In Greek mythology, memory is the mother of all nine muses.

We live in an age of lookup, not memory. Lookups are mighty useful, and they’re almost effortless. And the amount of data in today’s world far exceeds anyone’s memory capacity, no matter how prodigious.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that remembering essential facts of the world is a great platform for intuition. Perhaps also for general development of ideas. Holding essential details in one’s head can allow for interesting connections.

Putting it another way: when it comes to essentials, lookup is the intuition killer. Not because lookups stop intuition, but because if you rely on them, there’s less ground for intuitions to spring.

I would love to find a book that describes a set of variables to understand the most objective (ie: less contested) features of our current world, in physical, technological and economic terms. Determining those variables, and choosing good units to express them (for example, terawatts hour for total electricity generation, tens of thousands of square kilometers for Earth areas, and thousands of dollars per person for wealth) would make the task of memorizing the essentials far easier. That, and the mnemonic major system.

What are these essential variables? Claude.ai suggests “facts that describe the scale and structure of major systems”. Perhaps this is just about intution for system design, in the most ample sense.