There’s a story by Jorge Luis Borges called “Funes the Memorious” about a man who remembers everything, but can’t generalize. There’s a line about him not knowing if a dog on the square glimpsed at noon from the side is the same dog as the one seen from the back at 12:01 or something like that. Swirls of smoke from a cigarette are memorized forever. He mostly sits in a dark room.

Long ago, I was introduced to the theory of Mappers and Packers[1], which are polar opposites in the ways that people can learn things. Mappers (like me) have a mental model of the universe which represents facts and knowledge as puzzle pieces that have to fit together into a coherent whole. Any inconsistencies in the fit between those pieces drive us nuts. When we encounter a new set of facts, we have a background process that tries to make them fit. Then all the new connections arise over time as we realize new ways we can combine old facts.

On the other extreme, are packers. They have optimized for packing facts in bulk, with little regard for how they fit together. If you give this type of person a set of instructions that require a wider knowledge of how things fit, they will get lost, frustrated, and/or need support. If you anticipate this, and spend a bit extra time to show how to handle all of the possible contingencies, (and give them a document of this) they're good, and will be quite happy with your support.

I think that mappers take more time figuring out the model, compressing the facts to save space, and increase applicability in general.

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers

My mind is a blurry jpeg of my life.

(https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...)

> but that's exactly what OP said, no?

Not precisely. We don’t know if verbatim capacity is limited (and it doesn’t seem to be) but the brain operates in a space-efficient manner all the same. So there isn’t necessarily a causative relationship between “memory capacity” and “means of storage”.

> Likewise, if you remembered every single word in a book, you would not understand its meaning

I understand your meaning but I want to clarify for the sake of the discussion that unlike with ML, the human brain can both memorize verbatim and understand the meaning because there is no mechanism for memorizing something but not processing it (i.e. purely storage). The first pass(es) are stripped to their essentials but subsequent passes provide the ability to memorize the same input.

Compression = Intelligence

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