Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Why not search? Why not press a couple of keystrokes? Ctrl-U, ctrl-D, jump up and down by a half page. Because the ape visual system was designed to… You’re loading a lot of information. If every time you have to investigate this table, what’s on this table, you have to press a keystroke, you could develop the skillset that integrates that information but it’s really… There is an effective thing where if you have a sheet of paper like this and I’m looking at it, my eyes will be able to load in the structure of the information, the topics of the information. You just can do it faster, I think. There’s a big cost because it’s an extra monitor, but there is some stuff that’s vertical when vertically positioned. See, code is an iffy one code because code, 25 lines at a time, I think you can do a lot. This is more for like articles and especially with visual information in them or documentation, you can just jump faster. But I’m trying to… As you were speaking so eloquently, I was like wondering, “Am I just like deceiving myself that I need that? Can I just keyboard shortcut-ify everything and just have everything on one monitor?” That’s something I should probably try because I’m a big proponent of just automating everything with the keyboard because you can just move really, really fast, and you don’t have to think. Because I also do creative stuff, whether it’s recording music or video editing. It’s hard… Some of these programs still make it super easy for you. On Windows, with AutoHotkey you can do quite a lot, but still there’s limitations on how much you can do with the keyboard. So, it really is a pain in the to have to use the mouse, but, man, you’re really making me think. Even the text one, the reading one, fundamentally I think I agree with you, that you can see a lot more and you can kind of look up and down, and see those two things. And probably in articles or things like that, if there’s a graph down here that’s really big that take up your whole screen plus text, I could see why that would be very beneficial to zoom out, to be able to have all that information, but for me, I can only look at like a square inch. Really, that’s all my eyes can actually focus on. So, when I’m reading, I’m right here. Then I have to structurally try to pattern match what I think the information looks like. Then I have to start reading it. So, I’m not exactly sure if I actually get any real benefit of having a lot of stuff on screen, as opposed to I can relax my eyes so much I don’t even have to focus. The words are so big. I actually program pretty zoomed in. My text is bigger than this when I program, and so it’s just that it’s so comfortable, I don’t even have to exert any effort to read the code.…

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