The Patriot

The May issue of Wired magazine carries a story entitled The Memory Master. The article portrays Piotr Wozniak as radically self-absorbed man obsessed with memorization, hardly a role model for classical education. However, Wozniak has discovered some principles that ring true and have empirical support.

One of Wozniak’s principles is that the optimal time to review something is just as you are about to forget it. (Reviewing something while it’s fresh on your mind is not as effective in committing that item to long-term memory. And once you’ve forgotten something, you’re starting over.) It follows that review sessions should not be evenly spaced. After each review, the item is more firmly in your memory, and so it will take longer to reach the next point of nearly forgetting it. After a few such cycles, the item is committed to memory.

A related principle is that the struggle to recall something causes that item to be strengthened in your memory. Reviews that come too quickly and too easily build confidence but do not accomplish as much as exercises that are more challenging. The optimal strategy for memorization does not feel optimal.

See a related article on confusion.

Venture capitalist Paul Graham recently posted an essay entitled Be Good. His advice to start-up companies is

Make something people want. Don’t worry too much about making money.

He realizes this this is ”a description of a charity.” So to be a successful company, it pays to be like a charity. It also goes the other way around:

… it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.

I don’t know that Graham is coming from a biblical worldview, but he has discovered some biblical principles. Note that these principles are like what we find in Proverbs: general statements about how the world often works, not universal laws. Doing good can, and often does, lead to financial success. But doing good can also lead to suffering.

From John W. Gardner:

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often, we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them how to grow their own plants.