Ideas

thedeadhaji

39489 Posts

March 23 2012 15:21 GMT

Ideals are fragile. But not only are ideas fragile, they are also elusive. Not only are ideas easily quashed, as Jony Ive related to us so eloquently, but ideas are just as easily lost. But they're not lost because of some great conflict, or the burning of some great historical library. They're lost before they even come to be in this world, lost before they can even be be scrawled over a piece of paper.

In many cases, the human mind is the most powerful computer we know of today; yet it is simultaneously one of the most flawed. It's like a supercomputer, but one that will lose half of its old data and 90% of its new data every minute. It's stunning how little remember from day to day, from hour to hour, and even from minute to minute.

At work yesterday, I came up with a topic to write about in my blog, along with two supporting points for my thesis. That's effectively 80% of the work that goes into writing a short blog article. I get home at 9pm, head to my desk to write an outline, and ... fail. I have no idea what I had been so excited to write about, just 6 hours earlier. This kind of accident happens all the time: to me, to you, to everyone around us. Isn't it really quite a shame?

It doesn't have to be this way. No, we unfortunately can't change the way we've been designed; what we can do is help our brain out with our hand.

Just write it down. When an idea pops up into your mind, just write it down. If you're in the car, speak into a recording device. Seemingly everyone and their grandma has a smartphone these days (although I don't, but that's another story), so you already have both a "notebook" and a recorder on you at all times!

I remember a friend telling me that Charlie Cheever (early Facebook employee and founder of Quora) would write down every nuisance he'd encounter in his every day life. He was searching for a startup idea, and wasn't going to let his fickle memory get in the way of it. Ideas for writing, or even just simple realizations in life, are really just the same way.

Without writing, we forget. Not forgetting then, is easy. Just write, right away.

Crossposted from my main blog

Chef

10810 Posts

March 23 2012 15:28 GMT

I write down ideas I think are brilliant at the time and then when I look back at them they seem pretty dumb. I have a pretty good memory so I generally remember the details of even fairly meaningless things like people's faces I saw on the bus years ago. I think many people like to romanticize the idea that they've lost something great.

It's worth it to write down ideas so you don't have to sit thru the tedious process of searching your memory (I use a thesaurus whenever a word is on the tip of my tongue), and sometimes they may even be half decent, but I think of it more as a time saving technique than information saving. I tend to remember meaningful things even if it takes some thinking.

+ Show Spoiler [Nitpicking] +

I think the super computer comparison is a little out of date. They used to say it a lot in the 90s / early 2000s, but it doesn't really work. You say "Look at all the stuff a human mind can do that computers still can't do!" but you can just as easily say "Look at all the stuff a computer can do that the human mind can't." I don't know enough about neurology (or computer science for that matter) to say precisely, but I'm pretty sure they're extremely different processes of calculation. It doesn't have much bearing on what you've said, I just want to say that.

cmen15

United States1519 Posts

March 23 2012 18:47 GMT

Hey deadhaji I totally agree with you on this topic! love your blogs, thxs.

Treehead

999 Posts

March 23 2012 19:00 GMT

Re: Chef's Nitpicking Above

You're missing something very important here. The "look at all the stuff a computer can do that your mind can't" sounds convincing - except for the fact that you could use the same logic to show that Einstein isn't necessarily an impressive person. How? Compare him to an average author - sure the average author can't come up with the theory of relativity, but Einstein isn't any kind of author.

It's the same thing here. Thing about everything your body needs to do to regulate all of the cells in all of the systems in every organism in your body. There is not enough storage space anywhere to store this much data for one human being. So when you're discounting the fact that your mind needs to keep track of all this stuff (something which seems miniscule) you're actually glossing over something damn near miraculous. Sure, you might forget things every now and then, and in the lifestyle of an intellectual that's pretty annoying, and a computer will almost never "forget" things when properly maintained - but the computer doesn't have to deal with being an organism, doesn't have to deal with intelligence, doesn't have to deal with vastly complicated systems of organic matter that the best combinations we have of computer brains and human brains haven't been able to completely deconstruct yet.

In short, sure computers are a great thing and shore up a weakness of the brain. But never forget who is capable of designing who - that relationship only goes one way, and at present we have no reason to think (given the above storage space argument) that it will ever go the other way.

Edit: I stated this poorly. Just look at this link.
http://mradomski.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/human-brain-capacity-in-terabytes/

thedeadhaji

39489 Posts

March 24 2012 05:37 GMT

>Treehead / Chef,

So we could say that each type of entity is optimized for a different task

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