12 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Jan 2023
  3. Apr 2022
    1. It shouldn't escape the mnemonists' attention that while Wozniak recognizes some basic attributes of memory and mnemonics, he obviously isn't steeped in the traditions of the art of memory. Specifically he doesn't seem to be aware of associative methods beyond peg systems and some low level basics which he's come across via Tony Buzan. He's also missing the major system and the method of loci in general. However, when looking at his list of "Twenty rules of formulating knowledge", the majority of the items on the list are either heavily informed by the memory canon within classical rhetoric. Some of the items on the list actually move in an opposite direction from good memory principles (his admonitions against sets and enumeration), but it's because Wozniak is explicitly missing some of the basic mnemotechnical tools.

      Have any writers on space repetition gone beyond Wozniak's state of the art with respect to mnemotechniques before?

      I had started it and lost it due to a technical glitch, but it might be worth highlighting the places where Wozniak's list either directly dovetails or diverges from the arts of memory. His list could be dramatically improved and compressed by brining it closer in line with the fourth canon of rhetoric.

  4. Jan 2022
    1. Eusebius, a historian and bishop of the coastal city of Caesarea, in Palestine, assembled Christian writings in the local library. He also devised a system of cross-references, known as “canon tables,” that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four Gospels—a system that the scholar James O’Donnell recently described as the world’s first set of hot links.
  5. Oct 2021
  6. Jan 2020
    1. I appreciate the directness and succinct quality of these opening paragraphs. I have come to similar conclusions, about literary canons and certainly about the Common Core, but this is expressed so clearly here!

  7. Jul 2019
    1. The position of machine products in the civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of this norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition with other similar usages and customs.
  8. Feb 2019
    1. By this means, his sentiments are perverted; nor have the same beauties and blemishes the same influence upon him, as if he had imposed a proper violence on his imagination, and had for­gotten himself for a moment. So far his taste evi­dently departs from the true standard; and of con­sequence loses all credit and authority

      This is stuffed to the gills with assumptions. And while there is a good deal of boilerplate Enlightenment business going on, Hume also seems to be planting the seeds later authors will reap.

      Hume is requiring of the listener/taster/receiver, which is not new. "You think rap is good because you don't understand 'art' " is a common refrain. The elites have always used exposure to canonical works and forms as a method of discrediting those outside the circle, and have dismissed emerging works and forms as "lowbrow."

      What strikes me about Hume, and perhaps posthumanism (along with Foucault) would find this noteworthy, is that this "violence on" a person is not done by the community, but by the person themself.

    2. a real genius

      this is the sort of reasoning often employed in continuing to teach the Western Canon.

  9. Jan 2019