Incidentally, any chance of a copyedit? I noticed that there were quite a few typos.

Mnemosyne's XML is nicer (and I'm surprised Anki can't export as XML, it used to play nice with Mnemosyne) since it lets one specify metadata like grades, hardness, and category. But tab-delimited would work, yes.

IIRC, Anki is supposed to be able to export in Mnemosyne's .xml format. I'd like to take a look myself, and if it's a good set of cards, I could also upload it to the Mnemosyne card collection as well.

This is great; would it be possible to link back to the sequence in question from the Flashcard itself?

I had read all the sequences before, but I have found that since I've started using the cards I've noticed the concepts coming up in my life more often

Maybe the cards could be made even more effective if they asked you to come up with an application on the spot?

I'm happy to see something about Anki here, but how are Sequences supposed to be SRS-able in any way? "Learning" them involves understanding, not memorization of text / facts.

Or is that the joke ("mysterious answers") and I failed to see it?

Hmm... Does Anki allow me to review all of my decks of study material simultaneously? Specifically opening up an individual topic of study defeats at least half of the purpose that I use spaced repetition for!

While using supermemo I found it useful to put the sequence posts into the system and use the built in process for progressively reading and extracting the most important elements of the text (key paragraphs and sentences) for more frequent exposure.

Reading complex material through multiple exposures is an effective way of understanding concepts that are multiple inferential steps away and the process of actively extracting the key messages ensures a more complete understanding. Having supermemo handle the process of prompting me with material from a large 'to read' list also does away with huge akrasia problems (by narrowing the bottleneck down to 'use supermemo at all').

The supermemo documentation supplies tips on how to go about absorbing large volumes of material, filtering them by priority, breaking them down into concepts worth learning and, when appropriate, breaking that down into individual facts or concepts that can be prompted. When they cannot be broken down further it can just be useful to have paragraphs pop up as a reminder. Just that much exposure will be enough reminder to keep the concept fresh in the brain.

When using supermemo to help learn material from a dense texbook that I happened to consider to be particularly worth memorizing I ended up creating diagrams of some of the concepts and the repetition questions consisted of partially redacted versions of the diagram that prompted recall of whatever bit was missing.

I note that Anki doesn't necessarily support some of these applications. SuperMemo itself is abysmally ugly and a pain in the arse to learn but the feature set is clearly that of an application created by someone who wanted to personally optimise his learning over diverse set of situations. It will be extremely frustrating for me if I migrate to a more polished but more specialised system.

Rationality in dreams, fun topic...

Since early adolescence, I've experienced episodes of "sleep paralysis" just before waking a few times per month. The experience is different for each individual, but most people dream/hallucinate waking up, but being unable to move at least one part of their body. It can be very disturbing, especially if you can see all the normal things associated with waking up (like your alarm clock on the nightstand, your spouse next to you/talking to you, etc.).

When it first started happening to me regularly, each occurrence really freaked me out. I'd hallucinate waking up to storm winds breaking out my windows, but being unable to move, or being awake and trying to get up, but having my vision frozen in one spot. I would wake up sweating, breathing heavily, and very disturbed.

After several years, I've developed a sort of dream rationality, in which I "wake up" and experience some sort of paralysis (a lot of times I dream that my neck is forced into some terrible position), and then consider how likely the scenario is to being not-real before I get upset. I recall recently "waking up" to a burglar going through my closet, and I being unable to move anything but my eyelids. I started to get a little excited, but then I considered "How likely is it that a burglar silently defeated my deadbolt AND I spontaneously became paralyzed?" I considered this conjunction to be exceedingly improbable, so I sat back and let the scene play out, and a minute (probably not really) or so later I woke up for real.

If only I could apply this type of reasoning to dreams about sitting in high school classrooms with unfinished homework.

Sure, there are ways to hack into people's minds to get them to do what you want. The fact that they exist doesn't make them ethically acceptable.

Right. But now we have an ontological problem: "hack into someone's mind" and "not hack into someone's mind" are not natural kinds.

In any social, romantic interaction, there is some degree of mind-hacking going on. When a person spends all their time and energy chasing a member of the opposite gender who is not interested, what has happened is mindhacking. The pain of unrequited love is a result of asymmetric mindhacking.

Love itself is symmetric mindhacking: you have hacked her mind, and s/he has hacked yours, and both of your implicit utility functions have been shifted to highly value the other person.

What the Seduction community seeks is to allow men to create an asymmetric situation to cause a woman to have sex with them (and this is a place where some members of the community really do behave like assholes and not let the woman down gently afterwards, a practise know as "expectation management", though the community has built up a tradition of karma: we ostracise men who break the rule of always managing expectations and leaving the woman in a happier state than when we met her).

The other major goal of the community is to allow the man to create a symmetric situation - which is usually achieved by first creating an asymmetric situation (male strong), and then gradually evening it out by allowing yourself to fall in love with the woman.

Women who have been "screwed and left" by pickup artists feel good about themselves more often than one would naively expect - and this surprised me until I realized that if the PUA has demonstrated enough alpha quality, the woman's emotional mind has classified him as "good to have sex with even without commitment" because alpha-male sperm is so evolutionarily advantageous - if you are impregnated by an alpha male then your male descendants will have whatever alpha qualities he has - and will impregnate other women, spreading your genes.