly, Kindle, and iBook highlights and sends me a few quotes every morning via email. Reading my highlights each day made me appreciate the idea of refreshing abstract concepts as opposed to memorizing facts.

Now that I’ve had the pleasure of easily revisiting past ideas with Readwise, I feel like I understand what Devon was talking about with her note taking and why Omar built Screenotate.

Twitter can be a great intellectual resource if you use it right. I think Michael Nielsen’s Twitter thread puts it best. Twitter is great for getting exposure to ideas you weren’t familiar with, but maybe following people with similar interests also acts as a natural spaced repetition for ideas you’re familiar with but haven’t brushed up on recently.

At the end of the day, maybe learning is about finding abstractions and models for the world that are valuable and worth building into our day-to-day perception and reasoning. Fully compressing these abstractions usually makes it hard to truly digest them on their own. They end up sounding like:

• Truisms (“Make something people want”)
• Unjustified extremes (“Mainstream news is non-coercive propaganda that manufactures consent”)
• Cryptic statements divorced from context (“Models of reality are not reality”)

If you weren’t familiar with these ideas before and the compressions seem useful, I think they probably won’t stick for long without examples.

Reading a book centered around a core idea and backed with dozens of examples might be similar to preparing for an exam by studying for 6+ hours the day before. Casual spaced repetition would make the knowledge last longer and might produce deeper understanding.

By itself, it looks like highlighting while reading doesn’t help much. Everyone I talk to agrees that reading isn’t about literally remembering what you read. A little automation seems like it might tie these two ideas together and change the equation. Devon’s unnatural discipline, Omar’s screenshot organization, and Readwise’s highlight aggregation seem like they’re foreshadowing a high impact learning innovation that might come in the next few years.

The invention of writing, the printing press, and the internet all dramatically changed how human brains were optimized around preserving, consuming, and retaining information. It seems like there is something to this spaced repetition stuff, maybe it could have a similar effect for creativity and reasoning.

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