Intelligence Amplification Open Thread

Will_Newsome

A place to discuss potentially promising methods of intelligence amplification in the broad sense of general methods, tools, diets, regimens, or substances that boost cognition (memory, creativity, focus, etc.): anything from SuperMemo to Piracetam to regular exercise to eating lots of animal fat to binaural beats, whether it works or not. Where's the highest expected value? What's easiest to make part of your daily routine? Hopefully discussion here will lead to concise top level posts describing what works for a more self-improvement-savvy Less Wrong.

Lists of potential interventions are great, but even better would be a thorough analysis of a single intervention: costs, benefits, ease, et cetera. This way the comment threads will be more structured and organized. Less Wrong is pretty confused about IA, so even if you're not an expert, a quick analysis or link to a metastudy about e.g. exercise could be very helpful.

Added: Adam Atlas is now hosting an IA wiki: BetterBrains! Bookmark it, add to it, make it awesome.

In the Foucault Reader, Michel Foucault claims his greatest trick is an old one called hypomnemata. The last time I googled on hypomnemata, all the top hits were explicit Foucault references.

The hypomnema or hypomnemata are similar to diaries (or weblogs even), except they are not written one time and maybe never looked at again. They are to be reread and rewritten over and over for the writer's education and work and progress. I have been doing a bunch of this for years and it is only since November of 2008 that I have established a system that I am confident of using daily and feel that the pages will continue to contain useful information for years. Every page is dated and numbered. I now have close to 1900 pages with this dating/numbering scheme. Foucault claims this is a great idea and I don't know about that, but so far I like it just fine. It does keep ideas that I like to think about from sinking too far down the stack through neglect into oblivion.

After five years it is reviewed one last time and then tossed into the dumpster.

I don't know about tossing into the dumpster. It seems that one interested in cryonics could get more mileage out of this by doubling this as part of that really long letter that partially amnesiac you could read after revival or that omega could use to reconstruct a approximation of you. Perhaps locking it away where you can't read it?

3Craig_Heldreth16y

OK a couple more details. My system is not that complicated and very much resembles what I was doing seven or eight years ago, which was close to plain-vanilla journaling. Now I use printer paper, which I line myself with microsoft word in alternating colors: tan-lavender-orange-light green-rose-light blue-gray. There are fifteen pages per color. At any given time I carry with me sixty pages; the fifteen in the active queue and the filled three previous sets. Right now my active pile goes back to the 23 rd of August. The first thing written on every new page is the date and this date's page number in the top right corner. When I fill up the current active set (of fifteen pages), I carefully read the set that will go upside down on the stack of a thousand pages or so on my bedroom floor. Some stuff will get copied onto a new fresh sheet to keep in the current active bin. Other stuff will get circled in red, starred, or otherwise annotated as something I would like to be able to review, or to find fairly fast. I use a lot of cartoon drawings and glyphs and diagrams and graphs. I personally find it easier to find stuff out of hardcopy because keyword searches only work if you can remember the keyword and how to spell most of it. Depending on what I am looking for, I can scan through up to ten or fifteen pages in a minute; also, if it takes me a long time to find something and I have to search through a lot, I always find at least one pleasant surprise by happy happenstance. JenniferRM, I looked at those links and some of it is intriguing. I do not log everything and am not interested in a complete map of every thought I think. What I am after is to refine and rewrite and connect my very best thoughts. This is the sense I read Foucault's discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books. Foucault is generally thought of as intimidating,

2curiousepic16y

I would love to have some sort of browser plugin that would be a combination of this and supermemo, where, before going to bed, it would compile a sort of TL;DR summary of all of the most interesting and relevant articles I read that day, as well as those from a week ago (or whatever the optimal cadence for memory) for me to review and better commit to memory. I attempted a weak version of this the other day by simply reviewing all of the page titles in my browser history, and I think it did help a bit, but the real challenge would be in filtering it down to a short list of the information we most wish to remember, for those of us who find the web too shiny.

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