Have you ever walked into a room and found a vampire?
No, not the sexy kind, but a foul creature with bony limbs and ashen skin? The kind that snarls as you enter, like a beast about to pounce? The kind that roots you to the spot with its sunken, hypnotic eyes, rendering you unable to flee as you watch the hideous thing uncoil from the shadows? Has your heart started racing though your legs refuse to? Have you felt time slow as the creature crosses the room in the darkness of a blink?
Have you shuddered with fear when it places one clawed hand atop your head and another under your chin so it can tilt you, exposing your neck? Have you squirmed as its rough, dry tongue slides down your cheek, over your jaw, to your throat, in a slithering search that's seeking your artery? Have you felt its hot breath release in a hiss against your skin when it probes your pulse—the flow that leads to your brain? Has its tongue rested there, throbbing slightly as if savoring the moment? Have you then experienced a sinking, sucking blackness as you discover that not all vampires feed on blood—some feed on memories?
Well, have you?
Maybe not. But let me rephrase the question:
Have you ever walked into a room and suddenly forgotten why you came in?
Mostly off-topic, but if you find this compelling, you will certainly enjoy reading the short story "There Is No Antimemetics Division" whose chapters are linked from https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
I bought the book and read it based on another HN recommendation. The premise was interesting at first but the writing is trash and it ended up being the worst book I had read in recent memory. As another comment noted, it goes off the rails about halfway through. Not worth wasting paper, in my opinion. FWIW.
Is the encounter with the vampire similar to forgetting why one came into a room because when encountering a vampire in a newly entered room you forget everything before that and focus on the vampire?
The story is implying that whenever this happens to you -- forgetting why you came into a room -- the truth is that you were attacked by a vampire that made you forget the reason you were there, as well as the attack itself.
An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.
Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams...
But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war?
Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.
No, this is not your first day.
I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if walking or not) helps enormously.
For me it happens that I'm doing something on my phone, remember to do something else, switch apps to do it, and literally forget what it is. But by going back or checking the recent apps I find again the "trigger" of the original reminder.
For example, you are checking [social network] and you see a post that reminds you to go searching for [object]. You close the app, open the browser...and you try to remember what were you going to search. Just going back and seeing the social network posts you were watching will remind you again of it.
It's like the though's owner is the other situation/room, and as soon as you forget one you forget the other with it. Quite interesting
Yeah it also happens to me on the computer. Specially funny when I end up distracted by something else, then a hour later come back to the original trigger and remember how I ended up on the last hour long rabbit hole and what I was actually going to do.
Probably a timeless phenomenon. But I wouldn’t be as good as Henry. I’d take the bucket to the well and eventually shout back up the way, “there’s a hole...!”
(What do you think he needed the water for anyway?)
In Mr. Belafonte’s live recording of it, Dear Liza asks Henry to fetch the water before he starts singing. What she needs it for could be any number of household uses - cooking, cleaning (oneself or dishes or floors), laundry…
> I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if walking or not) helps enormously.
Definitely. My wife and I have a running joke about it. I'll walk into the room, she says "What's up?" and I say "trying to find something and I forgot what it was. Hold on, let me go back to my office to remember."
This works for me to an absurd degree. I sometimes remember, hours later, that I had some idea e.g. while showering or while brewing coffee. Returning to the bathroom or kitchen respectively helps me remember these ideas.
TOTP 2FA is terrible for this. I’ll sign into a website, pick my phone up to read the TOTP code, and instead end up on HN or Signal or something. Put the phone down after a couple of minutes, look back up to my computer screen with the 2FA prompt and go “oh yeah, that’s why I looked at my phone”
That happens probably 50% of the time. And I wish that was an exaggeration.
This is exactly why I've eventually ended up with almost no notifications on my phone. I am way too susceptible to being distracted mid-task, and the only way I've found to effectively combat that is by aggressively removing those distractions.
Now if only I could turn off the "you must investigate X" shouting my brain randomly throws at me WITHOUT external stimuli.
Why don't more sites ask for the username/password and the TOTP code on the same form? Is there a downside to that approach? I've only seen it done that way rarely.
Is there no way to stop Chrome on Android from remembering all open tabs? I find this one of the things that causes distraction from what I was going to do.
Living in a shotgun house has convinced me this effect is very real. When I have to walk from the front to the back, I have developed the habit of saying what I'm going to do as I walk through each of the five doors I have to pass through; this puts my intent into a different mental pipeline, that's much more resistant to being flushed out when I pass through a door.
If my husband is at home then he tends to get in on the act, leading to conversations like "I should set a timer for five minutes." "You should set a timer for five minutes!" "I'm gonna set a timer for five minutes." "Didja set that timer for five minutes?" "I just set a timer for five minutes!" when I'm crossing from the kitchen to the living room and leaving some water to boil.
Maybe a counter-anecdote? I live in a studio layout house. The only interior door/doorway is to the bathroom. Yet I regularly forget things between my kitchen counter and my desk, or sometimes even between my stove and the counter across from it, despite having generally strong short and long-term recall.
I had chalked it up to the familiarity of the places. I see the same things inside all the time, so one day's moments blend into the previous days' similar moments.
I find a related thing happens in places I visit a lot, like my church, where each time I go, the previous experiences layer on top of it. There just aren't quite enough of them there to crowd out what I'm trying to do this time.
That’s not a counter-anecdote. The linked article describes how this is about psychological barriers which can align with physical barriers but doesn’t have to be. Such as application windows on a computer desktop.
What you’re describing is still a physical barrier but it’s not a literal door way.
I clicked to add a comment, but as soon as the page changed I forgot what I was going to write ...
----
Seriously though, happens to me all the time. Not sure if just getting dotty. The connection between spatial presence and memory is an interesting one; see also Memory Palaces[1]
It makes me wonder if it's different for people totally blind since birth. Is the visual aspect important, or just the "spacial-ness"?
I was joking with someone who was asking about getting a walking pad for their standing desk that it would be psychologically disastrous for this reason, citing the ancient Greeks memorizing epic poems by walking places to make memory associations. Why would one purposely want to have an association made between something as mundane/regular as walking with working at a screen?!
Paraphrasing a theory I read ... somewhere;
it comes from when we were furtive subterranean critters,
where entering and leaving burrows
resulted in the invalidation of whatever threat just was,
(example: birds outside, snakes underground)
and that clearing the decks to more efficiently deal with different threats in the new context
included dumping short term memory.
I like that theory. I don't think we give evolution and our animal past enough credit for many of the psychological things we encounter in our lives.
That's actually what was most interesting to me about the ringworld series. Just an open conversation about how evolution has impacted action (however hokey it might be in the books, and ignoring the rishathra).
The "doorway effect" seems to be one expression of that larger phenomenon in which memory recall is largely influenced by the context in which it was encoded. It's the reason that if you're cramming for an exam, to the extent you can recreate the exact conditions of your study environment to mirror those of the test-taking environment, you'll do better.
I think it's a threat response. When you enter a different area your mind spikes for a moment as you (un)consciously scan around, and whatever thought you were tenuously holding is in jeopardy of getting pushed out. Watch a cat or dog, particularly those that spend a lot of time outdoors and don't take the world for granted; when a door is opened for them they'll step in, stop dead, look around, sniff the air, listen, and then get on with their business. Evolutionary wiring.
so a weird mix of being reminded about something that was about forgetting something. And it was one of those rare New Yorker cartoons that was actually funny.
A perhaps related effect is that when I leave the house I always forget one or two things, and I remember them usually once I start the car engine. So then I turn off the car and go back to my apartment and grab the remaining items. But I recently learned that I can imagine leaving the house, and it helps me remember the final things I forgot!
I also get this very strong feeling of having forgotten something when I get into my car.
It used to happen almost daily. I would get into my car reverse out of my driveway. I would drive towards my workplace for about 2 to 5 minutes until I hit first red traffic light and as I'm waiting at traffic lights I would get this sinking feeling that I'd forgotten to close my garage door.
This is despite the fact I do not have a remotely operated garage door it is manual. I have to reverse out of garage, get out of my car, manually close the garage door and get back into car and reverse out of driveway.
I would wrack my short term memory while sitting at traffic lights and have no recollection of closing the garage door. It was as if my journey (in my memory) would always begin with turning out of my driveway.
Nowadays I force myself to look over shoulder and check the garage door as I turn out of my driveway and onto the street.
Yeah I have that with locking the front door! It normally auto-locks and I just need to make sure it is latched and I need to check the handle to make sure I didn’t have the auto-lock off. But this latch-check happens so fast (I do always do it) that I will often forget. I have never gone back to check and found it unlocked but I still go back and check often. But for me this happens when I’m 100 feet away at the car so it’s not too bad.
To be fair, almost everything is amplified by psychedelics. It's like their primary effect is turning everything into some sort of feedback loop.
When I tried LSD, I'd constantly forget where I was in the middle of sentences, because everything happening in my brain made it feel like way more time was passing than was actually. As a result it was harder to recall the topic of the sentence because it felt like many many topics ago.
I would describe it as "an entire universe happening each instant". It was honestly kind of cool.
Writing was far easier, because I'd always be looking at what I've already written, rather than trying to rely on my memory of what I've spoken.
I've had to introduce this to my friends at work. Where I sit, I can't have my phone with me. So sometimes it'll take me four tries to leave the room, grab my phone, and actually remember to do the thing that I meant to do. Usually I get back to my desk after doomscrolling for a few minutes and remember.
Sorry to hijack this, but a related problem of mine is I can't picture myself going through a doorway. Like the brain just doesn't compute for some reason.
A long time ago I read that if you are awakened and want to fall back asleep, you should picture yourself turning around, going through a door to your basement stairway and descending the steps towards the dark basement.
I tried forever to do this and couldn't, and thought it was something about this scenario specifically. But then years later, I learned about aphantasia and realized I can't actually picture anything at all. The doorway wasn't special.
I'm quite adept at visualization, as I'm a visual learner (visualization comes more naturally to me than any other form of thinking) AND visualization is something I regularly, explicitly do in order to prepare for rock climbing.
Visualizing myself going through a doorway is difficult even for me. I think it's in part because it requires some creativity (compare "visualize yourself going through a doorway" as opposed to "visualize yourself going through the doorway of your childhood house"). The salient conceptual feature of a doorway is that it goes somewhere and so the prompt basically is asking you to imagine something without explicitly asking you. Even your example of the basement stairway is much easier for me to visualise, because the doorway has stairs after it.
Interesting phenomenon. Seems to be a thing.
I guess it's because how memory is encoded spatially and in the middle of changing places there would either be no clear signal due to multiple neuron parties firing or the brain is busy with context change in that transition and never builds strong memories of crossing a particular doorway.
> Memory is organized around specific events or episodes, such as attending a lecture or having a family meal, rather than being a continuous stream interrupted by sleep.
For some reason that sentence really irked the critical thinker in me. As if they have the schema for the human brain.
The wiki is worded far too strongly. The abstract of the cited research (c. 2000) describes it as a “model of autobiographical memory”. As is often said, models are not perfectly accurate representations of reality, but are useful representations of reality. How this model is used today - or if it’s even still considered relevant - I can’t speak to.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm walking in a crowded area, and as I follow someone through a doorway or other transition space, they stop and look around.
The doorway or (whatever) is already a natural traffic bottleneck. And these people are making it worse by stopping right in the middle of it.
I suspect it's because of this psychological effect. But it's so annoying that many people's response seems to be to stop in their tracks. Okay maybe you've forgotten why you went through this doorway. But have you also suddenly forgotten that you're in the middle of a crowd of people trying to move around? Apparently so.
[Spoilers - To avoid people having to watch the whole video, it's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about how clapping your hands against your thighs helps you locate books on a bookshelf. Towards the end of the video it shows how making a 'scissors' motion with your fingers helps you find scissors.
Although a joke, a physical motion like patting your flanks or making a scissors motion can help you keep your planned activity in mind]
> Meaning that the effect must be fairly strong to be observable in two studies with n=50?
Do what now? Isn't the problem that it could have randomly happened (especially if people did a bunch of other similar studies that didn't observe an effect, and only these two were published)?
For a publishable effect at smaller n, the effect size needs to be fairly large. If you have a huge number of people in a trial, you can get statistical significance of negligible consequence.
The problem with a single study of n=50 isn't the 50, it's that it's a single study.
That's not quite right. If the study is underpowered at n = 50 --- which is extremely likely --- statistically significant estimates are likely to be inflated. And as power declines, they also become more likely to have the wrong sign (e.g., the study will yield a positive estimate even though the true effect is negative).
Context changes impose substantial cognitive costs, disrupting reaction times, perception, and attention maintenance, and yes, memory.
Context has a huge role in memory, and context shifts can lead you to not recognize familar people, like encountering your college professor at a dinner party.
The ability to perform in spite of context changes improves over childhood into adolescence, but the costs remain there and will become more pronounced as working memory loads or task demands increase.
Those who design GUIs should really take this into account. When, for example, clicking on a menu replaces the whole screen, like a version of Windows experimented with on the start menu, the complete context change imposes real costs on cognition.
I apologize for not providing citations, but a google scholar search will quickly provide relevant materials; this comment was written from what I learned in my PhD studies on the development of memory.
I've found a very good way of forcing myself to return to a particular place in the house: leave my glasses there. This also reduces the doorway effect in terms of stopping me from doing things that require glasses when I end up somewhere else.
(I'm long sighted and need glasses for reading and precision tasks).
How is the theory falsifiable? What if I pass between two rooms that look identical? Has this been studied? (It seems to me that the underlying claim of episodic memory might not be able to tell a difference.)
If they didn't observe it, that would provide some level of falsifiability?
> What if I pass between two rooms that look identical? Has this been studied? (It seems to me that the underlying claim of episodic memory might not be able to tell a difference.)
There's a study listed on that page which observed that re-entering the same room did not improve recall.
Observation alone doesn’t necessarily give falsifiability. This requires an interaction of clear terminology with physics. In short, I was prodding at their definition of “doorways”.
Communication involves active participation from the audience, in that a receptive and curious audience can be expected to make a good-faith effort to intuit what a communicator means when parts of the communication are left vague. This of course means that miscommunication is always possible, but the alternative is being paralyzed by overcommunicating details which are in most cases obvious.
If you are hypothesizing that some element of the doorway might change their results, that's a totally valid hypothesis, but you've not given enough information for me to intuit what elements of the doorway you think might change results, i.e. you're not doing a better job than the original authors of the study in communicating.
And notably, underspecifying what they mean by "doorway" doesn't invalidate the study, it just limits what conclusions can be drawn from their observations. I feel I have enough information about what they mean by doorway to draw useful conclusions from these studies. Of course it's possible I'm wrong (i.e. miscommunication has occurred), but you haven't communicated anything to me that would lead me to believe there's an important element of their definition of "doorway" that I'm missing.
None of what I'm about to say is not meant to be harsh or insulting... I'm simply sharing a probabilistic estimate of how I view the situation so far. How you react will further refine my perspective.
I've developed antibodies to the word "pedantic", particularly when one leads with it. It seems that when people use the word, it has a tendency to make discussion harder. How often have you seen someone use the word and the conversation develop further into something interesting? Versus the opposite?
Using the word "pedantic" often gets perceived as a kind of slight. It is hard to say if the speaker realizes this consciously or not. It feels to me like it conveys a subtext, as if "why are you being so detailed about this?". This goes along with a general attitude of conveying less curiosity and more certainty. Speaking for myself, on forums such as this, I'd rather learn about other's perspectives and reasoning rather than discount them.
I don't like using "pedantic" when I want to encourage curious conversation. Speaking personally, when I hear it, it gives me the impression the other person is not demonstrating a mindset or vocabulary for the kind of communication that I find most valuable. I can relate: I'm hard for people to pin down: I've worked in too many industries and lived in too many places to be easily understood by any one frame of reference. The "me" of five years ago would have a hard time understanding the "me" of today. I'll give you an example: tell someone you think free will is an illusion and watch people's reactions. :)
I recognize what I'm saying, to some ears, could be construed as being anti-science or perhaps even pro-conspiracy theories. I can assure you that I don't hold such positions. I somewhat aspire to be a perfectly Bayesian agent but fall well short of course.
I simply want to add that I have a low-to-middling confidence in psychology based studies in general, at least out of the gate, until I dig into (or find someone else I trust who has) the study. You might say this is my attempt to strike a balance between epistemic optimism and pessimism. My "alarm bells" ring louder for studies that have some kind of "appealing" aspect like; e.g. "oh, that's why I forgot something when I walk into a new room". We simply cannot discount how many people latch onto studies because the result is self-serving.
As I get older, I see _tremendous_ value in considering large amounts of information but giving new information a very high _tentativeness_ score. I have a huge aversion to the i.e "recent information being novel and interesting effect". Some might call me too cautious -- people in the Silicon Valley ecosystem often would. People in more traditional industries would say exactly the opposite; e.g. that I'm "too worried" about ethics and AI.
How does the above sound to you?
Now, some particulars. I'm no expert, but I want to show why I'm skeptical after having read some details from Wikipedia article. It mentions two studies, both from Notre Dame, consisting of (A) 41 people and (B) 51 people. Then, it has an entry for another Notre Dame study without detail.
Then:
> In a 2021 study, researchers at Bond University tried to replicate the doorway effect in four experiments: in both physical rooms and virtual rooms, and both with and without the participants doing a “distractor task” (counting backwards). In one experiment -- in virtual rooms, and with a distractor task -- doorways caused a statistically significant increase in false positives (i.e., false memories), but not false negatives (i.e., forgetting). In the other three experiments, doorways had no effect. The researchers suggested that this was consistent with real life, in which "we might occasionally forget a single item we had in mind after walking into a new room but, crucially, this usually happens when we have other things on our mind . . . ."
This is the kind of replication problem that I'm talking about. The kind that makes credible and prolific psychologists be very careful to caveat their field. To quote Paul Bloom w.r.t. the field of psychology's state of understanding of the human mind, "A lot of our findings are not as robust as we thought they were" (from "What Do We Know About Our Minds?" with Sam Harris).
> I've developed antibodies to the word "pedantic", particularly when one leads with it. It seems that when people use the word, it has a tendency to make discussion harder. How often have you seen someone use the word and the conversation develop further into something interesting? Versus the opposite?
You're describing a correlation but haven't established causation. Is the causality:
someone using the word "pedantic" -> uninteresting conversation
Or could the causality be:
person being pedantic -> uninteresting conversation
AND
person being pedantic -> someone using the word "pedantic"
?
I have many experiences where a pedantic person shuts down a conversation and nobody uses the word "pedantic", so I feel there's strong evidence that pedantry, not the use of the word "pedantic", makes conversations uninteresting.
> Using the word "pedantic" often gets perceived as a kind of slight. It is hard to say if the speaker realizes this consciously or not. It feels to me like it conveys a subtext, as if "why are you being so detailed about this?". This goes along with a general attitude of conveying less curiosity and more certainty. Speaking for myself, on forums such as this, I'd rather learn about other's perspectives and reasoning rather than discount them.
With love, I'd like to gently ask: is that what you think you were doing when you discounted the researcher's perspective because they didn't define the word "doorway"?
In my experience, whether or not something is a slight has been irrelevant to whether it's true, so perceiving things as slights is counterproductive to maintaining an attitude of curiosity. Particularly, I'm curious about what I can do better.
It's worth noting that the reason I'm recognizing your behavior as pedantic here is that I have received the feedback that I'm prone to being pedantic, and as a result, I've worked very hard to recognize when I am being pedantic. I say this because I hope you'll recognize that I'm giving you feedback which I found helpful to myself and hope will help you, not because I think I'm better than you or I'm trying to hurt you.
I'd venture you may have received this feedback too, and received it as a slight or shutting down the conversation.
Indeed given some of the things you're referencing such as "perfect Bayesian agent", believing free will is an illusion, and Sam Harris, I strongly suspect we have very similar intellectual backgrounds.
> I don't like using "pedantic" when I want to encourage curious conversation. Speaking personally, when I hear it, it gives me the impression the other person is not demonstrating a mindset or vocabulary for the kind of communication that I find most valuable.
The person you are communicating also has a mindset and vocabulary for the kind of communication that they find most valuable. You don't get to force everyone into your communication preferences, and attempting to do so is a surefire way to prevent communication entirely. Even if your communication preferences are objectively better than theirs (which is a real possibility!), the content of the communication is likely much more valuable than the means of communication.
My experience is that the most valuable communication is a product of collaboration between both parties to build a common terminology. That collaboration can't happen if you insist on your own preferred forms of communication. Maybe if you could get the other person to use your form of communication it would be better, but you can't ever get anyone to communicate exactly how you want, so that's irrelevant. And notably, your preferred communication probably isn't perfect in every way.
> I simply want to add that I have a low-to-middling confidence in psychology based studies in general, at least out of the gate, until I dig into (or find someone else I trust who has) the study.
Same.
Part of my objection to insisting on a stricter definition of the word "doorway" is that it doesn't address any of the reasons my confidence is low. If I have 51% confidence in a study of doorways, it's not particularly interesting to me to improve that to 51% confidence in a doorways between wooden doorframes painted white that connect two rooms of equal size within a 20,000 square foot residential property that costs $70k in a top 10% school district. Specificity isn't adding anything pragmatic here because I still can't base most decisions on such low-confidence conclusions. If anything, the conclusion is less useful, because it only applies to such a narrow situation.
But, you asked about falsifiability--and I think that's a pretty different topic from confidence.
I appreciate your response. I'm thinking it over. Here are some thoughts for now...
For myself and anyone (like you) who thinks about things more deeply, being called pedantic is unsatisfying. Why? Probably some combination of (a) it feels like a lack of engagement at the same level; (b) possibly a lack of intellectual capability and/or interest in the other party; (c) possibly indicative of a "rougher" personality -- could be merely a more direct style of conversation, but could also be indicative of a lack of awareness of social dynamics. For someone like me interested in vetting conversation partners, all of the former points are useful to gather signal. They are all tentative and subject to revision. But it is useful to recognize when someone else's criticism is likely being driven by aspects _other than_ the content.
I like how you introduced other related concepts; in particular you touched on the idea of being charitable. To try to expound a bit: if someone wants to say that I've _uncharitably_ characterized another position, I think that is worth saying -- doing so is a specific claim that I think works better to advance conversation.
> It's worth noting that the reason I'm recognizing your behavior as pedantic here is that I have received the feedback that I'm prone to being pedantic, and as a result, I've worked very hard to recognize when I am being pedantic. I say this because I hope you'll recognize that I'm giving you feedback which I found helpful to myself and hope will help you, not because I think I'm better than you or I'm trying to hurt you.
I appreciate your intention. First, may I ask what is your meaning of "being pedantic"? I have my own answer at the bottom of this book-sized message. Second, I have a concern that people who are being less thoughtful "brow-beat" those who are being more thoughtful by calling them "pedantic". I see some possibility that you've internalized this brow-beating and now are "passing it along" in the hopes of being helpful. It is helpful to think about, though what I do with it might not be what you expect. :)
I do think there are sensible definitions of "being pedantic", but I'm very reluctant to label someone else's comment as being such.
I think we'd agree: some people don't want to spend the effort in arguing against a comment -- that's fine. Even with your point about causation in mind, I don't see a need or benefit to label the post they disagree with as being _pedantic_. Calling someone's else comment _pedantic_ is rather easy, but offering constructive criticism requires more effort.
Just to explain my semantics, here is the root word of pedantic:
> pedant : a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning: the royal palace (some pedants would say the ex-royal palace).
Keeping this in mind, thinking about your causation point... I think the underlying basis relies on a deeper question; namely, "What level of detail are we trying to explain here?" If one part is only interested in a relatively granular model, they might accuse someone else of being pedantic. But that other person may be seeking a more granular model. My point: rather than calling "pedantic" I think using terminology around "what are we trying to explain?" advances the conversation with minimal risk of slighting the other person.
Lastly, yes, I'm a critical reader of Harris and his guests. I get the impression he puts in a good faith effort to get at deeper truths, though I disagree with some particulars, as informed and reasonable people probably should. Again, I appreciate your comment, thanks!
I'd say that what I meant by "being pedantic" was something like "being unwilling to intuit aspects of what the other person is saying". This requires the other person to put a lot of effort into modifying their communication to clarify details, just so that you don't have to put effort into intuiting details or accept that things might be more vague than you like.
Another form of pedantry is when people insist on a specific definition of the word, when it might be possible to intuit that the other person means something else, even if they aren't using a more common definition of the words. Again, it's requiring a lot of effort from the other person so that you don't have to put in the effort to figure out what they might have meant.
The point is, it's exhausting to talk to someone who is being pedantic, because you have to put in all the effort to be understood while they put in very little effort to understand. That's of course not their intent in most cases--when I relapse into pedantry it's often because I want to be sure I understand the person, not because I want to maliciously exhaust them. But the best intentions don't fix the problem that it makes me hard to talk to.
Of course, the alternative to "being pedantic" is that you're going to intuit some details, and sometimes you'll get them wrong. But that's just a risk of communication: it's impossible to communicate with 100% accuracy.
Trying to communicate with extreme accurately has a lot of cost: it takes a lot of effort. It's not necessary reasonable to expect that effort of the people you want to communicate with. Case in point: I simply don't have time to continue this conversation much farther if I'm going to be expected to write out posts of this length each time to define every little detail of how I'm defining each word I use. That's not a decision I'm making because of any sort of animosity, it's a fact of my current workload.
It goes both ways: there are parts of your post I can't engage with because again, I don't have the time.
And, defining every little detail of everything hits a maximum eventually. You can write in immense detail, but eventually you'll hit the maximum ability of your audience to take it in. There are almost certainly aspects of this post which you are going to miss, simply because I wrote a lot. It's often the case that pedantry is just asking for more clarification than the pedant can actually absorb.
Additionally, there are other solutions to miscommunication than throwing a bunch of up-front effort at communicating. Often when a miscommunication happens because the other person intuited something incorrectly, they'll say something that gives you a chance to correct the miscommunication.
That's psychology and cognitive science. It can be meaningful, insightful, at times revelatory, all while suffering from a degree of non-reproducibility and confirmation bias.
As another commenter mentions it's seemingly the same phenomenon as why 'memory palaces' work for memorizing arbitrary things (among other similarly effective mnemonics) and this article suggests something similar is also occurring unconsciously for random thoughts and gets disrupted by such actions.
Such spacial-based memory triggers I've also seen demonstrated by magician/skeptic Derren Brown, where recall of the participant is manipulated via location-based touch or gestures (both for remembering and forgetting things).
This is also probably part of the reason why sleep specialists say you should set aside your bedroom for nothing but sleeping and sex. I think walking through a doorway loads the context of the new room into your brain, so you forget the stuff associated with the context of the room you just walked out of. If the context of your bedroom just has sleeping in it, you're less likely to have unwanted thought running around in your mind while you're trying to get to sleep.
This is why I advocate separation of work space and personal space, especially when working from home. It allows my mind to reset after physically leaving a space designated for work. If I don't, my mind will linger on work way more than I need to. At a minimum, I'd like to have separate PC for work, and even a separate desk for work. Ideally, I'd like a separate room for work but I don't have the luxury of having another empty room.
Widely known in the restaurant industry as the walk-in effect. You go into the walk-in fridge and then forget what you went in there to get. You go back to your station to remember.
I'd never heard of this effect before but it reminds me of a feature I've aways wanted for ios which is, in order to unlock your phone, you need to type in what you're planning to do (and maybe for how long), so you can refer to that or get notified when your memory inevitably blanks and you get sidetracked.
This is super interesting and nice to understand a phenomenon I have experienced, so thank you.
I have to admit that I thought the article was going to be about a different psychological quirk that I have noticed; the one where, for reasons unknown to me, people will congregate in hallways or stand in doorways to talk.
Does anyone else see this? Particularly at large gatherings like parties or company events? Is there a name for it?
Indeed. People are gravitating towards spaces that make them feel comfortable and safe, subconsciously or not, when engaging in the sort of intimate interactions that an in-depth conversation can be. One practical consideration that probably also often plays a part is acoustics, literally how easy it is to hear and to be heard.
Very interesting to think about, considering my anxiety tends to push me in the opposite direction, so I favore less crowded spaces or less physical closeness to other people.
The acoustic component is worth diving into, to me, since this is a big trigger. If the space is too loud, or cacophonous, I end up starting to lose higher-order functioning and have to vacate or wear my earplugs/noise-canceling headphones and just cut myself off from the sound (makes my job pretty awkward at times, tbh)
Small spaces amplify this acoustic aversion for me, especially when there are already people occupying the area. It's not claustrophobia, more of a "my brain will try to focus on all sounds at once and get sensory overload, so I probably should not go/stay there."
Yeah, the acoustics definitely depend on the space, but often it's easier to talk next to a wall, or of course if there's a main source of noise, somewhere away from it, like in a hallway.
Similar effect for full page context-switches. Example was the Windows menu when they made the windows key open a full screen view. Could never remember.
The "doorway effect" is a more everyday phenomenon. Interesting that the idea that transitions result in disorientation scales from the mundane to the religious.
This was one of the reasons people hated the Windows 8 start screen. You go to access something while keeping what's on screen in your mind but the entire thing is now replaced with a sea of icons and text on a blue background. Such a drastic change in view has close to the effect that a power outage does.
As someone with ADHD which was unmedicated far beyond what was reasonable, passing through a doorway still has some mild but primordial terror, as I remember a time when walking through a door was like being awoken from unconsciousness in an unfamiliar day.
... Or pressing the start key in Vista and seeing a wall of live tile distractions.
In my experience the start page idea was a software implementation of "Doorway Effect". I always had to return to the desktop to have my "refrigerator logic" spin up.
It's almost as though your physical surroundings are your true phenotype, creating a whole-brain activation with memory cues that disappear when you leave the room. The edges of the self are blurred.
Sidequest: Ask yourself, if now after forgetting the allegedly important _what_ weighted your mind (laden/burdend) before, gives you something like to feel bestowed 'freedom'?
This seems sort of intuitive to me so I’m inclined to believe it, but at this point can we really believe any of these sort of pop-behavioral studies with interesting quirky effects?
It seems like the entire field is so overwhelmed with fake data and bullshit that it’s hard to separate anything that might actually be real.
This is a weird comment. The Wikipedia article has a comprehensive list of sources underneath, and the comments on this post are full of people saying "this exact thing happens to me".
Consider an acute care facility. Patient care supplies (IV bags, IV sets, catheters, dressing supplies) are usually in a side room called the supply room.
Ours was in a room behind a doorframe without a door. If I was getting dressing supplies in a state of flow/on auto-pilot, more often than not, I would blank as soon as I went through that doorway and would have to actively think exactly what the hell I was there for.
Many psychological studies sound convincing but are hard to replicate and/or based on low sample sizes or poor experimental design. Seeing a plausible mechanism underlying a theory isn’t enough. So I’m writing this comment as a placeholder. Who here has checked the source studies?
Roughly speaking what is the total number of people in all studies pertaining to this claimed effect?
There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of context and context changes on many different forms of cognition, going back decades. Your posts really adds little of value, and relies on some over-broad stereotypes of the soundness of psychology research. Do some google scholar searches.
> There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of context and context changes on many different forms of cognition, going back decades. Your posts really adds little of value, and relies on some over-broad stereotypes of the soundness of psychology research. Do some google scholar searches.
In four words, the above comment is: harsh, judgmental, not curious.
Below, I hope to (a) offer another point of view about how your comment may be perceived and (b) demonstrate to you that the sample sizes and replicated studies regarding the Doorway Theory are unimpressive.
First, you made this discussion personal, and it wasn't particularly constructive. It is hard to say what goals you might have, but if your goal is curious conversation, I don't think this is the way. Do you? What is your experience/philosophy/science of productive conversation? Based only on this interaction, I wonder if you may not have thought about this very much and/or you aren't putting it into practice and/or you're taking something out on me.
Second, the word "stereotypes" gets casually thrown around. Empirically, how often would you say that using it advances constructive conversation?
Third, using this definition of stereotype: "a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing." ... why would you think my view of this is "fixed" or unchanging? I don't see a rational reason for seeing that based on what I wrote.
Fourth, for people that think in a Bayesian way -- and I think such a model is fairly useful in modeling how people actually operate -- we all have priors. Please do not accuse me of stereotyping when I'm only sharing a prior. One key question is what we do with them as we gain more information.
Fifth, on what basis would you validly say that my prior regarding my confidence in psychological studies is an "over-broad stereotype"? I've tried, but I don't think you can. You can disagree with my prior -- that's fair game. And we can talk empirically and rationally about how/why we have different priors.
Sixth, your comment shifts away the context I intended (I hope it was clear given the context, but maybe it was not) and criticizes a straw man. You wrote "There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of context and context changes on many different forms of cognition, going back decades". Perhaps this literature is largely sound and replicable. But that's not what I was referring to here; I was discussing the Doorway Effect in particular. From what I've seen so far, there were two early studies, both at Notre Dame, consisting of about 90 people in total. This alone certainly isn't enough in my mind to give high credence to the results. At least one subsequent attempt to replicate was mixed. So, please don't tell me to "do some google scholar searches". That is rather presumptive.
Would you like to continue to discussion on a better foot going forward?
I'll add further an apology. I was being rude, and I am sorry for that. It is easy to start responding in the way I did after my field, populated with many serious, careful, and brilliant researchers, gets regularly dismissed flippantly with such things as: "psychology isn't a real science, psychology isn't replica-table, psychology researchers don't know the scientific method, don't know statistics, are just p-hackers, etc etc etc, when you know that is only true for a subset of scientists, while the best tend to be experts, or collaborate with experts on the various topics needed to conduct serious science. So, please just understand where I am coming from, and do please accept my apology for my rude and presumptive demeanor.
Thank you; I appreciate this. I understand that too many people flippantly dismiss or don't have the ability to properly appreciate the hard work of doing science.
*"Many psychological studies sound convincing but are hard to replicate and/or based on low sample sizes or poor experimental design."*
Many physics, chemistry, and computer science studies suffer from these as well. Science is hard, and there are a lot of constraints on research. Typically the first finding is made with limited funding, meaning limited ability to do the study right. Also, usually there is no perfect study, just a balancing of different strengths and weaknesses. That is why in psychology and neuroscience research, we talk about converging evidence. 'Converging' here means evidence employing multiple modalities, measures, and procedures. This might mean combining evidence from animal and human models, molecular and neuroimaging, etc. Its messy stuff, and every approach has tradeoffs.
*Seeing a plausible mechanism underlying a theory isn’t enough. So I’m writing this comment as a placeholder. Who here has checked the source studies?*
You are writing a comment as a placeholder for what exactly? So far in your comment, it just seems like an excuse to bash on Psychology research, which is too often a cheap thrill here on HN, and usually from someone who has read little serious psychological research save the most flashy in-the-news findings.
*Roughly speaking what is the total number of people in all studies pertaining to this claimed effect?*
This appears to be a logical question, and within the immediate context, understandable. However, the more informed context would understand that the so-called "Doorway Effect" is just a specific example of a more general and prevalent cognitive phenomenon: The role of spatio-temporal context in memory and cognition.
You ask for specific sample sizes from studies that use tasks that look at the effect passing through doors, and well there may be just an of a few hundred.
But, I being somewhat knowledgeable int he field (PhD in memory research) would instead ask: What is it about doorways that could cause such an effect. Ah yes, it involves a change in the spatiotemporal context. What is the evidence that context changes impose costs to memory function?
Well: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=cont...
So many, for so long.. Its a HUGE literature.
Point is, its not about doors, and this is just one finding in a long list of similar findings that created CONVERGING evidence of a phenomenon.
A great, thought-provoking comment. This makes me quite aware that I don't yet have a great theoretical/conceptual foundation for how Bayesian reasoning for one particular experiment links up with experiments that are generalizations of it. In case this sounds too vague, what I mean is this: if a generalized theory has considerable evidence, what bearing does it have one more targeted and narrow experiments? This might be clear or even obvious, but I'm not recollecting written examples of how to run the numbers.
No, not the sexy kind, but a foul creature with bony limbs and ashen skin? The kind that snarls as you enter, like a beast about to pounce? The kind that roots you to the spot with its sunken, hypnotic eyes, rendering you unable to flee as you watch the hideous thing uncoil from the shadows? Has your heart started racing though your legs refuse to? Have you felt time slow as the creature crosses the room in the darkness of a blink?
Have you shuddered with fear when it places one clawed hand atop your head and another under your chin so it can tilt you, exposing your neck? Have you squirmed as its rough, dry tongue slides down your cheek, over your jaw, to your throat, in a slithering search that's seeking your artery? Have you felt its hot breath release in a hiss against your skin when it probes your pulse—the flow that leads to your brain? Has its tongue rested there, throbbing slightly as if savoring the moment? Have you then experienced a sinking, sucking blackness as you discover that not all vampires feed on blood—some feed on memories?
Well, have you?
Maybe not. But let me rephrase the question:
Have you ever walked into a room and suddenly forgotten why you came in?
https://old.reddit.com/r/shortscarystories/comments/1inv0n/n...