What do you do to remember and reference the LessWrong posts that were most personally significant to you, in terms of intellectual development or general usefulness?
post by lillybaeum · 2023-12-10T17:52:24.167Z · LW · GW · 1 commentThis is a question post.
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Answers 4 rotatingpaguro 4 Yoav Ravid 4 nim 1 bvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbv None 1 comment
Simple question!
Do you search until you find it? Do you look through a list of bookmarks? Do you keep a page, or even an entire Obsidian vault that references LessWrong articles?
It seems people often effortlessly reference relevant existing LessWrong articles when writing new posts and comments, and this might be a stupid question, but I'm curious, because I have a hard time simply remembering titles of things and I wonder what others do.
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I copy them as PDFs using my browser's "Export as PDF..." menu item, and add the date in the file name. I keep them all in a directory. PDFs have the advantage that I can mark notes on them, search by file content from the file browser, or input them into Claude.
I've started doing this recently after I hit your same problem, I'm liking it so far.
When I really care about remembering, I make Anki flashcards.
↑ comment by lillybaeum · 2023-12-10T23:43:03.791Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's really interesting to hear that people go this far in this regard. I had thought maybe I was overthinking it, but it seems like some people like yourself find a lot of value in cataloguing these things beyond just bookmarking them on the site or vaguely remembering the concepts and searching when they need them.
It's not the way I do it, but there's a bookmark feature on LW which you can use.
I used to keep them in my own bookmarks before LW had that feature, but now I have an obsidian vault where I keep quotes/links/etc, so some gets saved there. But I'm also fairly good at remembering what I read and where I've read it, so I can usually come back to things even if I didn't save them.
My experience of finding a post significant, in the "expect to want to link others to it in later conversations" sense, is much like the experience of learning a new word. The posts I find memorable not only explore a concept but also name it, and I happen to have the kind of cognition that handles jargon and acronyms well.
When I'm retrieving a post to link to others, I actually search the whole web based on the name I recall for the concept. Sometimes I'll recognize and grab a LW post based on that search, and other times I'll discover that the best concise definition lives elsewhere.
My experience of repeatedly linking a post is that I eventually start associating the winning search term with a concept, when I've searched it before.
For two examples of things I recall wanting to link to others, and how I found them:
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Scissor statements are in the LW vocabulary. When I want to link them, I recall a prior wild goose chase failing to find a good link with "scissor statement" as the search term, so instead I search "shiri's scissor" to get https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/. Turns out the source I wanted wasn't on LW, just LW-adjacent.
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I remember that bug hunting in the lifestyle sense is a term I learned from the LW sequences, so I search the web for "lesswrong sequence bug hunt" to get https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rFjhz5Ks685xHbMXW/hammertime-day-1-bug-hunt [LW · GW], which is what I wanted.
↑ comment by lillybaeum · 2023-12-10T18:32:00.102Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is really interesting and useful.
Particularly, the two things you linked are just interesting on their own, but also although I don't think my brain works in the same way yours does, I appreciate your perspective and how you tend to work with regards to these things. I think that I need something like a reference or a bookmark because these concepts don't stick quite as strongly in my mind without lots of repeated exposure. I tend to be a 'ground-up' learner (if that's even a thing) as opposed to someone who can keep lots of disparate concepts separately in my mind. Jargon and acroynms seem to fall out of my head like a sieve. I've confused the terms 'anosmia' and 'aphasia' for years. I just had to look up 'word for not being able to remember words' in order to remember the word aphasia. Ironic, right? Shiri's Scissor/sort by controversial is an article I already read once in the past, but completely forgot until you linked it, I clicked it, and I read four paragraphs of it.
I use anki flashcard for everything
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comment by johnswentworth · 2023-12-10T19:37:44.061Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What do you do to remember and reference the LessWrong posts that were most personally significant to you...
I write them. Makes it easier to remember.