I can not stand podcasts. Linearity of the medium is intolerable.
Of course, the reason behind my impatience is that most information is either trivia or noise.
The downside of Shereshevsky's flawless memory was that the details often got in the way of understanding. For instance, Shereshevsky had great trouble recognising faces. Most of us store in memory the general features of the faces we remember, and when we see someone we know, we identify the person by matching the face we're looking at to a face in that limited catalog. But Shereshevsky's memory housed a great many versions of every face he had ever seen. To Shereshevsky, each time a face changed its expression or was seen in a different lighting, it was a new face, and he remembered them all. So any given person had not one face but dozens, and when Shereshevsky encountered someone he knew, matching that person's face to the faces stored in his memory meant performing a search of a vast inventory of images to try to find an exact equivalent to what he was seeing.
Shereshevsky has similar problems with language. If you spoke to him, though he could always play back your exact words, he had trouble understanding your point. The comparison with language is apt, because this is another trees-and-forest problem.
Subliminal - Leonard Mlodinow (Page 64)
Language acquisition involves grouping impressions under categories via selective forgetting. In other words, there is a trade off between recognition ability and memorisation capacity.
Conjecture: Late talker toddlers should in general exhibit greater memorisation capacity and less recognition ability as adolescents.
Kelimelere kıyasla imajlara karşı çok daha hızlı duyarsızlaşıyoruz. Mesela cehennem kelimesi herkeste kendine özgü bir korkunçluk yaratabiliyor, fakat herhangi bir görsel cehennem tasviri çok hızlı şekilde etkisini kaybedebiliyor. Hatta sadece bir jenerasyon sonra komik bile bulunabiliyor.
Bu sebepten dolayı dinler görsellikten uzaklaşıp metne ve soyutluğa sığınmışlardır. Dinlerin temeli korkuya dayanır, fakat insanoğlu süreklilik arz eden korkularını normalleştirerek yenebilme özelliğine sahiptir. Tek yenemediği korku dinamik, kendi kendine yarattığı korkulardır. Metin bu korkuları çekip çıkartabilen ve sürekli canlı tutabilen basit ama çok güçlü bir teknolojidir.
Piyango oynayan yakınlarımı matematiksel argümanlarla caydırmayı çok denemişimdir. Hep de başarısız olmuşumdur.
Piyango biletlerinin satışından toplanan paranın sadece yarısı bilet alanlara geri dağıtılıyor. Böyle bir oyun oynanır mı yahu? Tabi ki hayır, ama gel de anlat! Olasılık hesapları, beklenen değer kavramı vs hiç bir işe yaramıyor. Karşı taraf bir türlü ikna olmuyor.
Neyse artık sonunda doğru yaklaşımı buldum. İnsanları kıllandıracak doğru cümle şu: "Bütün biletleri dahi alsan kaybediyorsun."
En efektif eğitim karşı tarafı kıllandırarak temel kavramların yeniden keşfini sağlamaktan geçer.
There is no such thing as an observer independent event. All the major breakthroughs in physics can be attributed to the slow and painful realisation of this fact.
Relational thinking is quiet tricky. (Even Einstein could not match Mach's relational ambitions!) We instinctively believe that we share a single unified reality. This of course is a necessary illusion since each one of us is confined to a single point of view. It is only when we try to switch points of view and insist on a single underlying reality do absurdities start to emerge.
Consider the notions of fairness and justice. These concepts come automatically with relational thinking. One is forced to listen to all sides of a story because there is no such thing as the story. There are only story-observer pairs. In other words, fairness is built into the very ontology of nature.
Perhaps the difficulty of getting our heads around relational thinking has got to do with the difficulty of being fair.
Culture flows from top to bottom, not from bottom to top. Here are some possible explanations:
Culture hardens as it scales. Hence the reason why you do not see values like openness and multiculturalism in larger organisations which need more social glue to hold people together. (Think of Google throwing out the coder James Damore for releasing a conservative manifesto.)
If you are a member of an organisation that you do not culturally belong to, try to limit the information flow as much as possible. That will hopefully decrease the cognitive strain.
Hierarchies select for testosterone heavy traits. In a world where only the high testosterone people can rise to the top, decisions will be testosterone driven. Hence, if you want to make the world a little less aggressive place, you should start by making the internal structure of the decision making entities less hierarchical. But how do you proceed?
In the first iteration of the study, he and the team had started with a totally naive neural network. But they found that if they began with a neural network that had already been trained to recognise some unrelated feature (dogs versus cats, say) it learned faster and better. Perhaps our brains function similarly. Those mind-numbing exercises in high school—factoring polynomials, conjugating verbs, memorising the periodic table—were possibly the opposite: mind-sensitising.
- AI vs. MD (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
I had always suspected that mathematics increases general mental sharpness. Since it is the most rigorous of all academic disciplines, it should also be the most "mind-sensitising" one in Siddhartha's sense. This creates a pragmatic ground for arguing in favor of making abstract mathematics a mandatory part of public education.
Personally speaking, my most challenging intellectual journey involved a deep understanding of category theory. The inhuman level of abstraction caused me headaches. Now, looking back at my experience, I think that pain was literally the pain of adding new layers on top of the already existing layers in my (neocortex) neural networks. I have probably been using those additional abstraction layers ever since, in all areas of my life.
One gets better over time as one masters a subject. Then how come the best artists' best albums are by far their first ones? Here are two possible explanations:
Lesson: The road to mastery should have no audience.
İyi polis kötü polisi oynayabilmek için minimum iki kişi gerekir. Dolayısıyla iki kişilik bir yönetimin tek kişilik bir yönetime karşı müthiş bir avantajı vardır.*
Tüm öğrenme süreçleri hem teşvik hem de tenkit gerektirir. Şımarıklığa yol açmamak için teşviğin tenkitle, ümitsizliğe yol açmamak içinse tenkitin teşvikle dengelenmesi şarttır. Teşvik eden kişinin aynı zamanda tenkit eden kişi olduğu durumlar kafa karışıklığı ve kredibilite kaybı doğurabileceği için iyi polis ve kötü polisin ayrı kişiler olması önemlidir.
Tek öğretmenli sınıflarda öğrenciler, tek ebeveynli ailelerde çocuklar, tek ortaklı şirketlerde çalışanlar komplikasyonlu bir öğrenim sürecinden geçerler.
* Genelde ikiden üçe geçmenin faydası birden ikiye geçmenin faydasından çok daha azdır. Mesela iki dil bilmenin bilişsel gelişime önemli katkıları vardır, fakat üç dil bilmenin çok da ek bir getirisi yoktur. Benzer şekilde, başka bir ülkede yaşamaya başladığınızda, akvaryumdan çıkmış gibi aydınlanır ve kendi kültürünüzü daha iyi tanırsınız. Üçüncü bir kültürel şok aynı etkiyi yaratmaz.
İlgili yazılar: Mystery of Two and Three, Two Opposite Lives
