logoalt Hacker News

Engineering for Bounded Cognition

20 pointsby supermattlast Friday at 12:41 PM3 commentsview on HN

Comments

james_rosstoday at 7:20 AM

This rings very true to me, and it's why I've been mildly obsessed for a decade plus with how to share mental models between people, and now LLMs, of any domain, be it technical, commercial, scientific or anything else. My inspiration was a book called Learning How To Learn by Novak, which TBH is so dry I'm not sure anyone I've recommended it to has actually finished it :) So then I point them to a talk here: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/concept-map/ and an app to help render the shared mental model in plain text accessible to the LLM while providing visual interactivity to the humans here: https://thinkingtools.software/concepticon/

zbytoday at 6:38 AM

It is interesting to compare this to LLMs - they also have the bounded context that you can see as the analogue to our working memory. It can contain enormously more bits of information than the 4 things the article says is the capacity of our working memory - but the 4 things can probably be much more complex internally - they are more like 4 pointers probably.

But at some level context engineering is very similar to what this article talks about.

show 1 reply
ares623today at 7:28 AM

Reminds me of Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk