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Posted by maksimur 9/10/2025

We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds(zettelkasten.de)
385 points | 178 commentspage 5
leslielurker 9/10/2025|
We can remember it for you wholesale specifically
komali2 9/10/2025||
I am either too stupid or too lazy to remember everything. Or my version of ADHD specifically restricts my ability to remember things, or to have sufficient energy to engage daily with the process needed to memorize information (e.g. build and review anki decks).

I gave up on Anki. I abandoned org-roam and switched to trillium with very simple summaries of hand written notes. I don't summarize articles I read, I simply save them to my bookmarks with good tags.

I might be stupider now, I don't know. My mandarin improves at the same pace it did before, when I was doing daily flashcards, according to my mandarin teacher. Except now I don't have the torturous Todo item of "do mandarin flashcards" weighing on me every day, or the huge catch-up if I miss even two days (again, I am stupid - I usually miss 20% of my cards, daily. Often the same cards. I have forgotten the same word over 100 times.)

But, the other day I went to trivia in Cambridge UK, where I was probably the dumbest person in the town and almost certainly in the pub! And everyone was answering very interesting questions with correct answers, about geography, history, science, even the geography of the Americas which as an American should at least have been something I knew better than my British colleagues! Nope. It made me regretful that I grew up in suburban America and didn't get a nice bit of background education like Europeans do, or maybe for me being dumb or having ADHD. It I always admired smart people and I always wanted to count myself amongst them - it's why I brute forced my way into engineering by picking the lowest barrier to entry bit (frontend) and gritting my teeth and smashing pencils through hour after hour of tutorial and project until I finally had a portfolio I could get hired off of. And still almost always, dumbest person in the company (there have been less productive than me, though), and no idea how to change it. I'm wondering again if there's something I can do to be smarter.

I am fascinated by the promise of zettelkasten, spaced repetition, fish oil, whatever, but none of it seems to deliver!

zozbot234 9/10/2025||
People should just stop worrying about their Anki backlog. The truth is, every little bit you do helps, even just one card a day. That "backlog" is just telling you that you are falling short of perfection wrt. keeping the whole content of your deck securely memorized. You'll still be able to recall the bulk of it as long as you keep a reasonable routine.
reddit_clone 9/10/2025||
As a fellow sufferer of same issues, I sympathize.

You are too hard on yourself though.

It is like a running race, when we are required to carry 50 Lb bags on our backs, while others are running freely.

At some point we need to accept and not worry too much!

wtbdbrrr 9/10/2025||
Another one of those things that will separate humans on different levels of consciousness even more.

Enough people simply don't want to train their minds. For a lot of people, IT is just a job. Programmers, consultants, ... CEOs and CTOs, people want money and that's fine. Some just don't want a boss.

Some of these people will replace the training of their minds with other stuff, pure experience and laughter. Somewhere else all the time. Other will only train specific parts of their minds, actively or passively.

The big question is, IMO: what will the young face when they enter school, when they enter university, the job market. Will humanity be able to keep the variety it is currently maintaining or is the reduction one of the first steps towards singularity?

All above is rather obvious but the side effects of outsourcing much of everything systematic and structural to AI will build up. Will people care less or more about law and justice? Or just the same? Privacy? Safety? Morals and ethics?

MITM already create a rift between customers and companies. AI will make this rift bigger.

So it's not just the training of the mind that we can't circumvent, it's the (heartwarming I know) the heart as well. How to care for your creation, product and customer if your are completely alienated from almost everything except the balance sheet? Ah, wait, there are a couple of million people like that already. So we'll just have more of those. But don't they read a lot and cooperate and mentor and fiddle with politics, investments and are life long learners and stuff ... I wonder.

digitalbullshit 9/10/2025||
Reminds me of when I debug why my aquascape (I’m a beginner) keeps having algae outbreak such as GSA and Cyanobacteria.

I have a lot of things correct, CO2, light, photoperiod. LLM told me that I have too much kH and gH and too much phosphate.

Followed the LLM advice, didn’t work. Apparently its an outdated advice. My kH and gH is high (not using RoDi water, just NJ tap water) but not that high such that plants struggle to get CO2, and my level of phosphate doesn’t necessarily what made the algae bloom.

Turns out my nutrition was the culprit. I bottomed out on Nitrogen all the time. But when I told that my Nitrate is 0 the LLM didn’t say a thing and instead “you got everything correct”.

Digital bullshit.

johongo 9/10/2025||
It was a typical attitude among my physicist and mathematician friends that memorizing was for suckers, even though it was often required to reproduce long proofs or derivations. These were people to whom mathematics came naturally; their understanding, memory, curiosity, and experience just compressed that knowledge until it was trivial to memorize. Unfortunately, many walked away with a sense of not needing to know things until they need them, but good luck with that in a systems design interview.
SpaceManNabs 9/10/2025||
you can hoard anything, including knowledge.
weekendvampire 9/10/2025||
See also: https://www.pearlleff.com/in-praise-of-memorization
zach_miller 9/10/2025||
Surprised this is on top. Human beings have been using tools to augment memory since writing. Lots of these tools are faulty but then so too is memory.

If you want to remember everything good luck, but I am not convinced.

fullshark 9/10/2025||
I've reached my limit and I'm going to tap out of reading the blogosphere. It almost exclusively contains half-baked musings and overly reductive conclusions of little value.
micromacrofoot 9/10/2025||
even before writing we used song and story
vxxzy 9/10/2025||
i will now no longer press F3 or / instead i will read.
mars009 9/10/2025|
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