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5137 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Write an opinion you think is hated on SN. 2nd lowest rated comment wins. meta
This is so intriguing. I'm trying to think of what truth faster could mean.
Related tangent: I have been obsessed, for several years now, with the question of: how fast can you learn something? This question can be answered in a dumb way and a smart way.
The dumb way is operationalize 'learn' it a really shallow fashion, for instance, being able to translate foreign language vocabulary, trivially, in a flashcard, e.g., they show you "amar" and you say "to love". Now maximize that.
The smart way is to ask: what does it mean to know something? Which is a hell of a question. If we stay in the realm of foreign language learning, it might be: to deploy this word ("amar") usefully, in context. To understand how it is used, which is always a little different across langauges, even for simple things. (In Spanish, for instance, you wouldn't say "te amo" to your mom, even though in English you would say "I love you" to her.)
For a less stupid example, when it comes to extracting maximum value out of something like a book, I read so slowly. Many smart people read 100 books a year, I do a fraction of that, but I write in them, I dwell on them, I connect the ideas to other ideas, I look up articles on salient points. It is glacially slow, but at the end I can say that I possess the book in a way that most don't; I have the book's knowledge deeply integrated with the rest of the things that I understand. It is work to do this! It takes so long. And on the surface I read so much less than my friends. But the product of our having read is quite different.
So, with all that said, I'm trying to think of what truth faster could mean in this context. What kind of truth is it that people seem to want? What can they do, as a result of having appertained those truths? What would the ideal experience be? Is it closer to 100 books, like my friends do, or five books, like I do?
Your are wise.
How fast can we learn something? What an interesting question. Autistic savants show us that the brain can do things like perfectly drawing a city in every detail after a single helicopter ride (like your flash card). Indeed it seems that what the neurotypical brain is doing is "forget as much as possible", and savants are disabled in their ability to forget.
Have you heard / read the philosopher/psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist? His books/lectures/videos on the way our brains work, specifically how our two brain-hemispheres interact with the world. You'd like him. The right hemisphere always keeping context, the left ignoring as much as it can in order to focus. Right hemisphere looks for signs of predators, left hemisphere looks at the prey it can grab. Here's a short clip where he discusses the importance of context.
I hope truth faster means honesty. That's what I want and seek out. Weird people, excluded, horrible, arrogant—if they are honest i want to read and hear them. Hook me up with analog cable to the minds of every idiot and nutcase out there. That'd be fast truth.
Hopefully @k00b can get us more info on that research!
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I love McGilchrist -- I've seen / listened to a number of interviews w/ him and really respect the work he's done. I have yet to read his masterpieces, but they're on my list. (It's such a commitment for me, as mentioned earlier, but I really do want to get to them.)
As part of my obsession with this idea of learning stuff, I've dabbled in some of the accounts that you've described, of savant-like learning. It's been notable to me that of the examples I've come across, the learning in most cases comes with crippling downsides. Borges wrote a famous short story about one such example. A related idea, which you referred to, is the massive process of neural pruning that takes place as babies grow. Forgetting is a crucial part of being in the world. Without a good forgetting algorithm, we are crippled.
Point of all that is that simply "recording" things is a poor analogue for what we usually mean by learning. What we really want, usually, is something more approximated by "synthesis". I think this is consistent with the truth faster examples that @ekzyis and @k00b are giving -- they want, with maximum speed, to integrate the truth with their models of reality. (I think this is what they're asking for, having read the posts.)
I've been noodling on what this would mean in an online-community context, and what it would take to build for it. It would be fun to discuss in some venue.
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