137 - How Do You Know?

This episode really wanted to make me joyfully participate live in the convo as the third chair. I remembered Destin's thought on wisdom too. Maybe wisdom is the goal instead of Knowledge? Since knowledge is a kind of truth? Anyway, you reminded me on Monty Hall problem in which there are two goals and $1M each behind a curtain. And how when you get more info, like that one curtain has a goat behind it, your odds of being correct increase a bit. Made me think on how since the majority of the time we cannot be exactly correct in life, switching our minds is a good idea, since when we learn more we understand how more often we begin being wrong more than being right. Also shuddering at the idea of future things undoing past things we thought are true, which can and does happen. We all have lots to still learn about the brain. Gamifying remembering with songs (Schoolhouse Rock!) or stories/images is something I really enjoyed pondering on too! Thanks for this thoughtful episode!

Matthew J Palka

Concerning the JTB bit… with Justification + Truth + Belief = Knowledge… why is Truth not on the right side of the “=“ but is on the left? You would think Truth is what the main goal is, not knowledge. I can know plenty of things, but I’d rather have truth be my main objective, otherwise, what’s the point.

So you guys are bringing up a lot of interesting questions. So when you talked about you just know something like a name, or location etc. that is declarative knowledge or memory. And then when you’re reconstructing an event that’s occurred that’s called episodic knowledge or memory. What’s interesting is the declarative knowledge seems to be stored like a factoid that we can just recall. But those factories are associate with other things and sometimes when it degrades we might actually say another fact that’s connected to it instead of the accurate track. That’s part of memory degradation. However when we’re recalling an episodic event we actually are re-creating the memory as we remember it and then that kind of changes the memory because we probably don’t reconstructed exactly as we experienced it for the first time we recall the memory. It’s kind of like that Apollo memory core (saw that on smarter every day) you were talking about that you’re recalling / retrieving data you have to rewrite the memory. So I thought that was interesting. When it comes to remembering peoples names I have the same problem and I figured out what it is because it’s always been curious to me that I can listen to somebody tell a story and they can tell me the names of their family members and I remember the names of their family members but not their name. It’s because when somebody just introduces me they’re just telling me this name and it doesn’t go with anything yet other than their face. But that name doesn’t necessarily mean that face in my head. But when they’ve told me stories about their family that’s like oh yeah I can remember that that name was in the story at this point because the person with that name did X. So what matters is connecting a name to something you know or has meaning and that makes that name have some type of meaning so that it’s remembered. It’s a good pneumonic trick that Matt described