Cognitive artifacts

• The following is quoted copy-paste from https://flancia.org/mine/go-links/ pull :

  • Cognitive artifacts are “artificial devices that maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function and that affect human cognitive performance”1. They are objects “made by humans for the purpose of aiding, enhancing, or improving cognition”2. Some examples are calendars, to-do lists, computers — and, with the latter, many of their abstractions.

  • David Krakauer from the Santa Fe Institute volunteers some further useful definitions surrounding cognitive artifacts: they can be competitive or complementary. Complementary cognitive artifacts have an interesting property: as you use them, you become better at the same or a related cognitive task, even in the absence of the artifact. A common example is the abacus: as it’s widely known, people that become proficient at using the abacus for performing arithmetic become better at these tasks even in the absence of an abacus. To some extent, they are able to internalize the abacus. Compare, of course, to the use electronic calculator; lose your calculator and you’re back to square one, or perhaps worse off than if you didn’t ever have it in the first place. Another example: maps are complementary for most people, whereas step-by-step GPS directions are competitive.

  • See where this is going? I’d like to make the argument that go links are complementary cognitive artifacts.

  • To see this, ask yourself: where is the go link stored? It is somewhere in a database or an HTTP server configuration for an HTTP redirect, of course; and, sure, if you lost that data, you would not be able to retrieve the target anymore. In that sense, for that function, they are competitive. But an often used go link is also in your head, and you can easily operate with it in some ways — even while far away from a computer or an internet connection. You can tell people about a go link; you can write it down on a piece of paper; you can tattoo it on you (you should probably only do this if you can trust whoever runs your instance). All in all, the go link can be operated on in many ways by virtue of the fact that you remember it. And you will remember it often, even without trying — you may need to use them for a while to believe this, but setting up and using links in spaces interesting to you (and you tend to link interesting things by definition) is clearly reinforcing in my experience.

  • Note that the alternative to using go links for many use cases is not to save and store the target URLs, but rather not to use URLs at all; to rely on search instead. You can notice this every time you ask for a document, or try to surface a document for someone, and find it takes a number of steps and involves opening up an interface (say, Google Docs) and searching. In this sense, giving a resource a go link replaces a relatively unstable procedure in your working cognitive space with a constant operation — dereferencing the go link retrieves an item. It’s a valuable optimization. In my experience it adds up. Once you see this and “get” go links, they become indispensable. They have sticking power. I miss them when I’m not in the day job and have thus spent some of my free time replicating them with open source tools.