Numinous Productions

In a more recent article Michael Nielsen and his co-author Andy Matuschak have adjusted their thinking somewhat: https://numinous.productions/ttft/

“One of us has previously asserted (Michael Nielsen, Augmenting Long-Term Memory (2018)) that in spaced-repetition memory systems, users need to make their own cards. The reasoning is informal: users often report dissatisfaction and poor results when working with cards made by others. The reason seems to be that making the cards is itself an important act of understanding, and helps with committing material to memory. When users work with cards made by others, they lose those benefits.

Quantum Country violates this principle, since users are not making the cards. This violation was a major concern when we began working on Quantum Country. However, preliminary user feedback suggests it has worked out adequately. A possible explanation is that, as noted above, making good cards is a difficult skill to master, and so what users lose by not making their own cards is made up by using what are likely to be much higher-quality cards than they could have made on their own. In future, it’s worth digging deeper into this issue, both to understand it beyond informal models, and to explore ways of getting the benefits of active card making.”

Michael Nielsen (with Andy Matuschak) also wrote about how Hindu-Arabic numerals enabled more powerful kinds of thinking (compared with Roman numerals.)

https://numinous.productions/ttft/#how-to-invent-hindu-arabic-numerals

> ...the Hindu-Arabic numerals aren’t just an extraordinary piece of design. They’re also an extraordinary mathematical insight. They involve many non-obvious ideas, if all you know is Roman numerals. Perhaps most remarkably, the meaning of a numeral actually changes, depending on its position within a number. Also remarkable, consider that when we add the numbers 72 and 83 we at some point will likely use 2+3=5; similarly, when we add 27 and 38 we will also use 2+3=5, despite the fact that the meaning of 2 and 3 in the second sum is completely different than in the first sum. In modern user interface terms, the numerals have the same affordances, despite their meaning being very different in the two cases. We take this for granted, but this similarity in behavior is a consequence of deep facts about the number system: commutativity, associativity, and distributivity

> Notebooks on the other hand are a god damned abomination.

I completely disagree. Notebooks are an excellent way of doing literate programming, because they go beyond plain text, and integrate richly formatted text, tables, figures, videos with code. This is excellent where the human is following a line of reasoning, and offloading the computation to the computer. The reasoning is explained via the non-code, made concrete via the code cells, and its effects shown via the code cells.

Of course, people can abuse the conveniences of the medium to write really bad code, and follow some really bad practices. But that doesn't mean the medium is bad. In fact, I think if you forced people to stop using notebooks, their productivity would drop by quite a bit. Notebooks are tool for thought [1].

The solution is to teach them better practices, and provide better tools within the notebook interface that will help people write better code.

[1] https://numinous.productions/ttft/

Of course they are. By design the flash cards are small atomic pieces of knowledge that can be answered simply. If the grand overarching concept is a web of interconnecting ideas, then the flashcards are supposed to help you maintain that by making sure you don't forget the small ideas the structure is made of.

It's also by design that some of the questions are, as you say, laughably simple. It's to catch people who aren't properly engaging with the text as early as possible.

Nielsen and Matuschak are sensible to these sorts of critiques. Quantum country is part experiment after all and they've been learning, adjusting, and experimenting with what works best. If you want a bit of context of where they've come from and where they want to go, I recommend this: https://numinous.productions/ttft/

This idea was the foundation for the Quantum Country book [0], which was essentially an experiment in combining reading with spaced repetition learning to let you do just that: understand a topic deeply.

Anyone interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the idea can read about it in the blog post [1] the co-authors wrote. For anyone who objects to the idea that rote-memorisation can aide learning rather than simply let you mechanically repeat facts, you should read the paragraph "How important is memory, anyway?" [2].

[0]: https://quantum.country/ [1]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/ [2]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/#how-important-is-memory

I believe the root of the problem is a misconception of how humans function. The prevalent trends in related fields, from AI/Neuroscience [1] to PKM/TFT [2], are further entrenching this crude rational/willpower-based perspective.

Perhaps the true (meta)rational perspective is to actually understand how to embrace the larger complexity of human experience (including sensibility/creativity/play...). Maybe the real willpower is to stop obsessing over this limited viewpoint (and the fears it produces) all the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain

[2] https://numinous.productions/ttft/