Through Time

Memory and writing: thinking when a machine remembers and drafts

What to hand to the machine and what to keep: memory, writing, reading and the skills that can fade when you stop using them.

A course for people who already ask a machine to remind, summarize and draft, and do not want to quietly lose the ability to do it themselves. You will see what research shows and which of it did not hold up, and be able to decide what to hand over, when to write first and how to maintain a skill you already have. Acquiring a new skill is the subject of another course in this strand.

So far there is only this table of contents. Lessons appear one at a time, and we promise no dates. Feed of new lessons (Atom)

18 lessons, 4 parts

Part 1 What we hand to the machine

People began moving memory outside their heads long before chatbots, and the question has always been what stays inside.

  1. Socrates against writing

    In Plato’s Phaedrus writing is accused of weakening memory: what in that fear turned out right, and what did not.

    coming soon

  2. What cognitive offloading is

    A shopping list, a calculator and a chatbot all take load off your mind, and the differences between them are the whole point.

    coming soon

  3. The Google effect: what survived

    Part of the famous experiment on memory and web search failed to replicate: what stood up, and what is still open.

    coming soon

  4. When offloading helps

    When writing something down frees your head for the next thing, and why that works only if you trust where you put it.

    coming soon

  5. The illusion that you know it

    Searching the web makes people rate their own knowledge higher, and it is worth asking what a chatbot’s ready answer does to that rating.

    coming soon

Part 2 Writing as thinking

A draft the machine wrote is one you read, not one you thought through, and the difference between those two acts is the point here.

  1. The generation effect

    What you produce yourself is remembered better than what you only read, and that is one of the sturdier findings about memory.

    coming soon

  2. Thinking on paper

    Many writers say they understand a thought only once it is written down: what of that has been tested, and what is personal experience.

    coming soon

  3. Draft first, ask second

    A simple rule for when to write first yourself so the thought stays yours; how to delegate to a model is in the course on working with one.

    coming soon

  4. The draft that thinks for you

    An assistant set to hold an opinion can shift your own views too, so you need to be able to notice when an argument is no longer yours.

    coming soon

Part 3 Notes and reading

Note-taking and long reading can now be delegated, so it matters to understand what exactly gets lost.

  1. By hand or on a keyboard

    The famous experiment in favor of notes by hand, the replication that did not bear it out, and what follows for notes a machine takes.

    coming soon

  2. Notes you come back to

    Luhmann’s card index and the “second brain” industry: what a note system gives you, what it does not, and what a model searching it changes.

    coming soon

  3. A long text on a screen

    Long texts are understood somewhat worse on a screen, especially in a hurry: how to read seriously with everything pulling at you.

    coming soon

  4. What a summary loses

    When a model’s summary is enough, and when you need the text itself, with its line of thought and the places where the author hesitates.

    coming soon

Part 4 Keeping a skill

Aviation and medicine have long lived beside automation, and their experience is worth more than any forecast, though it is not clear-cut either.

  1. The irony of automation

    Lisanne Bainbridge’s point: the better the automation, the less practice a person gets, and the harder it is to step in when it fails.

    coming soon

  2. What pilots lose and what they keep

    What weakens in pilots beside the autopilot, what holds up, and why aviation itself urges more flying by hand.

    coming soon

  3. Doctors and GPS

    Doctors used to an AI prompt and drivers used to GPS: what has been measured so far, and why the conclusions are still cautious.

    coming soon

  4. A maintenance plan for a skill

    Which abilities you are not willing to lose, how often to work without the machine, and how to test yourself with a task, not a feeling.

    coming soon

  5. A look ahead: the skill nobody kept up

    Jobs where checking the machine is the skill, and the risk for people who never did the work themselves: what to watch in the next few years.

    coming soon