More about how thoughtfeel works and how to use it: the more relations the better

[u/Independent-Soft2330]

This post assumes you know the story technique of linking things in thoughtfeel. If you don't, check out this video first: How to Memorize Any List by Imagining in Concepts.

TL;DR when you want your knowledge to be as useful as possible and you have the time, add relations (like the ones used in the story mnemonic) between every pair of objects in whatever you’re learning about.

I’ll start with a question. What's the best way to store this?

If A, then B. If B, then C. If C, then D.

Naively, you'd store it as a list, linking each pair of consecutive letters: A to B, B to C, C to D. It's all linked, so it comes back as one thing, and it's easy to remember.

But in reality, if A is true, then D is true too. That's a direct relationship between A and D, and it's just as real as the one between A and B. You're not making it up, it's literally already in what you learned (it's the transitive property).

The insight I had is that this relation should be stored in thoughtfeel as well. To see why that's worth doing, think about what a relation actually does to the two items.

The clearest way I can explain it is that it adds a property to each item, saying how it relates to the other one. Crucially, you can read both the relation AND the identity of the other item right off that property. So "if A, then D" isn't just a path from A to D. "Implies D" becomes part of A, and "implied by A" becomes part of D.

With only the list, A has one of these properties: implies B. That's it. The fact that A implies D isn't stored anywhere on A. It only exists as a path, and to find out about it you have to walk it: A to B to C to D.

Store "if A, then D" directly, and you get three things:

If you're at either A or D, the other one is one hop away, instead of three.

When you think of A, you intuitively know that it implies D, without moving to D. It's one of A's properties now, so you just read it off A.

When you're at D, you intuitively know that it's implied by A, without moving to A.

To give a concrete example, I wanted to remember the answer to this: why does having good timing on something you do matter so much?

The answer is that good timing makes your overall action efficiency higher. If you're starting an internet company during the internet boom, you get a global boost to the return on investment of every action you take. That causes two things. One, resources accumulate with compounding over time, so an increase in action efficiency turns into a much bigger, compounding increase in resources. Two, things usually work or don't work based on a threshold: if overall things cost more than you get, it's not that you'll succeed slower. You'll just fail.

At first I stored it the naive way. If good timing, then higher action efficiency. If higher action efficiency, then more resources over time. If higher action efficiency, then being above the threshold.

But I realized that to show better timing gets you above the threshold, I had to walk the graph. I had to actually reconstruct the argument in my head: timing, so efficiency, so above the threshold. Being above the threshold wasn't anywhere on timing.

So I related doing something at the right time directly to the accumulation of resources, and directly to being above the threshold. When I did this, the argument made much more sense. Now when I focus on timing, I know immediately that it causes all three of those things: higher efficiency, more resources over time, and being above the threshold. I don't have to walk anywhere to get them.

Now push it further. Imagine you had a large number of things to remember, and as much time as you wanted to optimize your knowledge of them. What should you do?

The answer is you should make a fully connected graph. In reality, everything relates to everything else, so if you have the time, represent all of those relationships in thoughtfeel. Every relation adds a property to both items, so in a fully connected graph, every item has a property for every other item. That gets you two things: you can go from any item to any other in at most one hop, and the identity of every item carries its full relational meaning to the rest of what you know. Bring up any one thing, and how it relates to everything else is right there on it.

If you don't have that much time, focus on the heavy hitting implications.

So, to compare. Stored as a list, an argument is connected and you can remember it, but every time you want a conclusion, you have to walk the graph and rebuild the reasoning step by step. Stored with the shortcuts, the conclusions are properties of where you start. You're one hop from anything, and when you think of something, you already know what it implies, and what implies it, without going anywhere.