[spicymaki]

I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references.

I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on.

I think the trend today is to prime the brain with content depending on the context. E.g. before giving a talk, an engineering meeting or leading a training session you can use flash cards to warm up the cache and strategically dump what is not important to remember.

Not exactly sure how I feel about that.

[ravenstine]

I've noticed a few ways in which this overload of information manifests.

You've got the people who consume a lot of "information" yet can't make much sense of it, or at least in a way that lines up to shared reality. I'd say this represents the average person. The main coping mechanism for these people is to consume information as entertainment and otherwise not think about what they're taking in. Otherwise, they might subscribe to prefab reality "lenses" that effectively give them the orders they need to make executive decisions in life.

Then you have those who actually can remember lots of trivial knowledge, but can hardly think beyond the level of factoids. In other words, they think that the world can be explained by what's directly in front of them, ignoring the need to distill, synthesize, and extrapolate in order to make predictive models of the world. I know a few intellectuals that insist on this thought process, and their predictions are usually wrong, yet they don't adjust their belief that memorizing a bunch of facts makes them more accurate thinkers. Likewise to the common person, the trivial knowledge archetype sometimes subscribes to existing world views so they can cherry pick knowledge that fits those views, mistakenly believing that their views are original and not assigned to them.

There's also the opposite of the last archetype, which is the overly abstract thinker who can't remember many specific facts at all, so they cope by passively consuming large amounts of "data" and distilling it down into a models of the world that make sense to them. This is the camp that I fall into. It's not that I don't remember anything specific, but individual factoids must be of significant interest for me to commit them to concrete memory. Even if my models of reality don't line up on a factual basis, the more important thing to me is whether I get results. The problem with people like I am is that we can think in terms of big picture but sometimes fail when thinking in a micro-scale actually counts for something. This becomes even worse when there is too much information to consume, because any bit of compelling data causes the distilled reality models to expand in ways that might not be justified.

[whatshisface]

>Even if my models of reality don't line up on a factual basis, the more important thing to me is whether I get results.

Without specific memories, how can you tell whether or not you have been getting results? :)

[ravenstine]

It's up to you. :) If you're getting what you want out of life, or if your predictions are usually accurate, in spite of having a mental model that isn't technically correct, then that would mean having results that didn't come from excessive rumination or memorizing lots of units of specific information. Similarly, religion can lead a person to perform actions in a way that are of benefit even if the beliefs instilled upon them are factual nonsense. What I'm saying is that a person can do just that but with high level conceptual structures as opposed to either religion or pedantic data hoarding.

When you keep trying to do right, but your world is perpetually on fire, you probably aren't getting good results.

[SstnMbgty]

Interestingly, this can be seen as an extension of the same principle; in a given person's life, there are impossibly many events going on all the time, each of which is providing some benefit, or negative result, and you could if you choose, try to look for specific memories of achievements or failures in order to benchmark your life's progress, falling back onto them and recalling these specific moments.

The obvious problem with such events is that they may not be representative, and so like a gambler remembering the last few wins, you could keep trying to solve a problem.

Conversely, you could try to remember conclusions, and a few simple procedures, while also passively using a diary or data entry system, such that you have a general feel of "how things have been going lately", without any specific examples, and then occasionally rerun your procedure, taking stock of recent events from recorded data, and update your abstract value.

Then there's the hybrid approach; working on a dataset, find a few specific data points that most properly represent the diversity of your current experience, then remember those, the general feeling associated with them, and your procedure for updating them.

That way you use your emotional episodic memory, but tie it to things that are verified by more careful reflective analysis.

[pbowyer]

Hello from another of the last archetype.

It's a blessing and a curse. And one I find very few careers favour.

[allenu]

I also think we consume more information that we need. I think we also tend to overvalue getting that information and retaining it. The HN crowd is biased towards analysis and information, but just look at the abundance of note-taking systems posted.

I used to store as much info as I could somewhere (a personal wiki) but over the years I realized there's just too much there and most of it I never need, and if I do need something, I can look it up again anyway.

I think it's possible to become something of an information pack rat. It's true that for me learning something new feels productive somehow, but if I were to be honest, most of the knowledge I seek out online doesn't really provide me with direct value. The act of seeking it out as well is time that could've been used to do something else.

[asdff]

The fetishism with notetaking is rampant, both on here and online. People make good money writing articles about the latest notetaking app and serving ads. Personally, I've never needed to crack open an old notebook after the relevant project has passed. I have a stack of them from college at my parent's house and they are simply collecting dust. Even if I had everything digital I would never feel the need to go back and sift through them since they are no longer relevant.

The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful than looking at the note again imo.

[dorchadas]

> The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful than looking at the note again imo.

Absolutely this. I'm working on teaching myself abstract math with help from a friend on Discord who has his PhD and is willing to check my proofs and such, and just the act of writing things down helps so much. Especially linear algebra, where I kept losing track of all the summations and what stood for what while I was just reading. Writing down the stuff, and adding my own annotations to the steps explicitly elucidating why a step was possible, did more for me than ever reading back over them did, though I do admit sometimes it helped if it was a fresh concept; but oftentimes, it was just the act of writing that did it for me.

[allenu]

That's how I treat note-taking today. I keep a physical notebook that I jot down ideas and draw diagrams in. It's sort of my canvas for sketching things out and seeing if I understand the problem and solution I'm working on.

Like you, I have a bunch of old notebooks as well that I only ever flip through for nostalgia. I generally only review my notebooks for design notes if the notes are at most 3-6 months old.

[rramadass]

>The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful

Well Put!

[nishparadox]

Ditto.

This reminds me of write-up by Morgan Housel: long-term knowledge vs expiring knowledge[0]. To optimize that trade-off, I generally try to review, on a weekly basis, what I consume from the internet-verse. This has helped me in some ways. Not sure if it's gonna work or not for other people... Plus, moving the scale towards consuming long-forms is also helping me out. (I guess it depends on what type of bubble you are wrapping yourself into. For instance, only visiting specific sub-reddit and LW topics intentionally has been advantageous to me...)...

[0] - https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowle...

[scotthtaylor]

Agree 100% — nicely written up!

[snarfy]

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are dreams I had. When recalling the events in my life, it's not always easy to recall which were dreams and which really happened. It's terrifying.

It's all too much information. I worked on cdrom technology 20 years ago. I don't want to know the sector size is 2532 bytes, but I do.

[leetcrew]

it's weird how dreams and "real" memories can blend that way. last week I was half-awake half-asleep during a rain storm and I felt water dripping on my forehead from the ceiling. it felt quite real, but out of laziness I decided to just deal with it in the morning and go back to sleep. when I woke up, my bed was dry and there was no evidence of a leak anywhere. I'm still not quite sure whether it was real or imagined. I'm assuming it was just a dream, but usually I don't have such vivid physical sensations in dreams.

[SonnyTark]

You just made me realize how confusing it must be for our brain to receive a high density of pointless information projected into it when we binge-watch a TV show through a weekend.

[hindsightbias]

After a week of work I cleanse my brain watching golf. Dont really like it but I sleep better than watching basketball or football.

[YinglingLight]

Reddit, and by extension HN, is by and large trivia porn.

[michannne]

Humans spent thousands of years telling stories orally, we didnt even have a written language for much of our existence, yet our memories have been working pretty well these past few millenia

[ehnto]

There is some research to suggest memories are stickier when tied to locations or other physical things.