I think it’d be good to flag April Fools posts when it’s not April 1 anymore, no?
Not that I don’t appreciate the intellectual challenge of figuring out that it’s a joke, I’m just concerned about non-LWers misinterpreting it.
meedstrom
Karma: 109
Hmm. About 50% of my note pile can be browsed on https://edstrom.dev/. I have some notes on the method under https://edstrom.dev/zvjjm/slipbox-workflow.
How large did your note pile get before it felt overwhelming?
It’s true that sometimes I see things I wrote that are clearly outdated or mistaken, but that’s sort of fun because I see that I leveled up!
It’s also embarrassing to have published mistakes online, so I’ve learned to make fewer unqualified claims and instead just document the path by which I arrived to my current conclusion. Such documentations are essentially timeless, as johnswentworth explains at How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor.
Still, I’m keeping more and more notes private over time, because of my increasing quality standards. But ignoring the matter of private/public, then I don’t perceive updating as a problem yet, no. I don’t mind having very outdated notes lying around, especially if they’re private anyway. When I rediscover them, they will be effortless to update.
I can understand that, since you keep the handwritings as they are.
Just sharing my own process, but I like the notepad because it’s ephemeral… I scribble what I learn, almost illegibly, and later type it up more nicely in my org-roam knowledge base, driven by sheer motivation to liberate myself from that stack of loose scribblings.
That way I get the upside of writing on paper (you learn better), but skip the downside that they’re hard to look up.
There is much bikeshedding about eyestrain. I’ve seen convincing arguments, especially from older hackers, that a white background is actually less strainful for the eyes. I forgot what the arguments were—will write them down next time—but I don’t think it’s as simple as the amount of light hitting the eye. Currently I’d advise just trusting in personal experience.
And maybe experiment with increasing ambient light rather than reduce light from the screen.
One problem with the Kindle Scribe is that I couldn’t switch from the note-taking application to the book I was reading very quickly. It would take about 5 to 10 seconds in total to press all the menu buttons
Ah, yes! With the reMarkable (another e-reader), I have a trick: I installed an app switcher so I could merely use a gesture to switch between a writing app and reading app.
I quite appreciated having a single slate to read and write on, in environments like the bus and the beach. Anyway, the software was somewhat buggy… and then I lost my stylus pen and then the replacement stylus pen. So now I just use a paper notepad, which I find works nicely.
I have a question. Would a paper notepad have worked for you instead of a second device? What’s better with the device?
Just a thought: I experience discomfort with only being able to sign up via a Google account. I can get over it personally, but we should observe I’m probably not the only one, so there are people out there for whom this is an insurmountable hump that stops them from getting started. I dunno how many in actuality, but there are definitely bubbles where it’s normal not to have used a Google service for years.
Alas, I dunno what alternative sign-up would be quickest and easiest to implement.
What is the goal? Why do you need to do more than what has already been sufficient to create high-trust societies?
I’m no historian, but I cannot fit your exiling/killing theory to any recent society I know of.
I know the most about Sweden, so I’ll discuss that society. Thinking about Sweden made several things obvious:
First, an alternative mechanism with similar effect as exiling/killing: simply making the next generation better, and watching the stats improve over time.
It’s not just a question of good norms or correct education, as if these could develop in any direction independent of the government and system in general. Sweden underwent a transformation over many decades of social democracy (1930-1980), and it seems widely accepted now that crime rates went way down because society provided for every last member. Crime is habit-forming, and if no one ever needs to get into the habit, then you get your high-trust society. In fact, I’ll add the hypothesis that you don’t even need high education nor attempt to directly influence culture.
Even when you build alone. Let’s say you’ll redo the tapestry in one room, with four nice regular walls, but in one corner there’s an ornamental stone pillar. Then you can spend one day doing the four walls, and three days just getting the details right near the pillar.
Regularities save time. Each irregularity is a massive delay.
Although every building is “novel” even today, they’re not “improvements on an existing building”. It’s a new site every time with a new blueprint. So your novelty point should apply, yet skyscrapers build slower now.
I do think the Burj Khalifa is also an outlier, and not representative of typical building speed, at least in the West.
I disagree with this definitively. I can’t read most if not almost all LW posts.
That’s interesting. I find it relaxing to read most LW posts/comments, which tempts me to call them good writers. Perhaps it’s not that they write “well” but that they think similar to me?
Because I know, it’s something that can hold me back, thinking “ohhh it’s so obvious what I’m going to say, it would be pretentious to think I’m provinding any value by saying it”.
Katja Grace explains how she got over that: Typology of blog posts that don’t always add anything clear and insightful
When you study practical rhetoric, you learn to hold speeches without any written memory-aid. Instead, you use something like the method of loci to remember a sequence of concepts that you want to lay out to the audience, but you do not memorize any exact phrasings.
The first time you pull it off is almost magical, because the benefits are immense and obvious. You have full freedom to walk around, stand in front of the lectern or wherever you like, look everyone in the eyes and ascertain whether they’re following along with you, and to change the speech on-the-fly.
Oddly, it’s a lot less stressful this way.
You remember everything you want to say, just not how you’re going to say it. You trust yourself to find suitable words when you get there. So have you “memorized the speech” or not? I think yes, in every way that matters.
I’d like to tie this into illiteracy. The privileged class in Ancient Rome were literate, of course, but several ancient Roman teachers said that it was better to compose the speech without writing any part of it.
That is, if you write a speech and then try to memorize it, it will tend to be in a shape that’s more difficult to memorize!
It’s better to instead generate the sequence of concepts in your head, like an illiterate person! The result tends to be more amenable to memorization.
(The Roman elites of course still wrote during some parts of the process, notably “inventio”, which is not composing the final speech, merely writing lots of lists/mindmaps to explore the subject)
Nice, I note that Foam is open source and uses markdown, the same as https://logseq.com/!
I wonder if the markdown documents are compatible? I know Logseq’s markdown documents are compatible with Obsidian, so some people use both. At least back in ~2021, several commenters (on another website I forgot) found Logseq nicer for quick idea-generation and Obsidian nicer for exploration.
Sleeping on benches in daytime.
I’ve often had the thought that controversial topics may just be unknowable: as soon as a topic becomes controversial, it’s deleted from the public pool of reliable knowledge.
But yes, you could get around it by constructing a clear chain of inferences that’s publicly debuggable. (Ideally a Bayesian network: just input your own priors and see what comes out.)
But that invites a new kind of adversary, because a treasure map to the truth also works in reverse: it’s a treasure map to exactly what facts need to be faked, if you want to fool many smart people. I worry we’d end up back on square one.
I agree, although I sense there’s some disagreement on the meaning of “learning by rote”.
Learning by rote can be tactical move in a larger strategy. In introductory rhetoric, I wasn’t retaining much from the lectures until I sat down to memorize the lists of tropes and figures of speech. After that, every time the lectures mentioned a trope or other, even just in passing, the whole lesson stuck better.
Rote memorization prepares an array of “hooks” for lessons to attach to.
Also Nate’s Replacing Guilt sequence. I’m still reading it, but I predict it’ll be the single most important sequence to me.
I can’t really see where this line of inquiry is going, so I’m not the right person to comment, but the list seems to be missing at least one thing:
Ask people to do you a favor
Oddly that makes people like you more, even though there is nothing obvious traded in return. I got that from either Dale Carnegie or Robert Cialdini.