It’s been a while since we last checked in, but we’ve been chipping away at the PAO.
- 3 Thoughts
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The hardest part of creating and learning my PAO is organizing them in Anki the way I wanted (especially since I did a lot of Yak shaving to find the right images). But really, that took almost as long as creating the entire list, and I’m not done yet.
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I am always amazed at how easily we forget how useful something is until it is needed. “We don’t rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of preparation” etc. I keep thinking about how useless this hobby is, reminding myself that “yeah, but it has its uses and it’s still fun and helps me feel fulfilled” and then suddenly I have to memorize a random number and I realize that memorizing that number is faster than writing it down. As Bryan Caplan says says, convenience is so underrated!
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On the second point, I think what is underestimated in memory art is the joy of being completely independent. Are you sure you will never need to store valuable information about your life or others that you can’t write, type, or otherwise record? That’s where memory comes in! The Art of Memory
At the end of the day, as my username reminds me:
“Nothing [is] your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ”
― George Orwell, 1984