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Nornagest comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong
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Pencil and paper is far more reliable than your native memory, and also gives you a way to work on more than seven or so objects at once. Either one would expand your capabilities significantly. Taken together they're huge, at least when you're working with things that natural selection hasn't optimized you for (i.e. yes for abstract math; not so much for facial recognition).
Right - but did anyone not know that?
Facts which seem obvious in retrospect are often less salient than they appear, outside of their native contexts. If I'd been asked to describe humans as computational systems before reading the ancestor, pen and paper probably wouldn't be one of the things I'd have taken into account.