This is a book I read about a year ago. Today I tried to parse the memory palace I built while reading it. I had revisited the palace a couple of times especially while reading the book. I probably went through the palace one time after completing reading it. But since that I don't recall having gone through it again. I don't recall explicitly going through it after

So today during my walk I checked in to see how much I could remember. Let's go through the loci one by one.

For the purpose of speed I'll put everything down as bullet points and ask Gemini or some other GenAI to flesh these out.

The garden

We cannot directly access our thougts. We might be able to reconstruct what is happening in our heads at some level, but we can never directly "watch" ourselves think. Our thinking is based on schemas. We categorize our experiences and make inferences. None of our experiences are "direct", they are all constructed.

• Fundamental attribution error (FAE).

• Framing

• Being swayed by other people

• Helping the mind work by thinking about a problem before going to bed. The mind will then work on that problem during sleep, and hopefully you'll have a solution upon waking up.

• Whats at the clothes line?

• At the mail box?

The cellar

• Cost benefit analysis - everything can be measured in dollars
• Sunk cost fallacy
• Loss aversion
• something with Experts? Maybe putting too much trust in authorities such as scientists?

Kitchen

• Law of large numbers
• Bell curve (Normalverteilung) normal distribution
• Standard deviation
• Sensitivity and specificity

Living room

• ignore HIPPO (highest paid person in the room)
• The different methods for arriving at scientific results ordered by their quality:
  • anecdotal evidence
  • natural experiments
  • multiple regression analysis
  • double blind controlled experiment (the gold standard)

Bedroom

• Western logic (deductive)
  • Premise A, Premise B, Conclusion
• Eastern reasoning (dialectical)
  • Thesis, antithesis, synthesis

This is somewhat sparse, but I think it is a world better than if I had not built the memory palace while reading the book. I've not done the experiment, but I'd guess If I try to recall the contents of a book I read at around the same time without constructing the palace I'd recall close to nothing.

This is likely simply due to the fact that my mind has nothing to cling on to, no "anchor" which will lead me to the memory - or allow me to reconstruct the knowledge.

Note

After coming back from my walk and starting to write about this some other loci which I hadn't found on my walk pop back up. I don't easily recall what these contain, but it's interesting to see them coming back now once I am working through this on the keyboard.