blog-post-how-to-we-develop-tools-for-thought
https://numinous.productions/ttft/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152542
"Even if they can follow at first, understanding later ideas requires fluency with all the earlier ideas. It's overwhelming and eventually disheartening." ^fluency-with-ideas
"learning those subjects is about much more than memory. But it would help in addressing one core difficulty: the overwhelming number of new concepts and notation."
"is it possible to 2x what people remember? 10x?"
The writing is a bootstrap to the cognitive media.
In fact, memory systems can be extraordinarily helpful for mastering abstract, conceptual knowledge, the kind of knowledge required to learn subjects such as quantum mechanics and quantum computing. This is achieved in part through many detailed strategies for constructing cards capable of encoding this kind of understanding. But, more importantly, it's possible because of the way the mnemonic medium embeds spaced repetition inside a narrative. That narrative embedding makes it possible for context and understanding to build in ways difficult in other memory systems. ^embedding-in-narrative-helps-for-mastering-abstract-knowledge
sr:: What is the name of the cognitive medium that has a quiz in its name || Quizlet ::rs
The graph takes a little unpacking to explain. By a card's "demonstrated retention" we mean the maximum time between a successful review of that card, and the prior review of that card. A little more concretely, consider repetition number 6, say (on the horizontal axis). At the point, a user has reviewed all 112 questions in the essay 6 times. And the vertical axis shows the total demonstrated retention, summed across all cards, with each blue dot representing a single user who has reached repetition 6.
So, for instance, after 6 repetitions, we see from the graph that most users are up around 6,000 days of demonstrated retention. That means an average of about 6,000 / 112 ~ 54 days per question in the essay. Intuitively, that seems pretty good – if you're anything like us, a couple of months after reading something you have only a hazy memory. By contrast, these users have, at low time cost to themselves (of which more below), achieved nearly two months of demonstrated retention across 112 detailed questions.
Furthermore, you can see the exponential rise in retention with the number of times cards have been reviewed. After the first review, users typically have an average of just over 2 days of demonstrated retention, per cardParticularly careful readers may wonder how this is possible, given that we stated earlier that the first review interval is 5 days. The explanation is that we recently modified the review schedule so the first review is after 5 days. For most of Quantum Country's history the review schedule was more conservative, and this is the reason for the difference.. But by the sixth review that rises to an average of 54 days of demonstrated retention. That typically takes about 95 minutes of total review time to achieve. Given that the essay takes about 4 or so hours to read, this suggests that a less than 50% overhead in time commitment can provide many months or years of retention for almost all the important details in the essay.
However, employing those strategies requires considerable skill. In practice, that skill barrier has meant these strategies are used by no more than a tiny handful of people. ^skill-requires-experts
By contrast, in Quantum Country an expert writes the cards, an expert who is skilled not only in the subject matter of the essay, but also in strategies which can be used to encode abstract, conceptual knowledge. And so Quantum Country provides a much more scalable approach to using memory systems to do abstract, conceptual learning. In some sense, Quantum Country aims to expand the range of subjects users can comprehend at all. In that, it has very different aspirations to all prior memory systems. ^scalable-because-authors-are-skilled
What would it take to achieve virtuoso skill in writing the cards of the mnemonic medium?
Quantum Country violates this principle, since users are not making the cards. This violation was a major concern when we began working on Quantum Country. However, preliminary user feedback suggests it has worked out adequately. A possible explanation is that, as noted above, making good cards is a difficult skill to master, and so what users lose by not making their own cards is made up by using what are likely to be much higher-quality cards than they could have made on their own. ^making-own-cards
How can we ensure users don't just learn surface features of questions? One question in Quantum Country asks: "Who has made progress on using quantum computers to simulate quantum field theory?" with the answer: "John Preskill and his collaborators". This is the only "Who…?" question in the entire essay, and many users quickly learn to recognize it from just the "Who…?" pattern, and parrot the answer without engaging deeply with the question. This is a common failure mode in memory systems, and it's deadly to understanding. One response, which we plan to trial soon, is to present the question in multiple different-but-equivalent forms. So the user first sees the question as "Who has made progress [etc]?"; but then the second time the question is presented as a fill-in-the-blanks: "___ and his collaborators have made progress on using quantum computers to simulate quantum field theory." And so on, multiple different forms of the question, designed so the user must always engage deeply with the meaning of the question, not its superficial appearance. Ultimately, we'd like to develop a library of techniques for identifying when this learning-the-surface-feature pattern is occurring, and for remedying it. ^different-but-equivalent
Indeed, there could be a whole series of followup questions, all designed to help better encode the answer to the initial question in memory.
stories vv To do so would likely violate the principle of atomicity, since good stories are rarely atomic (though this particular example comes close). Nonetheless, the benefits of such stories seem well worth violating atomicity, if they can be encoded in the cards effectively. ^atomicity
In fact, there are ideas about memory very different from spaced repetition, but of comparable power. One such idea is elaborative encoding. Roughly speaking, this is the idea that the richer the associations we have to a concept, the better we will remember it. As a consequence, we can improve our memory by enriching that network of associations. ^elaborative-encoding
Paivio and others investigated the picture superiority effect, demonstrating that pictures and words together are often recalled substantially better than words alone ^picture-superiority-effect
One user of Quantum Country told us that she found the experience of reading unexpectedly relaxing, because she "no longer had to worry" about whether she would remember the content. She simply trusted that the medium itself would ensure that she did. And she reported that she was instead able to spend more of her time on conceptual issues.
It's embedded in a larger context: things like creative problem-solving, problem-finding, and all the many ways there are of taking action in the world ^problem-finding
We described Norvig's essay as an "interactive essay". It's useful to have a more specific term, to distinguish it from other interactive forms, like the mnemonic medium. In this essay, we'll use the term "executable book" ^executable-book
Many people have asked why we wrote our first mnemonic essay about quantum computing. If we'd chosen an easier subject we could have attracted a much larger audience.
In serious mediums, there's a notion of canonical media. By this, we mean instances of the medium that expand its range, and set a new standard widely known amongst creators in that medium.
Memory systems make memory into a choice, rather than an event left up to chance: This changes the relationship to what we're learning, reduces worry, and frees up attention to focus on other kinds of learning, including conceptual, problem-solving, and creative.
Memory systems can be used to build genuine conceptual understanding, not just learn facts: In Quantum Country we achieve this in part through the aspiration to virtuoso card writing, and in part through a narrative embedding of spaced repetition that gradually builds context and understanding.