I honestly don't know. I would say quite much, but it does not feel like that: I do not review all my cards at one time in the day (I have notifications periodically nagging me if there are still due cards, so I don't forget, and they aren't too much bother) Another nice trick is to make more, smaller decks. When I see that there are 120 cards in one deck for review, I am not that ecstatic about that. If those same cards are split into 4 decks with 30-30 cars, I don't even think about it. Generally, 20 cards are play, they don't even register, and 80 seems to be the other end, that starts to feel a bit too much. (And the actual number of cards never changed)

If I somehow miss a day, though, that can make things indeed messy.

As a counter opinion, I barely use my smart phone for anything I didn't use my old Razr phone for. The only reason I got it was because it was actually cheaper to get a new smart phone than to continue on the old plan. The cost I pay is that I have to charge it every day.

So does mine. The humidifier helps, but since I spend a lot of time in environments where I can't easily install one (eg work), I also use moisturizer.

Alright, I'll be a little more clear. I'm looking for someone's mixed deck, on multiple topics, and I'm looking for the structure of cards, things like length of section, amount of context, title choice, amount of topic overlap, number of cards per large scale concept.

I am really not looking for a deck that was shared with easily transferrable information like the NATO alphabet, I'm looking for how other people do the process of creating cards for new knowledge.

I am missing a big chunk of intuition on learning in general, and this is part of how I want to fix it. I also don't expect people to really be able to answer my questions on it, and I don't expect that I've gotten every specification. Which is why I wanted the example deck.

Edit: So I can't pull a deck off Ankiweb because I want the kind of decks nobody puts on Ankiweb.

Any tips for boosting one's kindness? I know it's closely related to the Big Five trait of agreeableness and Big Five traits are hard to change (relative to one's age cohort). Perhaps mindfulness meditation could have a long-term effect? One could always just do a bunch of kind actions but I don't think it's that simple.

For the country data example, every instance of a country name is prepended with a small icon (for development purposes this is currently an obnoxious red X, but I plan to replace this with a neutral-coloured globe or something), and the name itself is wrapped in some custom style (currently boldface, but could be anything). Clicking on the icon places a container with the relevant data on the page, offset to the same location as the icon, (giving the illusion of the icon "expanding" to show the data). Clicking on the icon again, or away from the container, removes it.

In terms of extensibility, all the data is in a local JSON file, and the format of the data container is an HTML template that might eventually live in the same file. I'm also planning on having local image assets (maps and flags). This could all be swapped out for anything, or even obtained from a web service.

I'm playing around with writing a Chrome extension that identifies countries of the world in the browser and marks them up with expandable, at-a-glance summary data for that country, like GDP per capita, composite index scores (HDI, MPI, etc.), literacy rate, principal exports and so on. I find myself regularly looking this up on Wikipedia anyway, and figured I'd remove the inconvenience of doing so.

This example probably isn't that useful for everyone, but it got me wondering what other sets of things could be marked up in the browser in this way. Another example that occurred to me was legislature voting records, where a similar plugin would provide easy visibility of how elected representatives voted on legislation. Again, not useful for everyone, but I could imagine political junkies getting some use out of it.

Such a set of mark-uppable entities would have to be either identifiable by format (like an ISBN) where the data could be fetched from a remote source, or a finite list of a few hundred items (like countries), where the data could be stored locally. What kinds of things would you like this sort of visibility on in the browser? Is there a set of entities you find yourself tiresomely looking up data for over and over again?

(Partly inspired by the Dictionary of Numbers)

Try doing whatever it is you need to do (not sure from your posting) physically with other people doing the same thing.

I'm blind and live in Northeast Arkansas and have no friends and the only part of this that seems like it should be easy is getting over the anxiety that prevents me from walking to the bus stop (I still haven't done this. I've spoken to DSB about it but have no idea if anything will come of this). And my social skills are only technically extant.

I did try something last year where I talked to someone on Skype between us both trying pomodoros and such. I only lasted about a week.

(Akrasia, because that's all I ever talk about):

I do not know to whose attention I should bring this so as to combat the problem, so I'm asking here:

http://caejones.livejournal.com/18117.html

I have a stupidly difficult time talking to people, too, especially my parents (who pretty much have to manage all the details, because of course they do). This does not help.

Yes, I've read all the Akrasia articles on Lesswrong that I can find. Mostly, I'm hoping there's someone better equipped to fix this than me or the internet, and that someone can help me find that entity and extract a solution from them.

(But if that someone happens to post the solution here, first, that'd be nice. Although turning it into an arduous quest through the temple of doom seems like it could only help, assuming no crippling injuries along the way.)

Good links (also, very intelligent question from Bound_up). I’ll present a contrarian perspective I’m mildly confident in. I tried Anki and found it to be lots of work with a small payoff. In an age where you can instantly look up anything on the internet, spending a full five minutes cumulatively over the course of your life to make one particular fact unnecessary to google seems dubious. My Anki reviewing habit was stable for maybe 4-6 months after I installed it (I was habitually reviewing Anki while on public transportation, but got sick and decided this was too stressful.) I find it suspicious that so few people seem to use Anki well and consistently; I do know of a few, but if it was actually a slam dunk I would expect to see more results from people than I do at this point. See more: http://lesswrong.com/lw/juq/a_vote_against_spaced_repetition/

So what can you do instead of spaced repetition? It seems pretty clear that we forget most of what we read; I read Benjamin Franklins’ autobiography as a teenager and felt very proud of myself; years later if I was to write down everything I could remember, I doubt it would fill a single page. Was there any point in reading it? I’m not sure, and my current guess is complicated.

To figure out how to learn more effectively, we could start by asking what sort of payoffs we expect from learning. Here are some payoffs that come to me off the top of my head:

• Sometimes I’m learning something because I expect to apply the knowledge right away to some problem or project that I’m working on. The payoff in these cases is sure and immediate. Additionally, through applying my knowledge and learning by doing, I typically walk away with a deeper understanding. To adopt this as your learning strategy, make a deal with yourself that you won’t try to learn anything that seems useless, and in exchange, you’ll always be audacious enough to tackle difficult projects that seem interesting and important to you, even if they seem way beyond your capabilities, because you’ll learn your way there. Your goal is no longer “learn about machine learning”, it’s “win a Kaggle competition” or “find a pattern in stock market data that lets you make money” (both of these have concrete payoffs in the form of resume gardening and cash respectively, so it’s actually pretty sensible to have them as goals; you’d probably want to gradually work up to them with a series of more achievable project-based goals first though). My impression is that hacker type intellects seem especially predisposed to learn well through project-based learning (e.g. one of my brothers built an circuit simulator when he wanted to learn about electronics).

• Sometimes I find myself glad that I learned something because it constitutes a fact or model that’s useful for what I’m doing, but I wouldn’t have realized in advance the Google keywords I would need to use in order to solve my problem. (It may seem rather mundane to note what sorts of questions keyword search is and isn’t good for. But consider the limiting case where you could ask Google literally any question (e.g. does P = NP) and it would give you the correct answer. This is an AGI complete problem, so if this were true Google would be a superintelligence and there’d be no more use for humans like you. Your job as a human is to answer questions Google can’t. Memorizing state capitals is totally pointless, but having a grab bag of mathematical, statistical, economic, and computational models at your disposal is a good use of time. Google can’t tell you whether to model your thing as a quadratic or an exponential. It’s not clear to me how deep ones knowledge of these models even needs to be; as Steve Yegge writes in this brilliant post, just knowing the name of the branch of mathematics that has the solution to your problem may be enough, at which point you can bone up on it and then apply it to your problem. My guess is that deep knowledge will let you see some isomorphisms that shallow knowledge doesn’t get you, and deep knowledge is typically required to do cutting edge work in a field instead of just applying its results in another field. Deep knowledge of multiple interacting fields that are rarely combined in a single person probably pushes you in to superpower territory.

• Related to the above, new facts can inform your thinking at a subconscious level that’s hard to describe. In addition to a historian being able to point to specific un-google-able historical situations analogous to one that’s unfolding, they may be able to make better intuitive predictions even without citing specific examples (although I guess Tetlock’s work on expert predictions suggests that the historian’s opinion won’t be very predictive either way). In some cases these model changes may actually be harmful; reading the news will cause you to overestimate the rate of newsworthy disasters; reading psychology studies that are selected for interestingness (and thus counterintuitiveness) may lead you to believe humans are more counterintuitive than they actually are. But in the best case this can be very powerful. I had a great math teacher who would challenge students to solve new math problems without yet having been exposed to the standard method used for them, and I feel like this (along with studying counterintuitive math results like the Monty Hall problem) taught my brain this weird skill of turning off my intuition and demanding that everything be modeled rigorously and mechanistically, which feels like a valuable mental muscle to have.

In general, I wonder how your strategies might differ depending on whether you’re more interested in creating new knowledge vs applying existing knowledge in a straightforward way. Creating new knowledge probably requires more creativity, and it may be sensible to have explicit creativity strategies that your learning process plugs in to. For example, Richard Feynman supposedly memorized a list of a dozen or so interesting unsolved problems and whenever he came across some new mathematical trick, he’d test it against each of his problems, occasionally scoring a hit and wowing people with his “genius”. So you could imagine keeping lists of mathematical tricks and unsolved problems as you read, say, in order to facilitate this. There are other resources like Edward de Bono’s books or The Creative Habit on systematizing creativity. The steelman of using Anki might be that it makes all the concepts you’re learning highly cognitively available, thus giving you the opportunity to see more applications for them. Under this view you might create cards specifically for ideas that seemed important but not especially salient/memorable/frequently encountered.

In general I think the problem of knowing what sort of information you wouldn’t have known to Google for is a hard one. With my digital notebook, I’ve tried to build an index of information I read by the situation I would use it in, with each page corresponding to some situation. Over time, you can imagine forming pages that act as guides in particular situations; you could imagine a “how to solve tricky math problems” guide you compose for yourself; it’s probably quicker than memorizing the information with Anki; it’s more likely to actually get used appropriately, and it’s more durable and shareable. Or you could imagine an introspection guide with a list of all the major psychological and neurological models you’re familiar with so you can sweep through them and figure out which provides the most self-understanding (is this one for near/far or systems 1 and 2?). I expect creating these sort of guides will also sometimes cause you to remap your understanding in a way you didn’t expect, creating new knowledge, and at the very least will give you the opportunity to deepen your understanding instead of just nodding along with what you read. (nodding along seems OK for repetitive learning resources of low information density, since the repetition will hammer the info in to your head for you. But for highly info dense resources you should be spending half or more of your time trying to integrate what you’re reading with what you already know; staring in to space and figuring out why this knowledge might be surprising seems to work well for this.)

One final piece of advice: maybe intermix your learning about learning with learning some object-level thing, in order to make theory and practice maximally interconnected. For example, do learning study until you think of a learning experiment for today, then take a break, come back, and learn object level stuff for the rest of the day, trying out your experiment (and being willing to abandon it quickly and go back to your accumulated best practices if it isn’t working).