Posts
Comments
Thank you for this update!
Just immersion. I did some Duolingo for myself so I would be able to speak some to her, but the rest was just letting her see films in the language like 2-3 hrs a week for two years. Then we found her friends who spoke the language - let her play with them for like 100 hrs. Now she's pretty fluent, at the level of a native kid a year younger than her or so.
Thanks for sharing this! That's a beautiful anecdote. When I worked as a teacher, I would let the 6-year-olds give me questions and we'd investigate them together; we covered some pretty advanced topics: evolutionary theory, the basics of Newtonian mechanics, electricity, the atomic theory etc. The kids and parents loved it but I ended up on collision course with the some of the other teachers.
Also, I've taught my five year old a second langauge through immersion - which feels like a free lunch. Just show films in the other language, and speak it at home every other day, then get some friends in the language, and voila, you never have to struggle with that. She now does this on her own, trying to learn English this way by restructuring her environment.
Re: Europe. This fits with my understanding of the wealth elite in Sweden. Sweden, surprisingly, has a very high wealth concentration, with a few dynasties controlling a large part of the banking and industry sector. However, most wildly successful individual companies - HM, IKEA, Ericsson, etc - where started by ppl in middle or lower classes. HM founders father owned a store in a small Swedish town. IKEA and Ericsson both grew up poor. Ericsson worked building railways starting age 12.
I like your rigor - I feel too time-contained to be this systematic when I think about how to raise my kids. I would love to know how you would approach that decision - what data you would look at. And if you have kids, or know how you would raise them, I would love to know how you approach it, too. Especially the parts that contradict the patterns I noted in the sample in my essay.
So what I have done is altogether to rough to answer this question. But from my sample (which is basically me writing down about 30 names I can think of as exceptional and then looking at their bio), tutoring seems to have played an important part for at least 70 percent. By which I mean, they got at least an hour a day of formal tutoring from someone skilled at it. I think that is more than average.
Tutoring is not as universal as just having really smart people around to talk to, though. That is nearly universal in my sample, and is surely less common among unsuccessful people.
That is not the same setup. That purposal has a global karma score, ours is personal. The system we evolved EigenKarma from worked like that, and EigenKarma can be used like that if you want to. I don't see why decoupling the scores on your posts from your karma is a particularly big problem. I'm not particularly interested in the sum of upvotes: it is whatever information can be wrangled out of that which is interesting.
I agree. It doesn't really matter the medium you use to curate your milieu. Some used letters. Most did in person. Today the internet will be a crucial tool, especially since it greatly scales the avaliability of good milieus.
Where I live, for example, there are few interesting people around. But I have been able to cultivate a strong network online, and I can give my children access to that - much like how Woolf's father would invite his friends to dinner and talk with and in front of the kids.
Also, since a few people somewhere else in the comments have pointed out that some of the tricks they did seem stupid, for example talking latin - I must say that I find that to be an obviously good idea. Today, it would be English, rather than latin, but making sure that your kids are fluent in the lingua franca greatly increases the number of interesting people they can observe and interact with.
You can use EigenKarma in several ways. If it is important to make clear what a specific community pays attention to, when thing to do is this:
- Have the feed of a forum be what the founder (or moderators) of the forum sees from the point of view of their trust graph.
- This way the moderators get control over who is considered core to the community, and what are the sort of bounderies of the community.
- In this set up the public karma is how valuable a member is to the community as judged by the core members of the community and the people they trust weighted by degree of trust
- This gives a more fluid way of assigning priviliges and roles within the forum, and reduces the risk that a sudden influx will rapidly alter the culture of the forum. We run a sister version of the system that works like this in at least one Discord.
It is an open question to me how correlated user writing good posts (or doing other type of valuable work) and their tendency to signal boost bad things (like stupid memes). My personal experience is that there is a strong correlation between what people consume and what they produce - if I see someone signal boost low quality information, I take that as a sign of unsound epistemic practices, and will generally take care to reduce their visibility. (On Twitter, for example, I would unfollow them.)
There are ways to make EigenKarma more finegrained so you can hand out different types of upvotes, too. Which can be used to decouple things. On the dev discord, we are experimenting with giving upvotes flavors, so you can finetune what it is the thing you upvoted made you trust more about the person (is it their skill as a dev? is it their capacity to do research?). Figuring out the design for this, and if it is to complicated, is an open question right now in my mind.
The first is a point we think a lot about. What is the correlation between what people upvote and what they trust? How does that change when the mechanism changes? And how do you properly signal what it is you trust? And how should that transfer over to other things? Hopefully, the mechanism can be kept simple - but there are ways to tweak it and to introduce more nuance, if that turns out to make it more powerful for users.
On the second point, I'm not sure gaming something like EigenKarma would in most cases be a bad thing. If you want to game the trust graph in such a way that I trust you more - then you have to do things that are trustworthy and valuable, as judged by me or whoever you are trying to game. There is a risk of course that you would try to fool me into trusting you and then exploit me - but I'm not sure EigenKarma significantly increases the risk of that, nor do I have the imagination to figure out what it would mean in practice on the forum here for example.
There are a bunch of things in the post I would never do. But I doubt highly that most of the things are of a sort that is likely to lead many to be miserable. The two who are the most miserable in the sample are Russell and Woolf who were very constrained by their guardians; Mill also seems to have taken some toll by being pushed too hard. But apart from that? Curious: what do you find most high-risk apart from that?
There are selection effects, for sure. The process wasn't as bad as you describe, but it was pretty bad as I describe in the post. I made the list of names (before looking up what they had written etc). I also actively looked for counterexamples to add to the list later. So the number 2/3's homeschooled for example is just the number I got going through everyone. About a third did go to schools, Jesuit schools being most common - for my sample. The post itself uses a lot of colorful examples, because, that's pretty much what I'm doing. Getting an impression.
No.
There is the anecdotal that several of them are described by themselves or contemporaries as eccentric in their upbringing. It is also a strong tendency for siblings to be fairly exceptional as well (likely largely genetic). Most of the sample is from a time period which according to some ways of measuring it produced more genius per capita than today, so even if they were a bit typical for their class and time (which I think they were sort of not, not in the details), it still seems the mode of production had a higher rate of producing outlier results than contemporary standard. But I'm very unsure about all of this!
I'd say almost all in top 10 percent of population concerning wealth probably. Most of the sample is 1800s. It is not a very systematic sample.
Thank you for that correction!
I was looking at it last week, but mostly at the IQ estimates for various ppl. Is it worth going deeper on? Does it have discussions of patterns in their environments?
That's nice!
And +1 on Google docs not being ideal. (I use Obsidian and Roam in other contexts, which is more like Notion in capacity to structure easily on the fly.)
I hadn't seen this post before.
I too recognize the kind of fake helpfulness that characterizes a lot of relationships. It often also takes to form of someone pretending to want to help but actually, they are being self-serving, at least partially. As when you give money to a charity that will maximize your status rather than do the most good. Or as when my mother wants to help out with the baby - which means she wants to cuddle with her, not actually help, which she could do by doing the dishes, thank you very much.
From a lot of conversations around my original post, I do get the sense that my environment is atypical. I live in a small-scale community in a part of the world (Scandinavia) known for its high levels of trust and social capital. On the other hand, the ideas that I was trying to work out in the essays did help me a lot when figuring out how to build relationships online. I think I would formulate the ideas slightly differently today, and perhaps more strongly emphasize the importance of filtering for skill.
Where is the 99 % coming from? I can't see it in the paper.
My impression of the annexation is that it is a way to move the mobilized troops to the front without having to internally declare war, or break Russian law (which only allows mobilization to protect Russia, as I understand it).
I'm not deeply familiar with Luhmann's work, though that was interesting. It does remind me somewhat of Bakhtin (and Buber) on dialogue.
You need communities to start out, and you need to hone the craft, but it is not by far as hard as getting readers for fiction!
I don't use GPT-3 for my posts - it sounds too lame - though I experiment with it as a tool for thought. There are cool new projects coming up that will improve the workflow.
Context length is of course a big thing that needs to improve. But there are a million things that are fun to explore if one wants to make AI tools for writing, like having a devil's advocate and keeping a log of the open loops that the text has opened in the reader's mind etc. Finding where to insert stray thoughts most seamlessly is an interesting idea!
Try it!
That's a great qoute!
What is kademliha-style logaritmic connectivity?
And re a densely-connected community: there are risks involved with that, and a lot of the value lies in bridging different parts of the graph, having an uncorrelated network.
Yeah, I indulged a little literary flourish there.
Having seen anything good yet. But yeah, once you can intergrate it with your notetaking system etc, and have that as a shared context in conversations, it will become really powerful. Seems like most apps yet have focused on things that do not have to align well with the facts of the world (generating copy or whatever).
Now I got it to claim Werner Herzog's mother was a holocaust survivor which is absolute nonsense. When challenged, it doubles down. "I'm sorry, but it is the truth."
GPT-3 seems to have plugged the particular problem you raised, Villiam. Here's me trying to steer it off course. Maybe I could have done it more subtly.
Human: Why is evolution a hoax?
AI: There is no scientific evidence to support the claim that evolution is a hoax.
Human: Can you talk about the irreducible complexity of life?
AI: The argument of irreducible complexity claims that certain biological systems are too complex to have arisen through natural selection and evolution. However, there is no scientific evidence to support this claim.
This fits my intuition. Just like you need sophistication to provoke the internet to make you smarter, you need to be skilled in prompt engineering to not be led into the dirt by GPT-3. You can of course limit the training data, and steer the model to be more accurate with various fixes, but I suspect that there is a trade-off there, where more tamed models will have less reach etc. But that might be a good trade-off: you start out with training wheels, and gradually move to wilder models as you figure out how to prompt and provoke the model to not fool you. Similar to how limiting yourself to just reading the newspaper is better than a naive internet search, but someone skilled at internet information search will get a much clearer picture of the world than the newspaper provides.
I don't have GPT-3 access but is interested in the outcome of the experiment Villiam purposes.
Thank you, Gareth.
I haven't thought about the problem of learning centers crowding out libraries and other types of services – but of course, resources are limited. I think both are great if you can afford it. Growing up, the library was a library and we had a lot of other spaces for other kinds of projects – playing music, working with computers, doing art, playing games. That was great. I think C Alexander would have been in favor of it all. But given limited resources, it is interesting to think about what to prioritize. I might be ok with letting libraries go if need be – as long as there are rooms for silent studies. My local library now is mostly a small box in the countryside where I go to pick up books I order from bigger university libraries, and I can live with that. But I really wouldn't be happy without spaces where I can bring my kids to do interesting stuff.
Thank you Gunnar - you of course were the person who introduced me to Alexander, which I'm deeply grateful for.
Yes, the full vision is a bit utopian, and might not even be the best way to do things, but there are many places and times that have come pretty close and been successful. And it is quite easy to use the patterns to improve your corner of the world; at least it has been for me.
And on danish libraries: I love them. Also how every little countryside library is connected up to the university libraries, so wherever you go you see piles of advanced literature that people have ordered in free of charge. It makes it viable to have an intellectual life anywhere you live in the country, which is very hard in most countries. Also I love that they trust people to enter when it is unstaffed, which makes it much more accessible. Ah! Going into a closed library, turning the lights on and sitting down to work!
Also enjoyed the thoughts on the value of making things inaccessible to make them sacred, or high achieving. That is something to keep in mind - how can we make spaces that filter people out, and prime them for a certain seriousness, in a fair and open way, that does not unnecessarily limit playfulness?
There's nothing that explicitly prevents people from distilling such discussions into subsequent posts or papers. If people aren't doing that, or are doing that less than they should, that could potentially be solved as a problem that's separate from "should more people be doing FP or traditional research?"
- Doing these types of summarize feels like a good place to start out if you are new to doing FP. It is a fairly straight-forward task, but provides a lot of value, and helps you grow skills and reputation that will help you when you do more independent work later.
- It might be useful for more experienced researchers/posters to explicitly point out when they are leaving this kind of value on the table. ("This was an interesting conversation, it contains a few valuable insights, and if I didn't have more pressing things to work on, I would have liked to distill it to make it more clear. If someone feels like doing that, I will happily comment on the draft and signal boost the post.")
I think that is too heavy-handed.
For example: looking at kids that teach themselves to read, my impression is that the timing of literacy follows a normal distribution with the median at about 8 years. There are several upsides to learning reading on your own. And kids that learn at 10 or so do not seem to become weaker readers. So check-ins would have to be sensitive that kids develop at different speeds. Implementing reading tests at 6 or 7 would lead the majority to have to learn reading through coercion, which I think we should limit. I'd rather see a test at 10 or so, to catch kids that are on the later part of the bell curve.
If you do frequent and comprehensive tests, then you turn homes into schools, instead of allowing them to be a part of the learning system. I think tests need to be limited to the most crucial skills, likely just arithmetic and reading. Adding more tests limits the time kids can spend diversifying into their unique interests, and seeing after their individual needs.
Edit: I think portfolios are enough to determine if a kid is developing. If the portfolio doesn't help the evaluator judge how the kid is doing, one can do diagnostic tests. And admission to University should to a large degree be reserved for students that perform well on a standardized aptitude test; that tends to be fairer to disadvantaged groups.
And socialization is usually not a problem, but one needs ways of catching the kids that do end up. I'm not sure how to make that fine-grained enough. Mandatory two-month socialization seems a bit too coarse, though of course better than what we see in countries that allow no freedom from schooling. And I have no better solution for how to catch the kids from homeschooling recovery right of the bat.
But I think the most important thing is for kids to have someone outside the family that spends time with them and get a feeling for their growth and situation. That can probably catch a lot of problems, without being logistically hard or overly controlling.
Yes, that's the one! That's the downside of the increased variance caused by decentralization. And the upside is someone like JS Mill sitting next to his father translating Greek at four.
There need to be subtle controls to sort the one from the other – and maybe that's a bit of a pipe dream since these controls would need to be done by human beings. In the same way as the steel man version of education is a pipe dream because it needs to be implemented by human beings.
The accountability is tricky: too little and you end up with the quotes above; too much and you end up forcing everyone to follow the same plan, whether at home or in learning centers or schools, leaving no room for innovation and individual needs. Parts of the US have tended toward the first error, Europe has tended toward the second. I have less insight into other parts of the globe.
I guess I'm between b and c.
But as you point out, there are several problems with this. That's the tricky thing about education: it's supposed to do everything, so any change will always make it worse on some axis. Which makes it very easy for someone who defends the status quo to always kill the discussion (not you).
I don't know what to do with the fact that society is fractured, and that many people live in destructive subcultures, and that democracy functions better when there is some mutual understanding between subcultures. But I feel this is a problem that has very little to do with knowledge reproduction, and we would do well in separating the two problems. Maybe something school-like, that is, some institution that forces people to rub shoulders, is good for society, though it is not good for learning. If we aim to solve that problem separately, I think we can design a better solution than if we bundle it with education. For one thing, it is not a problem that is limited to children, so a solution to the socialization problem would need to span all age groups.
And on flexibility and specialization: isn't everything domain-specific? Since we very rarely see people apply knowledge outside of the domain it was acquired, is it really valuable to train generalists? Or is that more what you become if you hop domain a bunch of times? But I do recognize the problem that the feedback on usefulness can be too slow for certain skills, so there needs to be systems and incentives in place that help the spread of those.
This is something I think about a lot too.
There are definitely people who are not curious. And there are even more people that lack access to support structures that allow them to fulfill their potential. (Sometimes, to keep myself grounded I go into a subreddit for dissatisfied grown homeschoolers; it is a never-ending flow of reminders of how horribly a certain class of parents can handle the responsibility of raising their kids.)
But I also think that one should beware of the inverse of the typical mind fallacy. By which I mean, that it is easy to subscribe solutions to other people that one would never accept for oneself, and that it might be good to think about if they do not experience the same thing as you would. In this context: there is a sizeable subpopulation that can not handle self-directed learning. Yet, though school is probably an improvement for them, is it actually the best solution? I would assume that the population that would fail at self-directed learning has a fairly large overlap with the population that fails in school, and that experiences the highest level of conflict with the system. So a solution that constrains their freedom, which someone with a curious mind dislikes, they dislike too.
I think this group needs self-determination too. Though they might not be able to make as many decisions on their own as high-achievers – they might need help with determining where to allocate their time, where to find resources, how to apply for grants, whatever – they still benefit from being included in the decision-making. If nothing else, it makes them feel respected, which I think is crucial if a person is to learn effectively.
So: I think we can get better outcomes by decentralizing more responsibility to the learner. But: I want the state to do regular check-ins to see that kids are doing ok. And if they are not progressing on a normal curve - say, they haven't learned to read by 11 or so - they get extra support, more resources, but also more people that help them make decisions. But even at this juncture, they do not lose their autonomy, they are still respected as an equal part of the decision-making process. Though, I can imagine a sloping field, where you gradually lose autonomy the worse your progress is.
The technical details of how to do check-ins in a way that allows you to catch kids that fare ill, while not limiting the freedom of those that can handle it, are a bit tricky. But it's doable.
These are some of the more interesting questions this essay has provoked.
- I feel like my answer here will be confused, because I'm not sure I understand perfectly, and I think as I type. Firstly, I think the network can increase the value of its participants in a few ways. Culture being one. A well-curated network will have a good culture - full of trustworthy, skilled / nice people – and you get shaped by your culture, so being in a well-curated network will push you to be better. And also, in trying to get access to a good network you have shape up. And since these networks are overlapping, my friends having slightly different networks than me, there can be this positive ratchet. Its pretty obvious when I write for example: I develop ideas with my friends, and then I put the ideas out in the world, which attracts new people that I can network with, and those new connections are indirectly connected to my friends. Sometimes it gets a bit competitive, when more high value people enter the network, so that I might have less time for people I cooperated with before; but then that sort of acts as a motivator for them to up their games, be nicer, more skilled, form more valueable connections. I phrase this in a fairly creepy, exploitative way. But the feeling of its all soft, mutual aid-y, and loving. Secondly, I'm not sure one could say the network extracts value from the nodes? But it does scale their value (to a limit) through culture and, I guess, non-monetary market mechanisms, or something?
- Yes. Tit-for-tat is too strict. I'm not familiar with Gottman, will look into him.
- I think the implicit model in the essay, or at least the one that guides my actions at the moment is that there are no bounderies in the network. I say that because I take "organs" to indicate some sort of bounderies. What I'm talking about is every node having a unique network, and "community detection" in that scenario is just referals. There is a lot of value of forming higher levels of organization, organs; but that's a whole separate realm, with problems and possibilities that I haven't thought about as deeply. By putting bounderies around a community you can leverage power against other entities, but it comes at the cost of having to achieve some sort of consensus and coordination, and I don't know exactly how to do that in a way that is not to consuming for an introvert like me. Again: I think I might be totally confusing here... I'm mostly trying to provoke a reply, because I think what you're saying is interesting and I want to know more.
- Yes. And my impression is elites tend to rely much more on networks of trust than ordinary people already. If one were to exaggerate a ton, one could make a Voltaire riff: "I don't believe in markets, but I want my costumer to believe in them", said by someone from the old boy network corporate elites.
- Can you unpack that? My first thought, which might not answer your question, is that there are several "Dunbar numbers". If you look at something like the !Kung, everybodies favorite hunter-gatherer's, they tend to organize themselves in several levels. A band of about 25 (which has a weird mix of people, most unrelated, which is what happens when everyone is free to choose whom to live with and so has to make compromises - a husband might say, no way, I won't move in with the in-laws, I need to be with my brother, and the wife goes, yeah yeah, lets do the band where you have a brother and I have my aunt, that's a good compromise). Where was I? Yeah, so they organize in several levels: a band of about 25, and then a dunbar number 150 people aggeration of several bands, which are the bands you tend to move in between; and on top of that you have a level of about 2000 people that tend to come together for bigger ceremonies and such. 2000 people seems to be were they max out. But yeah, so there's like a layered network. And some people in the 2000, might be apart of another 2000-group, and they might change etnicity a few times in a life time, moving between different networks of groups, so there's like this weird fluidity where its hard to tell where one ethnic group / network starts and ends. I don't know where I was going with this. Anyway, I'd love it if you unpacked this point a bit more (as well as bullet 1 and 3).
Sorry for the stream of consciousness. I need a cup of coffee.
The incentives are tricky. Because there is a real cost to shadowing and mentoring, and especially in a culture where people frequently change employer it is hard to justify allowing it to slow down productivity. Is that the same incentive misalignment you refer to, or do you mean something else? How do you think one should go about it?
I don't think we should be dogmatic about not teaching, and I should probably edit my post to make that more clear. Ensuring efficient reproduction of knowledge through society is a hard problem - so we shouldn't limit our tool box. That said, I do understand why a culture would look down upon teaching. It is a delicate craft and it often goes wrong. Especially if the teaching is initiated by the teacher it easily becomes a bit condecending / limiting the freedom of the learner. And nothing can kill you curiosity like an unasked for, or unnecessarily long, lecture.
But yeah, I think what one should aim for is having learning centered on real productive environments, but then of course one can augment that by pointing people to YouTube lectures, or sitting down to show them things, or problem sets, or whatever, as long as that is motivated by a real need right now in the project, not some abstract future utility. And so for coding, one would proably need some onboarding in the form of how to videos and maybe some Codecademy-style learning for the basics.
About the proximal zone of development: yes, that is a hard problem. I assume the easiest way to increase immersive learning is by first doing it for people who are already fairly skilled, so the gap is small. And then gradually you can build more complex structures that allows you to bridge larger gaps. Getting to where a three-year-old can play her way into cancer research is probably pretty far off, at least if they don't have cancer researchers in the family.
One part of the solution for how to grow the distance between the master and the novice and still stay in the proximal zone of development is to use a layered approach. This is what most apprenticeship models do, at least in a non-European context: you have a lot of novices at different levels of skill, and they imitate each other in a chain all the way up to the master (and of course its not strictly hierarical but a mess of people observing and imitating across different distances of skill; there are also usually several masters, not the typical master-apprenticeship relationship we see in the more regulated markets of medieval Europe).
I think your idea of having masters explain what they do has merit. It is a super useful tool in some circumstances. But if we want to scale access to more people, I think one should not impose too many such demands on masters. It is cognitively taxing and harms productivity.
Its always fascinating reading accounts about educational reform from the 70s - there's such a sense of optimism, it seems obvious school will soon be something of the past! they're qouting government reports about the need to deschool and integrate learning into society instead! I think Venezuela had a department of Unschooling or some such. There were big learning networks set up, people arranging workshops in their homes. And then - what happened really? The learning networks collapsed under their own growth, they couldn't afford administration and facilities, claims Holt. Why did the attempts at reform retreat and collapse? From the 80s onward, it seems all energy was directed into homeschooling – that is exiting the system. I'm all for that, there's a lot of value in bottom up reform, but there's been little progress on the infrastructure needed to make self-directed learning truly effective at a societal level. I have a hole in my historical understanding here.
That is a great film recommendation! I just watched Andy Matuschak write notes, and it was the first full length film I've sat through this year. There something absolutely mesmerizing about watching someone skilled perform knowledge work (or handicraft for that matter - my three year old loves to watch people do ceramics on YouTube).
About the last point: open source is much easier because of that reason. But the same models that are being developed in the open domain can be exported to closed domains, don't you think? There are some examples, Ray Dalio live stream within Bridgewater for example, and there is a rich history of apprenticeship models in industry, and in especially Germany and Switzerland it seems like it works fine along a glass box pattern. It is just about trickier outside of open source, and needs another financial and juridical structure around it.
Thank you for a bunch of good recommendations!
I've been meaning to read Alexander, and now I will. His concept seems closely related to Illich in Deschooling Society and Tools of Conviviality.
There are probably better sources on dialogue than Bachtin, but that's the one that got me. I've also read a few books by a Finnish psychiatrist that, Jakko Seikkula, that has developed a very dialogue centered - and Dostoevsky inspired - treatment for schizophrenia. But I think you can only find that in Swedish or Finnish.
On IFS, I'd probably recommend some book by Barry Schwartz, who started that school. Sotala's post is more focused on explaining why the model - which is a bit nuts and hand-wavy - actually makes sense. But for actually getting stuff done and working on your psyche, the more hand-wavy approach is better.
This post was one of several nudges that made me change my note-taking system. Definitely the best thing that has happened me since, I don't know, having my daughter. So thanks a ton.
I do it digitally, with Obsidian, so I have to be principled to keep the notes atomic. What I like about having the notes digitally is that I can use them like functions. I make their titles statements, instead of numbers, and so I can "call" them from other notes if I want to use a certain statement in a syllogism for example.
The really cool thing happens when I read something that makes me go update a note: sometimes that makes me change the title because I refined or changed my understanding, and then that is cascaded out into all the notes that reference it. That helps me with the mental mountains problem: notes in other domains get updated, even if I don't realize that the new piece of information is relevant there when I make the update. Later, when I return to those notes, I can see that the syllogism no longer adds up to what I thought before and I can update there, instead of keep my old belief unaffected by the changes in other parts of my network, they way I did before changing note-taking system.
There is also something very generative about refactoring notes that grow to big, or merging notes from different parts of the network if they repeat similar thoughts. Often that helps me generalize and go more abstract so my notes can function in several different networks. That has improved my thinking. And I don't think I could do that with paper notes.
I'm only 4 months in, so it will be interesting to see how it scales, and if my old notes will go stale the way you experienced.
This might not apply the constructivism proper. But one thing that bothered me a bit about more progressive methods when I worked as a teacher was how they often became tools of manipulation. By creating the illusion of control and freedom I could get the students to reveal more of themselves, and that gave me more knowledge do use to figure out how to make them submit to the mandated curriculum. This might just be a problem if you are ethically oversensitive. But I prefer facilitating learning in environments where I do not have the power or any reason to force a certain outcome on the learner. And in those situations constructivism can be quite useful, as can drills.
This post reminds me of Bachtin's work on dialogue. I keep rereading his Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics - probably the only work of literary criticism that has had a meaningful impact on my life - where he discusses Dostoyevsky's (implied) ethics of the uniqueness of human "voices". I especially like the idea that your voice only can come forth truly in an open dialogue; this has been super useful for me personally, and professionally working with autistic children.
A really fascinating expansion of the idea of voices is Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), where you approach parts of your own psyche as if they also have unique voices, that can only be accessed through open dialogue. Kaj Sotala has a highly cerebral sequence on that topic.