Just Joshin' #208 (Memory)
Family Photo:
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Friend of the Newsletter Aaron sent me a very nerdy article about ways to use AI. The main point was that the AI models will continue to improve, but they are most useful because of our specific interactions with them. The article proposed a method to capture these AI model interactions so that you could port the interaction context across other models to avoid getting locked in—Anthropic's Fable and ChatGPT's Sol would be conditioned to treat you the same based on your interaction history with all AI models.
Buried in the middle was this line:
Maybe that's where we're heading. Maybe that's going to upset a lot of people who've built their identities around their intelligence.
If so, memories will become more important as AI levels the intelligence playing field. Memories will guide us in choosing where to apply our inherited super-intelligence. That makes me more bullish on the importance of this newsletter project, which is really about preserving memories Calvin and Lawrence aren't quite able to process today.
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My earliest memories are from when I was about 4. I have a handful of elementary school memories. Maybe a few dozen if I think real hard about it. Bryan Caplan recently wrote about having "many hundreds of vivid, detailed memories about my childhood, starting from around the age of 3" paired with committing to memory the release year of a thousand movies from the era, which he uses to cross-reference the chronology of his memories.
My mind doesn't work like that.
I feel my mind slipping some days: I forget people's names, or what we had for dinner last week, or whether it's the day we're supposed to put out the trash. Then the question creeps in: "Would I have remembered that if I were 10 years younger?"
When I wake up groggy after a deep sleep, sometimes it takes me a few seconds to remember my name. Then I have to think hard to sort out which day of the week it is, how to use words, et cetera. Sometimes getting good at words again takes a lot longer.
George Carlin quipped: "When Ronald Reagan got Alzheimer's disease, how could they tell?"
My grandma suffered from dementia. I don't know when it started, but we saw it up close over the last 10 years of her life, especially after my grandpa passed away. It's hard to watch someone who can't recognize their own children. Whose mind creates its own narratives to fill in gaps where memories used to live.
Memory is personal.
Dad Joke:
Core Memories
Source: @thisone0verhere
Highlights:
How Not To Forget
How not to forget what matters by Henrik Karlsson
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You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
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By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.
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The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion.
Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy by Sasha Chapin
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1.6 You know that person who had important ripple effects in your life, based on a brief meeting or a kind gesture they extended to you, which meant nothing to them, but everything to you? Or that interesting stranger whose manner cast a brief spell on you, lingering in your memory disproportionately? That’s you also, you’re that person. Most of your impact on others, you will never fully apprehend or appreciate. Thus, it’s not important to know what you’re doing.
Your Memory is Lying to You 🧠 by Jim O'Shaughnessy
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Our brains are quantum supercomputers that do amazing stuff for us, but it's okay to understand that some of the programs they run are no longer useful. Deleting and replacing our outdated programs with more effective ones can improve our decision-making capabilities.
You can build 80% of your own AI memory by talking to the agent already on your computer by Nate
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Josh Knox
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