- Question - How do I memorize 111 experiments?
- Context -
- I’m aiming to do 111 experiments by the end of 2024. Why 111? It’s an arbitrary number, getting in the reps for experimentation. Also seems like a fun number! You often see numbers like 24, 10, 100, 256, 8, but 111 you don’t see often.
- From Jan-May 2024, I did an earlier 12 experiments and learned a lot about the flow of an experiment and structuring it in a way where it is novel, but I found the previous structure I used to be a bit repetitive and bloated. In particular I had an internal and external document for every experiment and that was pretty unwieldy, ending up with subpar quality of the external write-up. I’d use GPT-4 with a system prompt to summarize my internal one, which didn’t work super well and sometimes muddied my thoughts. So I am consolidating each experiment to a single write-up and removing like five fields that weren’t very useful during the first 12 experiments.
- Recall of my experiments on the fly is kind of hard. Currently, I need to look back at my Obsidian to recall every one that is relevant to a specific topic. I wish I had a naturally eidetic memory, but unfortunately without intentional scaffolding my memory is like a sieve.
- Answer -
- I’m using a memory technique called Intersecting Category system to memorize all experiments in sequential order so I can recall the experiments accurately. Each experiment is tied to a memorable fiction character, like Aang from ATLA, that represents a number.
- The purpose of this is not to memorize every single detail of an experiment, but to have the scaffolding the remember the sequential order of the experiments to recall on the fly. For example, say I’m thinking about ‘AI browser agents’ for a new project. Without referencing my notes, I’d be able to mentally skim all experiments and recall the five experiments that are relevant to ‘AI browser agents’, and “pre-load” that into my memory. The memories are recalled faster and with reduced loss than without scaffolding. I suspect this improves subsequent creative/logical thought on the topic.
- I’ll do this by having spaced repetition cards for the 0’s place and 1’s place of the category system! And this will allow me to remember all characters from numbers 0-99. As I write my experiments throughout the next days I’ll hang them onto this scaffolding. I’ll append up to 111 at some later point.
- Primarily for personal learning or novel discovery? - personal learning
- What is the delta? - time, ~6x faster
- before: recall requires looking up and reading notes. ~3 min to open device, look at all notes and remember
- after: recall requires a mental check. ~30 sec
**Back of the napkin math for total time spent
- ~1 hr to write this experiment
- ~30 min to long-term memorize 0-99 Intersecting Category system:
- 2 spaced repetition notecards: 1 for 1’s place, 1 for 0’s place Total: 1.5 hrs
(doesn’t account for:
- several hours spent researching memory systems in the past
- ~1 hour spent reorganizing experiment system)
How the Intersecting Category System works
Pulled from a memory forum post:
So for my system I picked a category for sets of numbers: 0-9, 00-09, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39,… But also I picked a category for each digit from 0-9. So each number from 00-99 would belong to not one, but two categories – if you’d show that in a table, they would intersect – thereby giving me a pretty good guide on what character to choose for any particular number. For the sets of numbers the individual categories were all either a show or a movie I liked: - 0-9 Avatar the Last Airbender - 00-09 Atlantis: The Lost Empire - 10-19 Brave (the Disney/Pixar one) - 20-29 Spirited Away - 30-39 Monsters, Inc. - 40-49 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) - 50-59 The Boy and the Beast - 60-69 Alice in Wonderland (2010) - 70-79 Encanto - 80-89 The Owl House - 90-99 Coraline For the category of the digits between 0-9 I chose tropes/archetypes/functions of characters in a story: - 0 Animal - 1 Goofy Character - 2 Side Villian - 3 Strong Character - 4 Helping Character - 5 Doofus Character - 6 Main Villain - 7 Wise Character - 8 Special Power Character (basically a joker for me personally, I could assign any character there which was hard to fit anywhere else, or a character I wanted to be in my system) - 9 Main Protagonist So basically the tens place of a number is connected to a movie/show and the ones places is connected to a funtion of a character in a story. A concrete example:
66
6 in the tens place means Alice in Wonderland
6 in the ones places means Main Villan
the main villan in Alice in Wonderland is the Red Queen
66 = Red Queen
Tag types for each experiment
- Types:
- literature-review
- recreate-paper
- recreate-repo
- try-repo
- try-product
- human-ai-comparison
- proposal-only
- no-code
- code
- true-bit-flip
- Themes: - theorem - distribution - evals - agents - admin - self-states - habit-loops - positive-valence - arousal - knowledge-work - duplicate-self - learn
Tags
- personal mnemonic: toph as a mad scientist ruling over all the fictional universes
- type: #memory
- theme: #self-states #learn
- status: #done - cards created. memorization is ongoing for 2024 as experiments are created