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.

Women are basically anosognosiacs about pick-up. In fact, I once discussed the efficacy of PU with a woman, and she started insisting that women couldn't possibly be that stupid. I had to remind her that she'd left her long-term boyfriend for a fling with afellow PUA a few months earlier.

I've thought similar things. As a married man, I've also wondered whether certain aspects of the seduction community could be repurposed to maintain a high level of attraction within a long-term relationship. The misogyny of some PUAs is very troubling like you note, though.

It's their goal, not their means of deriving methods to achieve their goal, that I would be tempted to take issue with if I tried to engage with the topic.

Your mention of the difficulty of men writing realistic fictional female characters reminds me very much of a passage from Virginia Woolfe's A Room of One's Own that is the most insightful exploration of the issue I have ever read:

'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from LIFE'S ADVENTURE, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity--for so a lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This is not so true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.

Ever since I read this, I have taken notice of the relationships between female characters in books I read, and I do think its a rare male author who captures them well.

Huh, that minority-squared effect is interesting, but I'm not sure it need apply here. It'd be individuals coming here, right? It doesn't take a group to, well, come to LW.

Or am I misunderstanding your point in some way?

As far as 9 is concerned, I am female myself and have never commented on Less Wrong before, to provide a single, anecdotal data point.

Any idea why you haven't?