4. Questions are interesting to me only for a period of time. Many times, I pose a question, and a week later I don’t understand what I meant or I feel less excited about it. It is as if questions are a function of your mindset. This is related to the hypotesis that we can’t remember our childhood in part because our world model was so different to the one now that keeping memories will lead to inconsistent thoughts.

3. Ideas are difficult to generate but easy to hold and describe. Ideas are rare and delicate. Most perturbations will make the idea worse. Writing ideas makes you a better conversationalist. You have a thought for many topics. Also: talking with people allows you to continue developing the thought.

2. Why sometimes is it good to avoid writing down a thought and instead just think about it? Because you have to compress it to be able to think about it (our working memory is small.) And to compress things you need to understand. This is why writing the gist of a lecture is useful. It is not about writing it down, but the process of coming up with what to write. When I think about something complex, I usually go for a walk (to diverge in thoughts) and then write (to converge in thoughts.)

2′. Once I was sitting in a lecture not paying attention at all to the lecture, and trying to focus on my own work. The lecture was distracting, but I was able to solve a problem I couldn’t solve before. I think this was because the distractions forced me to simplify.

1. For a history class, I started answering a question by saying, “In the context of x, y happened.” Then I filled x and y, and followed up with z from there. And then I deleted x and y, and left z. Then I started the next paragraph again with “In the context of v, w happened.” It felt correct at the time, but then I removed that by what I followed up with. It is as if starting with “in the context of” lets me write more creatively. I write A, which generates writing B. Now A doesn’t matter if B is interesting on its own. In this way, being too focused on writing the best sentence can be counterproductive.