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Brendon_Wong comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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Hello! I’m a 15 year old sophomore in high school, living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was introduced to rationality and Less Wrong while interning at Leverage Research, which was about a month ago.
I was given a free copy of Chapters 1-17 of HPMOR during my stay. I was hooked. I finished the whole series in two weeks and made up my mind to try and learn what it would be like being Harry.
I decided to learn rationality by reading and implementing The Sequences in my daily life. The only problem was, I discovered the length of the Eliezer’s posts from 2006-2010 was around around 10 Harry Potter books. I was told it would take months to read, and some people got lost along the way due to all the dependencies.
Luckily I am very interested in self improvement, so I decided that I should learn speed reading to avoid spending months dedicated solely to reading The Sequences. After several hours of training, I increased my reading speed (with high comprehension) five times, from around 150 words per minute to 700 words per minute. At that speed, it will take me 33.3 hours to read The Sequences.
It seems like most people advise reading The Sequences in chronological order in ebook form. Is using this ebook a good way to read The Sequences? Also, If I could spend 5 seconds to a minute after each blog post doing anything, what should I do? I was thinking of making some quick notes for myself to remember everything I read, perhaps with a spaced repetition system, or figuring out all the dependencies to smooth the way for future readers, perhaps leading to the easier creation of a training program...
Thanks for all your help, and I look forward to contributing to Less Wrong in the future!
Figure out how you would explain the main idea of the post to a smart friend.
Thanks! Just curious, how come you chose that over simply taking short 10 second notes allowing me to memorize all the main ideas?
IIRC notetaking is supposed to work less well than explaining something to others. I don't know about imagining how to explain something to others.
I would imagine that actually explaining it out loud to a rubber duck is better than imagining explaining it to a friend, for the same reasons that it is a common debugging practice. Actually putting something into words makes weak spots in understanding obvious in a way that imagination can glide over.
Perhaps note taking works less well for understanding, but explaining it out loud without recording it down or even writing my explanation will do very little for long term recall. What good will it do if I forget everything I read, after spending many hours reading it?
At first, I think I will try explaining ideas out loud as I read to save time, then write ultrashort notes on main ideas for long term memory.
Thanks for everyone's help!
When I imagine speaking to someone, I generally imagine specific words. YMMV.
Actually speaking the words activates different areas of Broca's and Wernicke's regions (and elsewhere) than merely imagining them. Physically vocalizing the words, and hearing yourself vocalize them, allows them to be processed by more areas of your brain.
If that made much of a difference, it would also matter whether I was talking to someone out loud vs in writing. I don't feel that is the case, though it's not like I did any Gwern-level statistics about that. (Also, some people have more vivid auditory imagery than others.)
Both would work but my idea is less obvious so perhaps more helpful.
That's an interesting idea. I suppose it might help with better understanding the concept, but it might not work for long term memorization. Should I write the explanations down?
That would probably help if you have the time.
Welcome! As you're interested in applying the Sequences to your daily life, I suggest checking out the Center for Applied Rationality. (Maybe you overlapped with them at Leverage?) As part of their curriculum development process, they offer free classes at their Berkeley office sometimes. If you sign up here you'll be put on a mailing list where they announce these sessions, usually a day or so in advance.
Thanks, I just signed up. Do you think taking a full CFAR workshop would be a good next step after The Sequences? I'll be done in about 4 days at current reading speed (no planning fallacy adjustments), so I should probably plan ahead now.
It would definitely be a good next step. I don't know if they have a minimum age for workshops, but it doesn't hurt to apply.
I don't believe they have age constraints, the issue is the monetary constraints :p
Thanks for your help!
They offer financial aid, too.
Since I have a total of $23, I must get my parents to pay and allow me to go for a week, that will be the tricky part
People might not like my response, but I'd say that if you're in a situation where you believe something might be beneficial to you but it consumes a substantial portion of your resources, you should heavily lean towards not going. This applies as much to a rationality workshop attended by someone with a tiny budget as it applies to playing the stock market. Making large expenditures for an uncertain return is generally a bad bet even if the expected utility gain is positive, if failure has a very negative consequence. And human beings are notoriously bad at assessing the expected utility in such situations.
You also need to be very confident in your ability to evaluate arguments if you don't want to end up worse than before.
Obviously, this doesn't apply if you're absolutely certain that going gives you more benefit than you forego in money, time, and parental willingness to give in (which may, in fact, be in limited supply) so there is no risk of loss, but not too many people are really that certain.
But surely going to a rationality workshop is the best way to learn to evaluate whether to go to a rationality workshop. And whether it succeeds or not, you can be convinced it was a good idea!