| Ah, now I realize this post is about how to process information, not just representing and storing it. I once took it upon myself to map as much of my knowledge as I could. (I had heart surgery and wasn't sure I'd live a long time. Turns out I have.) I would collect lists of ideas, and then stare at them until I knew which categories they belonged in, and then split them up into the appropriate category. Long sentences I would compress into shorter ones, often two or three words (and maybe some symbols in an evolving language of punctuation). It's much easier to internalize a concept when it's written in few symbols. I just looked through my Semantic Synchrony knowledge graph for an example. I found "?is thing = ?has logic". That's shorthand for "to wonder if a pattern is an entity is to wonder if it the pattern has a logic". Kind of abstruse, admittedly, but my point is the compressed version was much easier to internalize. To create a knowledge base is to create a big collection of mandalas. Meditating on them is rewarding -- new ideas spring from them. There is a spectrum of cognitive processing states, from empty mind, to feeling an idea form, to having the words for it, to deciding it is worth writing down, to reading things (that you or someone else wrote) earlier deemed important. They are all valid and valuable. Discovering writing was a big deal for humanity, because writing lets you collect a lot of good ideas, and then distill them into a more powerful form. We now have the capacity (with graphs) to process information nonlinearly. This lets us move faster, theoretically processing much more information than linear presentations like books permit. I've written a little about the advantages of nonlinearity here[1]. [1] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-why/blob/master/nonlinear-... |