Posted by maksimur 9/10/2025
Memory is helpful but brains aren’t hard drives, they aren’t designed to store information perfectly.
Exactly. And those also come with doing the thing, or watching the thing being done, or reading about the thing, or thinking about the thing. You often don't have to actively try to kastle / cram / grok / etc the information to remember it. Just being exposed to it will make you remember some of it. Knowing where to get more accurate info is often a greater skill / benefit than knowing the details yourself. Especially in fields where knowing all the details yourself is almost impossible.
Weak article.
That said AI, Search and the like can be quite useful and helpful.
I predict the same thing will happen with the current AI tools: the bubble will burst, a bunch of folks will lose their shirts, and the world in general will come to a more realistic and sober understanding of what they are good for. We will figure out how to provide the useful parts without massive data centers and it will become natural. (I remember when things a graphics card can do trivially required a supercomputer with supporting staff.)
Insisting that people know exercise physiology to work out is a bit much. That's what trainers and coaches are for. Now drop and give me twenty.
The real problem with LLMs remains that they can't really do the job of thinking yet, because they're wrong too often. They can both hallucinate and get lost. What the AI situation will be in five years, we don't know.
My experience as a bit of geek is it's easy to get caught up in theory and do stuff that doesn't work in practice. Better than either the LLM or theorising is an experienced coach who can look at what you are doing and say don't to that - it's all wrong - do this etc.
People can drive a car, without understanding any of the mechanical and electrical systems of a car. In fact understanding these does essentially nothing for what most people use a car for.
>If you can’t produce a comprehensive answer with confidence and on the whim the second you read the question, you don’t have the sufficient background knowledge.
And then what? Why would this matter at all? You can successfully use a workout schedule without understanding what its strengths and weaknesses are and how they align with your goals.
(That having been said: I've used zettelkasten myself a bit and I'd say it's worth a try. Probably not for everyone but the underlying idea of "building out an artifact to supplement your memory and understanding of what you've seen" is an intriguing approach).
In order to verify, we need knowledge.
If the AI is the last stop ("I asked my LLM and it said that"), it's the wrong way to do it. If the AI is part of the process ("The LLM mentioned this, which made sense, and I confirmed it by [...]"), then it may (or may not) be useful.
In any case, "knowing it" is always more efficient than "having to search for it". So the more you know, the better.
This doesn't sound true and they don't seem to offer any support for the claim.
There's a whole host of emotion-driven cognitive biases, where an effective counter is to reduce the emotional weight of the whole line of action.
Of course, to their credit, it's only by remembering those biases that I could see their error
There is ALWAYS an "emotional/intuitive" response that precedes the rational, conscious thought. There's a ton of research on this (see system 1 vs system 2 thinking etc).
There is no way to stop the emotional "thought" from happening before the "rational thought". What you can do is build a loop that self reflects to understand why that emotion was triggered (sometimes, instead of "this feels bad because it's wrong", it's "this feels bad because it points to an inconvenient truth" or "I am hungry and everything I am reading feels bad")
Just functionally, it seems reasonable that something happened before that bad feeling to trigger it, e.g. "trying to fit this with already known things, and finding it doesn't".
Every website you visit has the payload delivered over the network before any JS is parsed. It has to, there's no other way. Same with intuition followed by rational thought
I guess if you define all rapid cognition as Intuition and all slower conscious cognition as Rational Thought, you're right by definition, but while that might provide a happy feeling, it might not give you any useful insights upon deeper inspection.
For instance, it doesn't support or disprove the "less emotion is bad for thought" idea
If emotions did not weigh on recall, surely there would be no "emotion-driven cognitive biases"