Cognition Café

We are physically unable to remember everything.
Our brains, left to themselves, forget most of what we see. And we do not have control over the few things our brains do remember by default.
Even worse, we do not know what we forgot. It is forgotten, out of our memory and awareness.

There is a process that counters this, and lets us reliably commit things to memory.
Writing things down and reading them regularly.

This is what I call Taking Notes:

Writing things down.
Reading them regularly.

The second part is often neglected, but it is in fact the only one that is necessary. Notes can be written by someone else (or even by an AI!), but reading them can only be done by yourself, and is the part that commits things to memory.

When I speak to someone who does not take notes, I know that they will remember at most like 2 facts and 1 vibe from the conversation.
To get someone who does not take notes to remember something, I must treat them like a child. I must manage their learning schedule and make sure they get the repetitions in.
This makes it very costly to teach them something.

If instead, you write things down and review them, you have an edge over most people I talk to. I will automatically grant you more of my attention.

I am quite extreme about note taking.

Often, when someone asks me for advice about something, I tell them to reflect. When asked what it means, I tell them the following simple process:

Write down your current opinion
Write down why you think that way, and to which extent you think your opinion is correct
Edit your opinion in light of the previous point
Iterate until it stops being productive

To a great extent, this is literally what I mean by reflecting. I do not mean "thinking hard about a topic". I mean writing our beliefs down and editing them.

To rephrase this: I perceive people not taking notes as not reflecting.

People who do not take notes are slow to change their beliefs.
Indeed, by learning only 1-2 facts and 1 vibe from every conversation or 50 pages read, one can only change their beliefs so slowly.
To the extent that people sometimes do change their beliefs faster, I do not feel great about it. It means that a couple of facts and a vibe were enough to persuade them.

To be completely honest, it is hard for me to think of them as having beliefs at all.
Thanks to taking notes for years, I have become acutely aware of how my beliefs can easily change without me noticing when I do not pin them down in writing.

When asked about what I believe, I usually tell people that my beliefs are not worth much, and that they should not rely on them much. I prefer to instead share ideas that would benefit them. If they truly want to know what I think, I can tell them about my best guess. But until I write it down, I do not feel confident in calling this guess a belief. Let alone an endorsed belief.

Sometimes, people ask me what I think they should do.
I always ask them if they have written down their goals and their current best guess for how to achieve them.
Very often, they have not.

In this situation, there is not much I can do, beyond asking them to write it down. I could give them the Word of God, and they would have no way to reliably integrate it into their beliefs.

Software can assist with taking notes.

Unfortunately, I usually just give up and use whatever is available on my work computer.

I started with Windows XP's plain text editor. Since then, I switched between Notepad++, Emacs, HackMD, VsCode, Notion, my own homebrew software, Slack, Todoist, Google Docs, Obsidian, and more.

Lately, I have been developing my own Spaced Repetition Software. More here Spaced Repetition.