mundane sentence collection

Life works so much better when you only engage with others based on their words or actions and refrain from any additional analysis.

Someone didn't text back? Okay so you're not making plans with them. Someone consistently ignores your attempts to contact them? Okay, so you're not gonna be interacting with them now. You can move on with no additional drama. It doesn't need to be a big judgment on them or a big judgment on yourself.

i do miss geiss.

favs-as-of-late: Errortica (Sasha Balykova), Hasla (of Seoul), and Helena Hauff (needs no introduction)

Loone, MixMix, and Boiler Room nice, though Seoul Community Radio has been most fruitful--for me--for finding new stuff

I had a good education, in a school system that had left behind the Bad Old Days, when teachers would hit you with a stick if you didn’t rote-memorise endless facts. I was basically never required to memorise anything by rote. I was never threatened with violence either (at least, not by teachers)^1, and I think those two things may be related. I mean, you do basically need to threaten kids to get them to do rote memorisation - even they can see that there’s no point to it. You can just look things up! What’s the use of stuffing your head full to bursting with a load of dry dusty facts?

Except, that’s not how learning works, is it? The brain doesn’t store knowledge like a hard drive, with a fixed amount of space that you can fill by learning, and if you learn too many things you have to erase other things to make room. The brain stores knowledge like a network, or a graph. You learn new things by connecting them to things you already know. New facts aren’t just inserted into the brain in the next empty space, they’re added to the existing structure, connected up to the surrounding knowledge.

If you come across a fact that has no connection to anything you know, your brain decides (usually correctly) that this fact is not useful to you - you can’t do much with it. A beautiful old stone building you walk past every day has a plaque that says “1667”. Ok, so what? If you don’t know anything else related to that, why would your brain bother to hang on to the number? It’s meaningless. The only way to get that kind of fact to stay in your head, without connecting it to your existing knowledge, is sheer repetition ^2.

But if you do have some related knowledge, like, perhaps you know that the Great Fire of London was in 1666, well, now that plaque means something to you. This building was built the year after a huge fire burned down most of the city. I wonder what was there before? Then later, you read in passing that the plague killed like 20% of Londoners in 1665, and again this date might have been meaningless, but now it has things to connect to, so instead of sliding off it, you think “Wow, what an incredibly shitty time to be in London. The vibe while they were putting up that building must have been wild”. And so on. Each thing you know gives more places for new facts to stick to, and those new facts give you yet more possible connection points. The more you know, the easier it is to learn.

And once you know enough, you can connect up the different parts of your knowledge into one huge graph that makes most new facts you come across just automatically stick in your brain without trying. It is a joy to go through life with your understanding of the world effortlessly growing and deepening each day, in a virtuous cycle.

But before you can fly, you have to get up off the floor! If new facts hit your brain one at a time at random, each fact will probably find nothing to connect to, and just fall out again, leaving no purchase for the next one. A few will stick, so eventually you will start to build out from the basic things you started off knowing, but only very slowly, because you’ve haven’t got much surface area for new knowledge to stick to. Most of the information you’re exposed to will bounce off and be wasted.

What you really want, to get this feedback loop kick-started, is a kind of low density ‘scaffolding’ of facts, that covers a wide area, so that new incoming facts of all kinds have a decent chance of finding something nearby to stick to. You could think of it like, you want to spread out a wide area of ‘nucleation points’ for new clusters of knowledge to start growing around.

For example, in order to have dates not just bounce off, you could learn the dates of major historical events: to get full coverage, you probably want to know the boundaries between periods - starts and ends of wars, reigns of the rulers, that kind of thing. To give information about places a chance to stick, you might want to just learn what countries there are, and maybe their capitals.

It doesn’t make sense to go crazy with this, you only want a small fraction of your learning to be this kind of memorisation, since it’s a much harder way to learn any given fact than just slotting it into an existing structure in a way that makes sense. But if you use memorisation efficiently to build a framework skeleton to grow the rest of your knowledge on, it helps enormously.

The problem is, I didn’t realise this kind of thing was a good idea until after my formal education was done, and to be honest I haven’t been very successful at doing it on my own, without external motivation structures. And the worst thing is, now I’ve had years and years of valuable information just bouncing off my brain, where a lot of it might have stuck if I’d only had the structure in place to catch it. I wish the value of memorisation was explained to me early enough to make the most of it.

Footnote 1: I dimly recall that one of my teachers (an older one when I was very young), still kept the stick in the classroom and would talk about how he’s not allowed to use it any more.

If I were designing an initiative like this, I would put together some type of special invite-only community or something and let people fill out a form to apply. Then I would make a practice of regularly putting interesting things there, previews of upcoming changes (both major and mundane), requests for input, things like that.

Tumblr also has a problem in which many power users of the site do not trust the people who run the website, even if there are plenty of ways that your interests are aligned (people who post on this website would also like more people to join tumblr and would like to see tumblr grow! they would like to see the site become easier to use!). So as a prerequisite to any meaningful engagement, I would look in to taking deliberate steps to build more trust. Communicate more about upcoming changes and make a point of respond to feedback, and not just in a bland corporate way -- talk about how the sausage is made! If you impliment a change, talk about why, what data caused you to make that change, how you weighed different possibilities. Make people feel like community feedback was a meaningful part of the process, even if the outcome isn't something you think will be popular. Hire a community manager and empower them to both share more internal user research and information with the wider tumblr community and also empower them to collect ideas -- and then listen to the ideas they collect and act on them.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

We rolled out a significant change to how notes work on reblogs, and the reaction has been strong. We're not going to pretend otherwise. 

First things first: We're reversing the change. Your feedback in comments, emails, and especially reblogs, made clear that the rollout created problems we need to address before moving forward. We also should have communicated this differently from the start, and we didn't.

We still believe there's a better version of how reblogs can work. One that gives every voice in a chain the credit it deserves. But we want to get there with you.

In the coming days we'll share more on how we plan to do that,  including ways to work directly with some of you on this and future changes before they ship.