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What I Think About When I Think About History — LessWrong

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[Epistemic status: I'm sure that this happens in me. Not so sure why; take all my speculations and extrapolations (to AI especially) with a grain of salt.] Ever since learning more about history in the past year or two, I've started having a really weird sensory experience. I can see history. What I mean by this is that when I hear a date when something happened, I can place it in my field of view. The timeline also has different levels of zoom on a sort of logarithmic scale. I think this experience/model all started when I learned the US Presidents using Anki. For every president, I learned the years they served, their picture (picture → name), and the party they belonged to. I did this not because I'm some crazy history buff, but just because I wanted to test how well Anki works. I found that Anki works remarkably well. I was able to memorize all the presidents and becuase of the nature of the spaced-repititon algorithm, still remember most (>95%) today. As a side effect of memorizin

x What I Think About When I Think About History — LessWrong History AI World Modeling Frontpage 4 What I Think About When I Think About History by Jacob G-W 4th Jul 2023 Linkpost for g-w1.github.io 3 min read 4 4 [Epistemic status: I'm sure that this happens in me. Not so sure why; take all my speculations and extrapolations (to AI especially) with a grain of salt.] Ever since learning more about history in the past year or two, I've started having a really weird sensory experience. I can see history. What I mean by this is that when I hear a date when something happened, I can place it in my

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