> Caesar was said to prefer the company of fat men, with the implied causation that happy -> fat.
From WikiQuote [0]: "It is not the well-fed long-haired man I fear, but the pale and the hungry looking."
And from pg's determination essay [1]: "That's why Julius Caesar thought thin men so dangerous. They weren't tempted by the minor perquisites of power."
Well, it's also amusing to me that people want to jump to simulations that generate a large number of examples. In the original 3-door version of it, it's reasonable to exhaustively list all the possible sequences and just tally up the outcomes under each strategy. The simulation is just sampling from this not-that-long list.
I've never tried the PAO system, due to the startup costs of pre-memorizing 100 person-action-objects.
But a simpler alternative which requires less work up front is the Major System (sometimes called the Phonetic system) [0].
The way it works it by assigning each digit a sound-value (or family of sounds). To remember a number, you then convert the digits to the letter-sounds, and fill in vowels that don't have a digit value to create words.
E.g. to remember Boltzmann's constant, I do this:
1.38 x 10^-23
1 has the letter value "t" or "d". So I use the word "tea" ("e" and "a" have no digit value), to remember the digit 1.
The 38 is converted to "m" and "v", which becomes "movie".
23 becomes "n" and "m", or "nemo", the fish from Finding Nemo.
Putting it all together it becomes: Ludvig [1] walking on bolts (= Ludwig Boltzmann), and in his right hand he's holding a old VHS movie on top of which balances a cup of hot tea. In his left hand he holds a frozen (to indicate the negative sign in the exponent) Nemo.
To make it memorable you can make this scene as vivid as possible: Ludvig is a cautious character who sniffles a lot; walking on bolts would hurt and make it difficult to balance the cup of tea on top of the movie; the frozen fish would be cold and slippery in the hand; the tea would smell nice; etc.
Robert Bjork [0] talks a lot about this, in particular in [1], and also in his 1h long lecture "How we learn vs how we think we learn" [2].
It's important to distinguish between "performance" (how well you're doing right now) vs "learning" (how well you do after some time delay).
Compare blocked practice with interleaved practice. Suppose you're practicing calculating the area of different geometric figures of types A, B, C, etc.
Blocked practice means you do problems in the order of: AAAABBBBCCCC, etc.
Interleaved practice means you mix them up: ACCBAABACA, etc.
Blocked practice increases your performance (how well you're doing right now) because problems of the same type cluster together, i.e. you're able to "cache" the right formula and just plug in the numbers. But this doesn't help learning, because you're not practicing recognizing what features of the figure should prompt you to retrieve which formula from memory.
Interleaved practice reduces your performance, because more cognitive effort is required to retrieve the right formula, you might get it wrong, etc. But it improves learning, because you're training yourself to recognize which figure requires which formula.
So "desirable difficulties" can be introduced (of which interleaving is one) to increase learning at the cost of reducing performance.
> The problem with skipping memorization of concepts after having understood something is that two months later, you'll have forgotten those concepts.
The key realization, for me, is that conceptual understanding, intuitions, and key insights are themselves just pieces of information that can be memorized.
E.g.: Q: How to derive Bayes' Theorem? A: Write P(A and B) two different ways.
The ancient Romans and Greeks were known to use the Memory Palace technique, as other commenters here have mentioned. (It's mentioned by Cicero, in Ad Herrenium (of unknown authorship), and St. Augustine, among others.)
This was continued into the middle ages, by e.g. Christian monks, see Mary Carruthers' work [0], and the Rennaisance (e.g. Matteo Ricci), see e.g. Frances Yates.
For non-western uses of the memory arts, I'd recommend Lynne Kelly. She writes about aboriginal Australians' use of songlines, the African Luba people's use of lukasas, etc. (Lynne Kelly has done multiple podcast interviews that make for fascinating listen, as she's both an accomplished practitioner of the memory arts as well the history behind them.)
I'm not blind, but I've tested some of my apps for VoiceOver and it's just utterly unusable with a "reasonable" speed. You have to pretty much set it to your reading speed for it to be useful, and that happens to be significantly faster than most people are comfortable speaking.
I'm reasonably good at listening to sped-up audio, personally, so this wasn't really an issue for me. I was just providing anecdotal reasoning of why TTS users may set their audio speed to something that might sound unreasonable: it takes forever to navigate the interface otherwise.
Same. It really makes you realize what we take for granted as sighted developers. I can't imagine what the learning curve was like for him, as he lost his sight at age 7, long before many of these accessibility technologies existed. [1]
It would be so cool if the Native Americans independently discovered the Method of Loci (or something similar)! If so, I wonder if they also developed the same rules of thumb as the Greeks/Romans, like: space your loci apart, always view your loci from the same angle, store a fixed number of items at each loci, etc.
I'm aware of one interesting example where someone created a memory palace around an object that's not a building (or a route along a street). IIRC a person became blind and wanted to write a book, so s/he stored plot points at different parts of an intricate vase s/he was familiar with. (In medieval Europe, the fingers of the left hand were also used for memory purposes.)
Using a stylized bird gives you readily apparent loci: the beak, the head, each of the three feathers of each wing, etc.
Magnifying the bird and turning it into a path is clever, since your sense of place, amount of fatigue while walking, and on which side the sun hits you, would all help cement the route in your memory.
Memory Palace, as in used for memorization, is covered in Moonwalking with Einstein (a book). It's certainly an interesting way to memorize things, in this case competitions for memorizing a deck of cards.
