gwern comments on Rationality quotes: October 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Morendil 05 October 2010 11:38AM

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Comment author: gwern 29 October 2010 09:08:23PM 0 points [-]

"...It is a severe prescription. And yet now, as I grin broadly and wave to the gawkers, it occurs to me that the cold rationality of his approach may be only a surface feature and that, when linked to genuine rewards, even the chilliest of systems can have a certain visceral appeal.
By projecting the achievement of extreme memory back along the forgetting curve, by provably linking the distant future — when we will know so much — to the few minutes we devote to studying today, Wozniak has found a way to condition his temperament along with his memory. He is making the future noticeable. He is trying not just to learn many things but to warm the process of learning itself with a draft of utopian ecstasy."

--Gary Wolf in Wired, "Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm", of Piotr Woźniak and his SuperMemo program which exploits spaced repetition for efficient memorization/learning