Group Rationality Diary, July 1-15

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for July 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Next diary -- July 15-31

Immediate past diary -- June 1-30

Rationality Diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for July 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Next diary -- July 15-31

Immediate past diary -- June 1-30

Rationality Diaries archive

I recently started using Anki on my phone. Seems easy, effective and even somewhat fun. I don't actually have anything that seems very important to memorize yet though. I've been (re-)learning Hiragana and Katakana with the vague intention of learning enough Japanese to read untranslated manga or something, but while it's been easy enough so far the goal doesn't seem super high value and Kanji is looking many times harder.

What do you do for a living? I'm sure there's something there that'd be worth memorizing.

How good are you with names & faces? Birthdays? Telephone numbers?

Another thing I use it for is learning new vocabulary. Maybe once or twice a week I'll run across a word in an article that I would typically jump over & just assume I know what it means based on the context, sometimes when I look it up I'm surprised. The other benefit is that memorized words will be more available to you when writing or speaking.

3luminosity13y

I've found that I'm getting a lot more value out of non-fiction books / guides than I used to by using the following process: 1. Read through book once normally 2. Sit down in front of computer with Anki open, scan through each page quickly 3. Any insights that I think are valuable, get turned into a new card in my main deck, and tagged with the book's name. Only useful if you are reading through essays, books, etc that have insights you want to take away and keep, I suppose. (Most of my recorded books are programming or business specific so far, but a good general example to make into cards that work for you is CPR & resuscitation guidelines.)

0Locaha13y

I have this crazy idea to use Anki to learn the multiplication table to 100x100, to be able to multiply large numbers fast. The only problem is, it seems both pointless and impossible, :-)

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Group Rationality Diary, July 1-15

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Group Rationality Diary, July 1-15

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