But I think part of what makes it confusing is that the distinction between cached thoughts and cognitive strategies is not as clear-cut as you might think.
Clarifies some vague feelings I had while reading the article. Good work.
You might think of Cached Thoughts (CTs) as organized into a rough hierarchy:
The original post was focused on level-2 CTs of course. Obviously this hierarchy isn't strict and the boundaries are fuzzy, but I do think its meaningful to try to develop level-2 CTs.
Can you clarify what you mean by:
But ideas is the way our culture implements cognitive strategies.
(Sorry for the slow reply!)
I just meant something like this: the article talks about "cognitive strategies" as something mysterious and unspecified, which the cronophone can somehow read off and transmit. But lacking a cronophone, how can we convey strategies? Well, by expressing them as ideas, e.g. "try to work at several levels of abstractions at the same time", or "pick a good system of notation". (At least this is true if you try to improve the thinking patterns of an entire culture -- a single individual can probably get ...
Today's post, Archimedes's Chronophone was originally published on March 23, 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Useless Medical Disclaimers, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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