Michael Nielsen, a physicist and writer, publishes notes on memory systems, existential risk from AI, and science and technology.
HN commenters call his writing on Anki and memory systems incisive and paradigm-shifting, and cite his notes on the Vulnerable World Hypothesis and Discovery Fiction.
Pleased to see this posted here again. Nielsen's writing on Anki and memory systems more broadly has been nothing short of incisive, inspiring and paradigm-shifting in contributing to the ongoing "hermeneutic turn" within the community. Whilst this is not as evident as with his later essays, ATLM lays the foundations for some of the most important points for beginners of using the tool: a focus on coherence, disambiguation, and crystallisation as virtues of an Ankification practice; and above all shifting the conversation from it as a miserable prosthetic to memorise arbitrary associations to a genuinely beautiful tool that you can use to shape and change what you know, are and do.
The former interpretation's popularisation does unfortunately seem to be the outcome of it being embedded within the epistemic ecologies of language learning and medical school, two situations where Anki is almost inevitable if one is to succeed, but also where its unique power of meaning making is most neglected. As he writes in "Building a better memory system" [1], targeting the audience of the creative expert seems to be where the most tractability in expanding and improving a mnemonic practice lies. I hope such progress continues in the vein of current open-source and community-oriented advancements such as FSRS - the best feature of which is making switching from SuperMemo all the more obvious ;)
[1] https://michaelnotebook.com/bbms/index.html
I think you make a great point about adding even further abstraction. I was inspired by Michael Nielsen's idea of "Discovery Fiction"[0], and porting the Sussman library gave me the idea that building the abstraction layers required to to do the physics in "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" would make for a great narrative backbone.
I DID start the newsletter thinking I would read Road to Reality and get a community going around the book, and I still want to do that! What happened there was when I tried to talk about the book to anyone that wasn't already dialed on the math I was learning (close family, my wife, software engineer friends) I found that I couldn't communicate what I thought was so beautiful about the book and Penrose's development.
I wanted interactive visualizations that could run in the browser to function as little set pieces, so I could set them down and say
- look, this is what I mean!, and
- Here, you take the controls, let's play!
TRTR will come in, mixed in, I hope, with executable Feynman Lectures etc...
Hopefully that helps fill in some context that I left out!
[0]https://michaelnotebook.com/df/index.html
Did you have a better path forward?
I point to Michael Nielsen's commentary on Vulnerable World Hypothesis [1] again:
>do you think inexpensive, easy-to-follow recipes for building catastrophic technologies will one day be found, given sufficient understanding of science and technology?
With every increase in technology and science, the probability increases, and as a result, society will necessitate ever more surveillance. The reason provably beneficial surveillance is important to discuss is that we need a careful middle path between totalitarianism and outright catastrophe. It is the opposite of "sleeping our way" into technofascism.
1. https://michaelnotebook.com/vwh/index.html