Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think there's pedagogical value in forgetting? Some anecdotal or unrelated evidence is in neural networks where sometimes you can improve performance by pruning some of the weights. Obviously, we forget things and we don't remember everything. When we sleep, we lose a lot of our memories. Is it possible that by not getting the details and only getting the gist, that actually helps us better generalize the insights we're getting from text and things like that? What do you think of that way of thinking? Yeah, it could be. Memory is very connected to attention. And we can't attend everything. So one of the roles of memory is to help guide us to the things that are important. Maybe I happen to know that the magnitude and energy of an electron volt, that's something I can draw on because of the memory system stuff, but I also don't want that to be front and center in my mind all the time. I don’t want it to be hyper salient the way that I want some very important design principles to be. So yeah, there's some role there. There's also some theories that the reason we have forgetting is that our environment or ancestral environment was very traumatic. So we would like our episodic memory in particular to maybe not be all that faithful. I actually don't know the status of those theories. Probably why you forget dreams as well, right? Dreams are pretty traumatic. If you thought of them as the same as a real life experience.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.