4 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2022
    1. Krapp argues that, despite its ‘respectablelineage’, the card index generally ‘figures only as an anonymous,furtive factor in text generation, acknowledged – all the way into thetwentieth century – merely as a memory crutch’ (361).2 A keyreason for this is due to the fact that the ‘enlightened scholar isexpected to produce innovative thought’ (361); knowledgeproduction, and any prostheses involved in it, ‘became and remaineda private matter’ (361).

      'Memory crutch' implies a physical human failing that needs assistance rather than a phrase like aide-mémoire that doesn't draw that same attention.

  2. Mar 2022
    1. Future tools will provide standard ized learning streams to help novices perform basic tasks and scaffolding that wraps the tool with guidance as users acquire expertise. Experts will be able to record their insights for others and make macros to speed common tasks by novices.

      We've been promised this for ages, but where is it? Shouldn't it be here by now if it were deliverable or actualizable?

      What are the problems in solving this?

      How might one automate the Markov monkey?

    1. The use of gesture supplies a temporary scaffold that supports theseundergraduates’ still wobbly understanding of the subject as they fix theirknowledge more firmly in place.

      Gesturing supplies a visual scaffolding which allows one to affix their budding understanding of new concepts into a more permanent structure.

    1. “Noteson paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporaryphysics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make itpossible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbookof neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions inthis book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internalprocesses are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinelyconcerned with what enables human beings to perform the

      spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.)

      Does Neil Levy go into anything on orality with respect to this topic? Check: Levy, Neil. 2011. “Neuroethics and the Extended Mind.” In Judy Illes and B. J. Sahakian (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, 285–94, Oxford University Press

      Link this to P.M. Forni's question about how I think about mathematics and my answer relating to scaffolding or the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

      Link this to the 9/8 zettel quote from Luhmann about writing being thinking.

      Compare the ideas of visual thinking (visualizations) and a visualization of one's thinking being instantiated in writing along with the Feynman quote about the writing being the thinking. What ways are they similar or different? Is there a gradation in which one subsumes the other?

      What does Annie Murphy Paul have to say on this topic in The Extended Mind?