I do believe that FORGETFULNESS is the obvious natural ABSORBING BARRIER

It’s just that for absolute majority of people the primary hindrances, even before memory, is simply:

-not doing enough (doing in general, and doing new things, iterating)

-blindness: some inborn (biases), most learned (einstellung effect, ego, sunk cost, it’s a looooong fucking list)

But it’s self-evident that LEARNING BETTER is a function of FORGETTING LESS and REMEMBERING MORE.

Thus FORGETFULNESS is the obvious bottleneck .

And if LEARNING is a component of given endeavour — then if retention is failing then LEARNING is failing — and now learning is the bottleneck of the success of the endeavour.

I think learning is horribly underrated in our society: I mean ALL learning: reading a TON, learning a TON, knowing a little about everything and a lot about something, knowing not so little about everything and a lot about many things….

I think it’s underrated because of this dichotomy of the bookish academic that DOES nothing — and then entrepreneurial no-nonsense DOER,

This dichotomy is misleading because:

-most people do way too little

get a job, maybe change it once or twice, start a family, get a house — and that’s all the tinkering and improving that they do throughout their entire lives

-and even more people LEARN way too little

And then of course, the bookish academics DO too little in the real world and in their real life — and the no-nonsense DOERS learn too little.

You want to LEARN MORE AND DO MORE, in direct proportion

So I think both doing and learning are underrated: though ultimately learning is perhaps even more underrated,

And it’s because ultimately we tend to be forced to DO SOMETHING in life, sometimes — but LEARNING is something most of us more or less give up on after school

And I do mean “give up”,

Since you escaped the mental health facility of involuntary education — you likely had no strategy about your learning,

Obviously you learned, if life forced you to. Just like you DID things — when life forced you to, and sometimes even out of your own volition,

But you weren’t strategic about it, you were stupid about it,

So learning is fucking underrated

And then — having EXCELLENT memory is horribly underrated,

It’s because of what I said: you neither do nor learn. If you were to either start doing or start learning — DOING would yield you far better outcomes,

You start DOING things, vigorously pursuing things and trying things and bettering yourself and bettering the world around you — you get tremendous outcomes,

The next logical step will be to start learning a lot ,

and the next logical step will be to have an EXCELLENT fucking memory,

but before you realize it you would have to have been deep into this business of bettering yourself and your life and your work,

Therefore EXCELLENT MEMORY, NON-FORGETFULNESS, is horribly underrated

I said that to appreciate it you would already have to be both a DOER and a LEARNER,

but to benefit from EXTRAORDINARY MEMORY — there is almost no precondition,

-if you’re a bookish academic loafer — at least you remember more nonsense theories

-if you’re a doer — you’re just more effective, with more RAM (more operating memory to aid general effectiveness: just like a computer)

-if you’re neither a doer nor learner — you still benefit from at least not being more stupid. Your forgetfulness is still an obvious hindrance in your life: from forgetting where you put your keys, through someone’s birthday, through all the things you were to do, through basic lessons that you fail to learn,

-see there’s no guarantee that excellent memory will save you: but via negativa it’s CERTAIN that having no memory would ruin your performance in ANY endevour. It would literally kill you.

Therefore I postulate that you should really really fix your memory,

No matter who you are

You should fix your memory no matter who you are.

IF you do nothing — still fix your memory — just for the sake of not being so fucking stupid and slow.

If you’re learning a lot than obviously it would be nice to retain a lot,

And if you’re doing a lot than start learning a lot — and then actually retaining a lot — to be able to use this knowledge a lot.

It WILL be an absorbing barrier eventually,

Man REALLY forget a lot.

Man REALLY fail to learn from their mistakes.

Can you imagine how much you would have known by now — if you actually RETAINED everything that you saw and heard and once learned?

If you’re doing nothing then you don’t need this knowledge. But the more you do — the more knowledge you need. AGAIN: it becomes the MAIN absorbing barrier, the MAIN reason you STAGNATE

And we all don’t even realize it,

We realize it when we’re old and don’t even remember our nephews name. This is pathetic and should not happen. How can you voluntarily let yourself be so stupid? And if you can’t remember someone’s name — how do you remember all your fleeting ideas, subtle epiphanies, complexities of your trade… ?

Look at chess grandmasters. They look like geniuses, seeing the right move instantly. You could spend a year thinking about a chess position and a chess move — and the move you’d select would be worse than the move the grandmasters selects instantly,

They look like geniuses but the truth is that they merely memorised their game. When they move — all the grandmasters before them move.

The point is that we underestimate CRYSTALLISED INTELLIGENCE,

Surely you’ve seen a moron be 10 times more intelligent at something than you are,

Likewise you’ve seen a very intelligent person be slow and stupid when learning a new thing,

Intelligence is complicated and we understand little of it’s working. We are fascinated by stupid labels and freak shows: so we talk about IQ, about geniuses of the history, about Einsteins hairstyle, about the greatest of all time chess player, about child prodigies and what-not,

Intelligence is million times more complicated: and you learn the most about it by being intelligent yourself. By successfully getting more and more of your desired outcomes — and penetrating the reality in the process.

Then you perhaps learn that “crystallised intelligence” is not THE intelligence — but it is practical part of it, or perhaps it’s manifestation.

What this effectively means is that some subjects just have to be understood deeply, near instinctively — before you can proceed,

To even start thinking about chess strategy — you must at least know the moves and rules inside-out.

MANY things are like that. To proceed – you need some foundation,

And the higher the level — the more you have to know inside-out,

And the more there is to be learned — the harder it gets. Not merely because of volume — but because the specific details less often appear than the general rules and truths. Therefore they are less often reinforced in one’s memory,

Therefore the quality of your memory will eventually decide how good you will become at something.

You can obviously be strategic about things and that’s what men do: they break down the problem, and focus on the components in isolation — until they are sure that they retain it’s specifics.

But this requires you to play two games: the main game of learning, and the meta game of planning your learning.

It would be easier to just fucking remember.

Everyone should work on their memory,

It’s like am muscle and you should work it out.

And once you’ve started working out — you develop interest in optimising your methods.

This is when you discover mnemotechniques.

I really don’t see ANY reason to not learn mnemotechniques. Not a single one. I think it’s some of the most obvious life hacks in history.

It’s a low investment which then compounds throughout your lifetime, turning you from literal average Joe, an intellectual mediocrity — to a little bit of an erudite, literally. This is what happens when you only DON’T FORGET literally everything you ever learn.

It’s nothing new that we can be extraordinarily collectively stupid: and not learning mnemotechniques is one such obvious stupidity,

(Other being, among others: not investing, being fat or unhealthy, not building a network, not knowing the basics of well-being, not reading and learning (like an illiterate), and of course not avoiding the multitude of modern insidious modern vices)

You should literally start yesterday, even if you’re a fool. There are few better investments than your own brain and memory.

Yes, brain and memory,

I believe memory makes you smarter,

Poor memory would be an obvious bottleneck in a computer. Low RAM, low available disk storage — would bottleneck any amazing CPU. Doesn’t matter how fast you think — if there’s nothing to think about, because you REMEMBER nothing — then you have NO DATA to process.

Remove ANY of those components from the computer: and it just doesn’t work.

Neither would you. Without memory — your brain is useless.

This is an extreme example but it bolsters my argument about memory being the bottleneck,

IF you learn nothing, or remember nothing — you’re stupid — regardless of how “intelligent” you are, how fast your CPU is.

Ironically CPU is LESS of a bottleneck than memory. Storage device is as good at storing on either fast CPU or slow CPU. It’s just that some of the things it stores may be useless if the CPU is not up to par,

Same goes for RAM. You can be slow to observe patterns and analogies (cpu/intelligence) — but if you can hold the bigger picture in your working memory (RAM) — you will sooner solve the problem than the one with fast CPU (quick intelligence) but low RAM (working memory).

Finally, good software optimises how data is processed. This is no different to how mnemonist organises data in order to recall it million times faster and retain million times more of it.

In general organising knowledge OPTIMISES it. Good understanding is function of drawing multiple useful connections and patterns in the data.

Case closed: improving your memory DRASTICALLY increases your intelligence. Try it

Case closed: memory is the bottleneck.

-DO MORE

-then LEARN more

-then LEARN BETTER, RETAIN MORE

-therefore LEARN TO LEARN,

-AND learn mnemotechniques