[mmargenot]

> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work.

You don't have to remember everything. You have to remember enough entry points and the shape of what follows, trained through experience and going through the process of thinking and writing, to reason your way through meaningful knowledge work.

[rafaquintanilha]

"It is requisite that a man should arrange the things he wishes to remember in a certain order, so that from one he may come to another: for order is a kind of chain for memory" – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Not ironically I found the passage in my Zettelkasten.

[mmargenot]

It's weird to read this from zettelkasten.de, given that the method is precisely about cultivating such a graph of knowledge. "Knowing enough to begin" seems to me to be the express purpose of writing and maintaining a zettelkasten and other such tools.

[skydhash]

I would say they mean being able to recall, not having everything at once. It’s being able to answer the 5 why’s.

[wduquette]

I arrange my code to follow a certain order, so that I can get my head back into a given module quickly. I don't remember everything; there's too much over the weeks, months, and years. But I can remember enough to find what I need to know if I structure it properly. Not unlike, you know, a Zettlekasten.

[kelvinjps10]

Isn't a Zettlekasten, structured so you can easily go back to a note easily?

[wduquette]

Yes. And so's my code, so to speak.

[skybrian]

This is task-specific. Consider having a conversation in a foreign language. You don't have time to use a dictionary, so you must have learned words to be able to use them. Similarly for other live performances like playing music.

When you're writing, you can often take your time. Too little knowledge, though, and it will require a lot of homework.

[kjkjadksj]

There might be words I don’t use or chords I don’t know. It doesn’t matter though because part of expertise is being able to consult a reference and go “of course”, implement it, and keep moving.

[keremk]

Actually this is how LLMs (with reasoning) work as well. There is the pre-training which is analogous to the human brain getting trained by as much information as possible. There is a "yet unknown" threshold of what is enough pre-training and then the models can start reasoning and use tools and the feedback from it to do something that resembles to human thinking and reasoning. So if we don't pre-train our brains with enough information, we will have a weak base model. Again this is of course more of an analogy as we yet don't know how our brains really work but more and more it is looking remarkably aligned with this hypothesis.

[stronglikedan]

I always tell people that I don't remember all the answers, only where to find them.

[mvieira38]

Just to be clear, are you saying that to know something:

1- You may remember only the initial state and the brain does the rest, like with mnemonics

2- You may remember only the initial steps towards a solution, like knowing the assumptions and one or two insights to a mathematical proof?

I'd say a Zettlekasten user would agree with you if you mean 1

[mallowdram]

Of course you have to remember everything. Your brain stores everything, and you then get to add things by forgetting, but that does not mean you erase things. The brain is oscillatory, it works somehow by using ripples that encode everything within differences, just in case you have to remember that obscure action-syntax...a knot, a grip, a pivot that might let you escape death. Get to know the brain, folks.

[chrisweekly]

Interesting take. I respectfully differ. IIRC, Feynman said something akin to my POV:

Brains are for thinking. Documents / PKM systems / tools are for remembering.

IOW: take notes, write things down.

FWIW I have a degree in cognitive psychology (psychobiology, neuroanatomy, human perception) and am an amateur neuroscientist. Somewhat familiar w/ the brain. :)

[mallowdram]

Feynman wasn't a neurobiologist.

I'd read Spontaneous Brain by Northoff (Copernican, irreducible neuroscience) or oscillatory neurobiology Buzsaki.

The brain is lossless.

I would agree that external forms of memory are evolutionarily progressive, that ability to utilize the external forms requires a lossless relationship.

Once we grasp the infinitely inferior external of arbitrariness (symbols words) are correlated through superior, lossless, concatenated internals (action-neural-spatial-syntax), until we can externalize that direct perception, the externals are deeply inferior, lossy forms.

[wduquette]

But taking notes and writing ideas out requires that we think them through...which we usually don't do otherwise. This has been a commonplace of the intellectual life for centuries.

[mallowdram]

Words and thoughts are wholly separate. Notes aren't the direct results of perception, they are more like sportscasters reading the mind of pitchers. Notes point to thoughts or observations, they aren't the thoughts themselves.

“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024

[wduquette]

I did not say that my brain uses linguistic representations internally when I think; I said that the process of turning my ideas into words helps me think.

[barrenko]

Or alternate "pen is mightier that the sword."

[nathan_compton]

"The brain is lossless."

Nothing is lossless.

[mallowdram]

Fourier transforms are lossless. If it entered the oscillations of senses, it's still there in your brain. You may never need it, but every action is detailed by difference.

[nathan_compton]

A Fourier transform is just a change of coordinates. It has nothing to do with the signal per se. If you have a signal which was measured or recorded with finite precision (as any signal must be) then the fourier transform (as a pure mathematical object) simply preserves the same amount of loss that the original signal had. But, in fact, to do that, we would need to do the transform on hardware that could represent real numbers. This hardware does not exist in computers or in your brain, and so a fourier transform is lossy in that case. Still, the idea that your brain encodes all information in oscillations is not accurate - your temporary electrical activity can be substantially disrupted without you losing your memories, suggesting very strongly (to put it mildly) that some of your memories are encoded chemically and physically in changes to the connectivity between neurons that do not depend on persistent electrical activity. That encoding scheme must be lossy.

[8note]

fourier transforms are lossless, but what impleemntation are you refering to that losslessly implements a fourier transform?

to my knowledge practical fourier transforms set a number of sine waves they will calculate for, and a window of time to look at. these limitations result in loss.

but, just taking the brain, at some point the person will die and decompose. how are you gonna get the oscillations back out of the rotted flesh? there has to be some form of loss to the brain

[svnt]

Math is models, not reality

[mrguyorama]

Popsci books tend to be horseshit.

Reading one does not make YOU a neurobiologist.

[mallowdram]

They're not popsci books. I'm a co-lead developer on a project with neurobio consultants, so I better know wtf they're talking about.

[palata]

I don't think that the point of the article was "you are dumb if you don't remember absolutely everything".

The point, I believe, was that the more you remember, the better you can think. As in you should strive to remember stuff, and not just be lazy and rely on LLMs. I agree with that.

[HPsquared]

A bit like the memory palace. One memory leads to another. Not random-access.

[palmfacehn]

You only need the initial seed to restore the full state, provided you can reason your way from there. If you haven't applied yourself to problem solving, then perhaps you might need to memorize the full state.

[mmargenot]

Executing on meaningful knowledge work also might require many different paths, depending on the context and the environment. To me it's more about the method of inquiry and how you begin than it is the specific content. Sure, more individual facts help to guide that inquiry, but at any given moment you're only truly going to be able to recall a subset of those.