The votes on this post make it seem contentious. My best guess is that’s there’s some difference in understanding over what “memory is not about the past, it’s about the future” means by “about”. I take your post to be about the purpose of memory, i.e. what it is useful for. But “about” is ambiguous, also meaning a way of categorizing the contents, thus rendering the nonsense rephrasing of your thesis as “the content of memory isn’t generated from past events, but future ones”.
Then again maybe people are turned off by something else, but just a guess.
I downvoted because it was quite long, and because it felt like it was trying to be persuasive rather than informative. It took me multiple readings to determine that there’s nothing in there for me to update on. Parts seemed obvious, and parts seemed … irrelevant to a model of cognition or decision-making. I’ve removed my downvote because the comment by cogitoprime was fascinating.
Edit: for clarity, I don’t mean to say that long posts are bad, only that they need to be well-structured and either indexed or summarized so readers can identify what parts are relevant to read first, in order to determine what claims or models are being proposed.
The votes on this post make it seem contentious. My best guess is that’s there’s some difference in understanding over what “memory is not about the past, it’s about the future” means by “about”. I take your post to be about the purpose of memory, i.e. what it is useful for. But “about” is ambiguous, also meaning a way of categorizing the contents, thus rendering the nonsense rephrasing of your thesis as “the content of memory isn’t generated from past events, but future ones”.
Then again maybe people are turned off by something else, but just a guess.
I downvoted because it was quite long, and because it felt like it was trying to be persuasive rather than informative. It took me multiple readings to determine that there’s nothing in there for me to update on. Parts seemed obvious, and parts seemed … irrelevant to a model of cognition or decision-making. I’ve removed my downvote because the comment by cogitoprime was fascinating.
Edit: for clarity, I don’t mean to say that long posts are bad, only that they need to be well-structured and either indexed or summarized so readers can identify what parts are relevant to read first, in order to determine what claims or models are being proposed.
Thanks for the feedback, but how can a piece of writing be informative without it being persuasive?