Hacker News Reader

Comment by joebig | Hacker News Reader

One of Grossman's bound, beautifully handwritten notes, many which were once used by Einstein to get through university exams: https://www.e-manuscripta.ch/zut/content/titleinfo/146744

View on HN

I'm not sure how he writes pages and pages like that, without even crossing out a word because of a mistake? I feel like he must have re-written some of these notes afterwards, but even then, how do you never make a mistake?

My notes looked like crap almost always, but I knew some girls in university where notes looked good while writing and then exactly did this rewriting for perfectionism (and besides that, this written reiteration is likely quite good to ingrain it, like spaced learning).

Any such notes are most likely rewritten form of rougher notes written elsewhere. Then again, it's not difficult to write without making a mistake.

Think about musicians who improvise for quite a long time, playing hundreds of bars, while never playing a wrong note.

I think most likely the notes were the result of re-processing information written down earlier -- if the original content was taken from a class. Nevertheless, that is very impressive -- almost a product of art. I wish I could get one copy.

My parents can write like that (or could when they were not in their 90s yet). School back then put a lot of emphasis on good handwriting.

I on the other hand have handwriting that's barely legible after decades of typing on keyboards.

After I read Moonlighting with Einstein (about mnemonics), I wondered how throughout the ages, technologies shaped the way we think and structure thoughts. This closely relate to it. I assume a 100 years ago, academic had far larger memory capacity than the average peer in today's world. We kinda traded memory for higher CPU frequency (or maybe just decreased our memory, maybe our software is digressing). But this could explain why the chain of thought was so clear to never make a mistake? I wonder if there is a research on this fascinating topic.

A bit of survivorship bias in your question.

You are comparing the absolute best from 100 years ago with the average peer from today.

There were also far far fewer "researchers" back then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com