It’s also why I’ve been spending over a year making a GUI that can encompass as much of my activities on the computer as possible—which is most of my entire life. (The beauty of coding personal tooling is that you get to construct your own slice of reality—which can be trivial or extremely profound depending on your abilities and on whether controlling your slice of reality even matters to begin with—and the digital world is so much more malleable than the physical world.)
Start
Our interface to the world and our minds is basically our memory, which is not a static lookup, it changes as you spend time “remembering” (or reconstructing your memories and ideas, which maybe shouldn’t be seen as “remembering” exactly).
Tools extends the available “surface area” of our interface, meaning our memory, because the tool is still one “item” in your mind but it stores a lot more knowledge (and/or references to knowledge) than if you had to store the unpacked version. When you replace “all programming knowledge known to man” with “skill at Googling”, you pay for storage space with runtime compute.
(And sometimes you actually want to buy runtime compute by spending storage, meaning, you practice with some topic so that you can immediately recall things and actually think about things directly instead of every thought being behind a search query, which would be like 100x slower or something and totally impractical)
Holistic worldview means fewer root nodes
A very holistic worldview basically means you have fewer items of that initial interface, like, anything you wanna think about passes through a smaller number of initial nodes. This probably makes it easier to think about things, and if this worldview actually works and is consistent, you can iterate on it and refine it over years and years, which is much harder if you have like 100 scattered thoughts and ways of thinking, because they won’t be revisited as often.
(I wonder if this is the holy grail of philosophy)
(But ofcourse it only works if it’s not costing you too much “runtime compute”, like, if you have a worldview that is arguably holistic and consistent, but every time you think about some topic you have to spend 5 minutes explaining how exactly it maps to your worldview, and it’s better to just directly think about that topic instead, then it would be worthless.)
Examples
Having a longtime best friend/wife/husband/partner who you always talk to about whatever you’re thinking of, is kind of like having a node that encompasses most of your worldview. So you can iterate on it.
Something like asking “what would Jesus do” is like that too, or any religious figure or role model. (Every time you do this, you actually understand Jesus better—at least your model and other people’s model of him—but you also get better at usefully using this framing to inform your decisions (or your heart), it’s not literally about doing what Jesus would do, I think.)
Maybe any general habit someone has that they consistently use to deal with problems, is like this. A thing which the majority of one’s thoughts pass through. ( <-- wait that’s weird lol )
This post got weird
Somehow I got a different definition than the “interface” idea I started out with.
Maybe the “node that most thoughts pass through” definition makes more sense than interfaces anyway, because we’re talking about a cybernetic-like system, with constant feedback loops and no clear start or end. And the node can be anywhere within the system and have any arbitrary “visit frequency”, like maybe your deep conversation with your best friend or mentor is only once every 2 months.
(I guess the “initial interface” framing is a special case of this more general version)
On our “interfaces” to the world...
Prelude
This is a very exploratory post.
It underlies my thinking in this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wQ3bBgE8LZEmedFWo/root-node-of-my-posts but it’s hard to put into words but I’ll make a first attempt here. I also expressed some of it here, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MCBQ5B5TnDn9edAEa/atillayasar-s-shortform?commentId=YNGb5QNYcXzDPMc5z, in the part about deeper mental models / information bottlenecks.
It’s also why I’ve been spending over a year making a GUI that can encompass as much of my activities on the computer as possible—which is most of my entire life.
(The beauty of coding personal tooling is that you get to construct your own slice of reality—which can be trivial or extremely profound depending on your abilities and on whether controlling your slice of reality even matters to begin with—and the digital world is so much more malleable than the physical world.)
Start
Our interface to the world and our minds is basically our memory, which is not a static lookup, it changes as you spend time “remembering” (or reconstructing your memories and ideas, which maybe shouldn’t be seen as “remembering” exactly).
Tools extends the available “surface area” of our interface, meaning our memory, because the tool is still one “item” in your mind but it stores a lot more knowledge (and/or references to knowledge) than if you had to store the unpacked version.
When you replace “all programming knowledge known to man” with “skill at Googling”, you pay for storage space with runtime compute.
(And sometimes you actually want to buy runtime compute by spending storage, meaning, you practice with some topic so that you can immediately recall things and actually think about things directly instead of every thought being behind a search query, which would be like 100x slower or something and totally impractical)
Holistic worldview means fewer root nodes
A very holistic worldview basically means you have fewer items of that initial interface, like, anything you wanna think about passes through a smaller number of initial nodes. This probably makes it easier to think about things, and if this worldview actually works and is consistent, you can iterate on it and refine it over years and years, which is much harder if you have like 100 scattered thoughts and ways of thinking, because they won’t be revisited as often.
(I wonder if this is the holy grail of philosophy)
(But ofcourse it only works if it’s not costing you too much “runtime compute”, like, if you have a worldview that is arguably holistic and consistent, but every time you think about some topic you have to spend 5 minutes explaining how exactly it maps to your worldview, and it’s better to just directly think about that topic instead, then it would be worthless.)
Examples
Having a longtime best friend/wife/husband/partner who you always talk to about whatever you’re thinking of, is kind of like having a node that encompasses most of your worldview. So you can iterate on it.
Something like asking “what would Jesus do” is like that too, or any religious figure or role model. (Every time you do this, you actually understand Jesus better—at least your model and other people’s model of him—but you also get better at usefully using this framing to inform your decisions (or your heart), it’s not literally about doing what Jesus would do, I think.)
Maybe any general habit someone has that they consistently use to deal with problems, is like this. A thing which the majority of one’s thoughts pass through. ( <-- wait that’s weird lol )
This post got weird
Somehow I got a different definition than the “interface” idea I started out with.
Maybe the “node that most thoughts pass through” definition makes more sense than interfaces anyway, because we’re talking about a cybernetic-like system, with constant feedback loops and no clear start or end. And the node can be anywhere within the system and have any arbitrary “visit frequency”, like maybe your deep conversation with your best friend or mentor is only once every 2 months.
(I guess the “initial interface” framing is a special case of this more general version)
Anyway this is a good time to end it.