If you find something hard to understand, BLAME YOUR OWN LACK OF KNOWLEDGE! since you were first born knowing nothing, then you've learned. There’s so much you still don’t know. things that confuse you now, but later, you may see them clearly and understand. — Nahj al-Balagha, (Letters 31-35), by Imam Ali
lets pray:
O God, whose wisdom has no limits and whose power transcends all imagination— I ask You to shine Your ceaseless light of knowledge into the shadows of my mind, dispelling the darkness of ignorance, so that I may know more and understand deeper
Transmit Understanding, not just knowledge
- Constructinism and Connectionism Learning theories
- The art of note-"making".
- Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughts
- What Good Is Learning If You Don’t Remember It?
- Unison programming language: database as source code
- Mint programming language:
importless programming - Hypermedia Systems Book + HTMX essays
- Neurite
- Brilliant | Learning by doing
- makandra cards
- Networks of the Brain by Olaf Sporns
- Proof Wiki
an insightful talk by Rich Hickey - link
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simple and easy:
- drinking water
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simple but hard:
- converting date system in all images in a folder
- lifting heavy weight
- coding a graphical game in assembly
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complex but easy:
- solving a quadradic equation ( has considarble amount of steps but once you get it, it's easy )
- coding in Python (sorry), you actually shoot your foot when coding python, happy debugging
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complex and hard:
- building a 3D printer
- GoT (Graph of Thought) is a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)
- GoK (Graph of Knowledge) is a Directed Graph (may have cycles too)
- SF: Straight-Forward
- Focus: highlight important parts and figure out what is wanted.
- Problem Differentiation: determine related concepts involving in the problem.
- Recall: remember related information about the previos attempts.
- Relate: try to make connection between the previous attempts.
- Reason/Calculate: try to conclude or process previous attemps to extract new results.
- Repeat: repeat the process until you're done.
- Doubt: explore the possibilities of other answers by assuming you're answer is wrong or you've missed something
Thanks to Eric Demaine for his SRTBOT method for formulating dynamic programming solution. see "introduction to algorithms" in MIT open course ware.
the height of GoT reperesents the complexity of the problem. the more the height of the GoT, means that solving it requires more steps and hence is more complex.
The more the width of the GoT more ideas involved or more options have to be considered.
If a solution to a problem resembels the direction of edges between nodes similar to what the learner's mind, we say that the solution is straight-forward, on the other hand if the direction of edges between nodes for an solution to a does not exist between nodes or does not exists directly between the nodes in the learner's mind, then we say that the solution is not straight-forward or it is Explorative.
Thus the term straight-forward is subjective according to the learning material and the learner.
Note that just connecting 2 nodes are not important, the direction of the edge also matters. for example a language learner first looks at the word e.g. "camera", then translates it to his mother tongue e.g. Persian ("دوربین") and then translating, he imagines the real camera in his mind. but he may have trouble to do it vice verse i.e. seeing a camera and then finding its English word. it is true that the person probably can find the word after some time but it is not obvious i.e. it's not present directly in his GoK.
In the above case we say that the person "knows" that word, but he must think more and accordingly takes more time for him compared to another learner that the image of every word is associated along with the word in his mind.
think of GoT as Valley, and nodes as hills and Mountains. The more unconventional to get from a neighbours of a node to it, the more the height of it.
here what I mean by the word "create" is that makeing/producing something that the creator/author has not seen like it before.
to create something new, the person need to connect sometimes even unrelated nodes in his GoK in a way that makes sense. the feature of connecting no so obvious unrelated nodes in brain requires some level of forgetting since he or she must not consider all of the details about it and sometimes has to misremember or misinterpret the details about it. I didn't know that forgetting can be blessing.
I've read somewhere that creative people tend to forgot more, as their brain gets good at losing connection between nodes in KoG and even creating false connections between them.
by the definition, you might've guessed that creative work is not straight-forward.
Reference:
according to definition of straight-forward solution, one can implement a question that the GoK be completly useless (i.e. the connection between concepts not be present).
In order to mitigate the above problem, one might suggest that adding a lots of edges between nodes (cross referencing) and this surely solves the problem. that is correct in one aspect, but it will arise a worse problem; nobody can understand a super dense GoK, by looking at it!
Another solution would be to create different versions of GoK based on different aspects e.g. most important nodes be people, most important nodes be time-line, most important be based on specific features and so on ...
That is why tools like GoK of Obisidian software would not help much and they are rather a fancy feature to make people say WOW!
The real problem is that the GoK must be placed in the person's brain, not in the computer. computers are already good at storing and retriving data efficiently. we as the users of these apps were supposed to make our learning journey easier but now it is completly oppsoite.
I've tried implmenting a GoK app similar to Kumu named ReMS (Remembering Management System) and not only it was time-consuming, it would not help me understant better. sure the remembering got easier but it was mostly becuase of documenting stuff; and I even want to say that, it was very shallow kind of remembering.
the above assertion hold true for mind-mapping since GoK is a lot more powerful than mind-map.
I've asked DeepSeek AI to give opinion about mind maps if he were Richard Feyman. the result is actually impressive (some of them are rather funny):
"Nature doesn’t organize itself into pretty radial diagrams. If your understanding can’t handle a little chaos, it’s not understanding—it’s interior decorating."
"Mind maps are like tour buses: you see all the sights, but you never step into the street. Real thinking means getting lost sometimes."
"Drawing a line between two ideas doesn’t mean you’ve connected them—any more than tying a string between two lampposts means you’ve invented the telegraph."
"The best mind map is the one you crumple up and throw away—because you don’t need it anymore."
"Drawing a mind map to understand physics is like painting a sailboat to learn the wind."
"Knowledge isn’t a dot you can connect—it’s the fire that burns between them."
"Understanding isn’t a tree. It’s a wildfire—and you’re supposed to be the arsonist."
well in my opinion the only benefit of using GoK or Mind maps is that you kinda see the structure of the content and gives a whole overview; but the benefits stops here...
- colors stolen from ColorHunt
- Janet: 1.38
- add citations if possible
- chain of thought: رشته افکار