For what it's worth, I never got into the habit of using Anki until I installed the mobile app on my smartphone. This happened about three years ago, and since then I've been using it on a daily basis, primarily during commutes. If your experience is limited to the web or desktop versions, do consider giving the mobile app a try.

Huh. I'm reading this because I'm attempting to at least partially walk your path right now, although with a different set of math subjects (starting off with my lacking foundations in probability theory and Bayesian statistics, moving towards algebra and category theory, and also algorithmic information theory, and also wanting to work on my foundations in logic to accompany my healthy knowledge of computability theory).

Mostly I'm just finding that bashing my dopaminergic circuits with reward signals when studying helps to overcome the akrasia -- to the point that I now find myself regularly tempted to study my unofficial material rather than work on my official research and coursework!

Also, I've discovered the CoqIDE theorem-proving assistant is about as addictive to me now as Legend of Zelda games used to be.

Huh! Yeah, that's super interesting, but it seems like it might be hard to actually tackle. The finding of info on animal intelligence as well as the supporting of specific reasons for human dominance anyway both seem a little messy. I'll put it on the list of options though :)

I recently re-read Gwern's Drug Heuristics, and this jumped out at me:

....In other words, from the starting point of those wormlike common ancestors in the environment of Earth, the resources of evolution independently produced complex learning, memory, and tool use both within and without the line of human ancestry....

...The obvious answer is that diminishing returns have kicked in for intelligence in primates and humans in particular5354. (Indeed, it’s apparently been argued that not only are humans not much smarter than primates55, but there is little overall intelligence differences in vertebrates56. Humans lose embarrassingly on even pure tests of statistical reasoning; we are outperformed on the Monty Hall problem by pigeons and to a lesser extent monkeys!) The last few millennia aside, humans have not done well and has apparently verged on extinction before...

...The human brain seems to be special only in being a scaled-up primate brain41, with close to the metabolic limit in its number of neurons...

If I had more time, I'd try to look more into the intelligence tests that are given to animals. Assuming animals are smarter (in some sense of the word), then why are humans dominant? I think the answer to this might be something like "Humans evolutionarily stumbled upon language, then encoded this in our genes, and language allows us to reason about the world, which is something raw animal intelligence/pattern-matching cannot do."

I think it's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't know where I'd start trying to evaluate it, or how likely I think it's true.

Extend female fertility, postpone menopause etc. It is the technological solution to the social effects of The Pill, which gave the choice to women to not have kids (without resorting to celibacy), extending the possibility of the choice to have kids later into life, in the fities, sixties is IMHO the logical way to revert some of its effects (such as smart people not reproducing their genes enough). Do you want a higher IQ population, an eugenic effect without threating anyone's liberty? Help smart women have more kids by giving them more time to make this choice. For people worrying about human genes / IQ this is IMHO a very good idea.

I overcame depression a few years ago and have been meaning to write about how I did it, but honestly, the current me is so different from the old me, that I don't even remember how being depressed felt.

I do remember some of the things that got me out of the depression:

• Coming independently to the insight that I should "Avoid Misinterpreting my Emotions". One day, I was sitting there thinking the same old depressed thoughts I'd usually thought. Something like "what's the purpose of doing anything." But, I realized that when those words went through my head that day, I didn't feel depressed thinking them. Then, I realized that whatever words were going through my head were not the cause of my emotions. In general, it's true that we can unlike our emotions from our thoughts. By doing this we can optimize feeling better and resolving whatever epistemic issue you think is the cause of your emotions separately.

• Discovering LW helped in a lot of ways.

• Doing lots of mind mapping / writing therapy, using GTD for managing stress/productivity, and to a lesser extent CBT.

• EDIT: Also, getting out of high-school.

I had always modeled part of the appeal of workout/gym is that one doesn't need to coordinate with other people.

Software engineering: everything by Andrew Tanenbaum. The standard texts in the field for good reason.

When you see a good move, look for a better one.

Emanuel Lasker

Thank you for writing this series Jonah. I'm don't have the time now to think deeply about this topic, so I thought I'd add to the discussion by mentioning a few related interesting anecdotes.

I doubt what made the Polgar sisters great was innate intelligence.

Another interesting anecdote is von Neumann not (initially?) appreciating the importance of higher-level programming languages:

John von Neumann, when he first heard about FORTRAN in 1954, was unimpressed and asked "why would you want more than machine language?" One of von Neumann's students at Princeton recalled that graduate students were being used to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine. This student took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying that it was a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work. http://worrydream.com/#!/dbx

EDIT: Apparently, von Neumann's attitude toward assembly was common among programmers of that era. http://worrydream.com/quotes/#richard-hamming-the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering-2