Things that are not written down keep nagging at attention, which is useful for understanding them better. Also forces developing greater fluency to be able to work with them without looking anything up. So I intentionally avoid writing down important/confusing/complicated things, giving them some time to do more work first.
It’s different for instrumentally useful or routine calculations, where either training data is plentiful, you don’t care about improving capabilities of doing the calculations, or quickly getting a result is more important.
To elaborate in response to some reacts: There is a noticeable effect where writing something down eases the mind, so that you no longer try as hard to retain awareness of it. This is less important when you can formulate a task/problem/question and then slot answering it into your workflow. But with confusing things where even formulating the issue is an unsolved problem, it’s important to retain the context that only exists in the mind at that point and is hard to recreate from a poor description. Writing something about it down causes losing traction on it, so it’s useful to hold off for a bit, perhaps until the next day.
I guess the react I actually wanted was “this doesn’t seem true for me, and seems to be making a kinda strong claim?”. “Disagree” felt a bit strong/weird in this context, since I don’t doubt that this is true for you. Maybe I want an “overstated” react. (I could have written that as a reply, but one of the things I wanted was to flag the objection to the line for people who just read the opening comment but aren’t necessarily delving into the thread)
Your original sentence might be true in some contexts for me, but in the scenarios I have in mind, I don’t usefully boot up the confusing thing into my attention to process or anything, it just slips away completely. And for a dense post, where typically each paragraph is somewhat hard to parse or I have a lot of interesting thoughts about, having some kind of working memory augmentation is really important. Little flags about where I’m confused or what my brain was doing in a specific spot helps give me some handholds to recover my attention after I get stuck for awhile.
Things that are not written down keep nagging at attention, which is useful for understanding them better. Also forces developing greater fluency to be able to work with them without looking anything up. So I intentionally avoid writing down important/confusing/complicated things, giving them some time to do more work first.
It’s different for instrumentally useful or routine calculations, where either training data is plentiful, you don’t care about improving capabilities of doing the calculations, or quickly getting a result is more important.
To elaborate in response to some reacts: There is a noticeable effect where writing something down eases the mind, so that you no longer try as hard to retain awareness of it. This is less important when you can formulate a task/problem/question and then slot answering it into your workflow. But with confusing things where even formulating the issue is an unsolved problem, it’s important to retain the context that only exists in the mind at that point and is hard to recreate from a poor description. Writing something about it down causes losing traction on it, so it’s useful to hold off for a bit, perhaps until the next day.
I guess the react I actually wanted was “this doesn’t seem true for me, and seems to be making a kinda strong claim?”. “Disagree” felt a bit strong/weird in this context, since I don’t doubt that this is true for you. Maybe I want an “overstated” react. (I could have written that as a reply, but one of the things I wanted was to flag the objection to the line for people who just read the opening comment but aren’t necessarily delving into the thread)
Your original sentence might be true in some contexts for me, but in the scenarios I have in mind, I don’t usefully boot up the confusing thing into my attention to process or anything, it just slips away completely. And for a dense post, where typically each paragraph is somewhat hard to parse or I have a lot of interesting thoughts about, having some kind of working memory augmentation is really important. Little flags about where I’m confused or what my brain was doing in a specific spot helps give me some handholds to recover my attention after I get stuck for awhile.