Read Yates the art of memory
How to integrate srs in the extended mind/second brain?
Ratio of ram to harddrive should fall as cost of search decreases
Funes the memorious is an obvious one
See more sci-fi about memory enhancement
Checking how memory changes game theory, like in iterated PDs, vs. how learning/experience changes stuff, would be interesting
Gulliver on the struldbrugs is a good opener
Immortal whose extended her memory and kept only a database in her head to access external memories, she’s all catatonic. Point about extended mind thesis, internalism/externalism, responsibility and aboutness.
https://www.drakethomas.net/blog/memorization
Relevance of Anderson’s work on the forgetting curve and how it matches the actual frequencies of events and topic over time, hence is optimised.
Interested to know what the major bottlenecks of memory are, if it’s simply increasing cache size with data, or if speed limits the amount of levels of cache we can usefully have. Does all memory run on the LRU algorithm?
Also that french word from the vsauce video on how few days are memorable from dictionary of obscure sorrows. The corollary is Walter Murdoch’s essay our prominent citizens about how few people are memorable, and those who are are poets/writers/sometimes statesmen. What are the day/experience equivalents of these people? Experiences which somehow make themselves immortal like poets do. What is the function of remembering and being remembered cf writing for the future generation + scheffer/scheffler - it means you can’t create the taste you write for, you have to write only to your contemporaries maybe. Karnofsky’s Beethoven - Scientific and Artistic Progress
Clearing out my notes app is a concrete and really depressing example of that french word, there are strata of forgotten and abandoned ambitions around the gym, art, helping people, etc.
Recall and reuse of memories, maybe more of them are reused under different names, that would be encouraging. Like the emerson quote about the books made him same as meals.
The wikipedia on Zettelkassen has loads of great references.
All the different forms of search, how do they relate to each other and to memory? E.g. breadth-first vs depth-first search, index/keyword/bottom-up search vs content/topic/top-down search, pure search vs. search ranking (e.g. Google’s page rank algorithm)
My memory is so bad that the books I read aren’t even really data for me, they aren’t accessible by memory. They affect me subconsciously, my temperaments. They twiddle with my hyperparamaters. Notes I take are my data. Published writing is theory.
Galen strawson on non-narrative people
Memory is most likely to be the bottleneck in factual unsystematic domains, like medicine, rather than systematic procedural domains, like maths. That’s why med students use anki and doctors don’t. But how does the procedural stuff really fit in, why not use SRS to learn skills? Doesn’t math academy do just that?
See the Galen strawson essay club post for why having a bad memory is good (according to Montaigne)
Gwerns thing of babies learn the fastest but remember nothing. Case studies of people with perfect memories. In general, ask LLMs for intuition pumps and test cases in the literature (construed broadly) since these are generative Blog Post Editing + Writing Advice