Doug Belshaw captures here some core questions about learning and memory. "In Borges' story Funes the Memorious, the protagonist falls from a horse and acquires a perfect memory... As Borges writes: "To think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details.'" But what Borges calls 'forgetting' others might call 'filtering', and what's interesting to me is that it's the opposite of what most people think of as abstraction, where generalization is a process of inductive inference reaching (ideally) to universal principles and the essences of things. That's where my thinking usually lingers, but Belshaw also takes this in the direction of organizational memory, AI, and dashboard design. "There is a useful distinction to be drawn between legibility and significance: Legibility means that something is capturable as data... Significance means who important that data is in terms of actually mattering." The details are legible. The generalizations are significant. But they're not (contra the universalists) simple. "They're difficult to quantify not because they're 'vague' but because they're complex. It's difficult to put a single number on complexity." A rich post.
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