>I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?
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>But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place? A combination of my own experience and other things I'd read. None of which I could at that moment remember! And eventually I'd forget that Hilbert had confirmed it too. But my increased belief in the importance of this idea would remain something I'd learned from this book, even after I'd forgotten I'd learned it.
A somewhat more 2020 way of looking at it is to consider NN training. A image classifier might ingest tens of gigabytes of input to produce a model megabytes in size. Reading any given article, though it be thousands of words in length, containing much "information", will only nudge the strength of a couple of connections in your existing neural net. And if you're lucky, commit a single fact to long term memory.
For instance, just trying out a quick recollection of the thing from memory, I have:
"Teachers, upset with fixed pedagogy, decided to run a performance art project on students which they called the Locked Room. Students would show up to class at 1000 and leave at 1630, allowed to leave only for tools. The content of the room would be varied and sometimes students would show up only to find their stuff moved around. Some students didn't like this, and some remember it as having been a bonding experience. Eventually that class was split into streams with one being traditional, something that a filmmaker called Tony Hill took. It overall didn't have much impact. They did have outdoor sections, one of which had students blindfolded or something."
Reminds me of a comment on HN which I saw where someone said "If I were to start a class on X I would first tell students 'X is the most important thing you will learn'" and my first thought was that students would instantly /dev/null that because it's like a telomere for knowledge. A signal that information is about to follow but that the signal itself is not meant to be recorded. So no student would conclude that X was the most important thing they would learn. But all students would have exited alternate thoughtstreams and the length of that sentence gives them time to sync to the lecturer.
I'm sure linguists have some obvious term for these header/footer bookends. Sometimes you get a long article in The Atlantic and it's almost all header/footer and you suddenly notice but otherwise you just bite through the bun to the meat without even noticing.