Am I missing something? Why is this quote so popular? Is there something more to it than “you can do harder sums with a pencil and paper than you can in your head”? Or, I guess “writing stuff down is sometimes useful”.
Pencil and paper is far more reliable than your native memory, and also gives you a way to work on more than seven or so objects at once. Either one would expand your capabilities significantly. Taken together they’re huge, at least when you’re working with things that natural selection hasn’t optimized you for (i.e. yes for abstract math; not so much for facial recognition).
Facts which seem obvious in retrospect are often less salient than they appear, outside of their native contexts. If I’d been asked to describe humans as computational systems before reading the ancestor, pen and paper probably wouldn’t be one of the things I’d have taken into account.
Is there something more to it than “you can do harder sums with a pencil and paper than you can in your head”?
Yes.
The paper is about the importance of environmental scaffolding on behavior. One of the topics it touches on is akrasia in college students, and it hypothesizes that this is because they lost their usual scaffolding—the routine of their homes, their parents, etc.
The main point is that models of the human mind need to take into account the extent to which humans rely on external objects for computation. Paper and pencil are an extreme example of this.
The quote itself has further implications. In my opinion, this is the single most important technological development. As far as I’m concerned, the “Singularity” began when humans began using things other than their brains to store and process information. That was the beginning of the intelligence explosion, that was the first time we started doing something qualitatively different.
Everyone realizes that writing stuff down is useful, but since we do it all the time not everyone realizes what a big deal it is.. The important insight is that to write is to make the piece of paper a component of your memory and processing power.
Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009
Am I missing something? Why is this quote so popular? Is there something more to it than “you can do harder sums with a pencil and paper than you can in your head”? Or, I guess “writing stuff down is sometimes useful”.
Pencil and paper is far more reliable than your native memory, and also gives you a way to work on more than seven or so objects at once. Either one would expand your capabilities significantly. Taken together they’re huge, at least when you’re working with things that natural selection hasn’t optimized you for (i.e. yes for abstract math; not so much for facial recognition).
Right—but did anyone not know that?
Facts which seem obvious in retrospect are often less salient than they appear, outside of their native contexts. If I’d been asked to describe humans as computational systems before reading the ancestor, pen and paper probably wouldn’t be one of the things I’d have taken into account.
Yes.
The paper is about the importance of environmental scaffolding on behavior. One of the topics it touches on is akrasia in college students, and it hypothesizes that this is because they lost their usual scaffolding—the routine of their homes, their parents, etc.
The main point is that models of the human mind need to take into account the extent to which humans rely on external objects for computation. Paper and pencil are an extreme example of this.
The quote itself has further implications. In my opinion, this is the single most important technological development. As far as I’m concerned, the “Singularity” began when humans began using things other than their brains to store and process information. That was the beginning of the intelligence explosion, that was the first time we started doing something qualitatively different.
Everyone realizes that writing stuff down is useful, but since we do it all the time not everyone realizes what a big deal it is.. The important insight is that to write is to make the piece of paper a component of your memory and processing power.