I've been writing blog articles on the potential of educational games, which may be of interest to some people here:

• Why I'm considering a career in educational games
• Videogames will revolutionize school (not necessarily the way you think)

I'd be curious to hear any comments.

My current anti-procrastination experiment: using trivial inconveniences for good. I have installed a very strong, permanent block on my laptop, and still allow myself to go on my favourite time wasters, but only on my tablet, which I carry with me as well.

The rationale is not to block all use and therefore be forced to mechanically learn workarounds, but to have a trivially inconvenient procrastination method always available. The interesting thing is that tablets are perfect for content consumption, so the separation works well. It also helps me to separate the contexts well, so I don't sit on the laptop "to work" but end up browsing around. Its also good for making me self aware of what I am doing at any given time, on a physical level. Finally, I tend to reject hard restrictions, but trivial inconveniences may be a good balance.

So far, the results are very encouraging, time on hacker news and news sites is way down. I have been doing this for a couple of weeks, so I am not over the two month honeymoon yet, but if anyone else wants to give this a shot and let me know how it works out, then more data for all of us!

If people can turn off sounds and notifications, we probably don't have to worry about bothering others by chatting outside of a break.

I would think so too, but at least 1 person has requested chats that chats be at a minimum, even if he turned off the sound and notifications.

Besides that, a lobby has the advantage that you can hang out without working. Here's the failure mode I'm anticipating and trying to avoid: Let's say this becomes big, and there's plenty of people in the study room. Some will just hang out, and not specifically be working at that time. This creates an environment in which it feels "okay" to just hang out and not work when you're there.

I went through an Optimization course last semester (CS, grad), so it doesn't really qualify as an "out of class experience", nevertheless reading it was quite optional, and, actually, the questions I asked myself were very similar to yours.

Especially in the light of those small remarks textbooks tend to make along the lines of "we don't have any more space here, so if you're interested, the excellent book by X and Y is a very nice read". As if they were referring to some light and entertaining book if the one you were holding weren't really enough to fill up your entire afternoon.

Instead, I spent hours on the part about Conjugate Gradients for example, coming up with different (mostly wrong) mental models, drawing various maps, and thinking about what's wrong with the way I try to study math. (I also ended up at #lesswrong, asking people how they study. Also brought home some ideas.)

So, in the second half of the semester, I upgraded my method to the proposed-by-some-people "ignore all the proofs, and generally, all of the textbook, try to complete the excercises that are likely to come up on the exam, and don't try to see everything". Which kind of worked: I understand most of the concepts, I can solve actual problems, and also, passed the exam. (As if that one counts as a proof of knowledge...)

But I'm still curious how studying textbooks is supposed to work. Like...

• what is the goal of people when reading textbooks? being able to solve real-world problems? passing exams? solving all the excercises? getting the warm fuzzy feeling of having eaten a huge book with lots of formulas while getting that "yes I understand" feeling that may or may not be the same as really understanding stuff?
• what is the goal of people who write textbooks? is the fact that they are hard to read an unavoidable thing, a way-too-common flaw or... are there people who read math like I read MLP fanfics? Is it possible to fix this?
• and also, the statistics you mention. About the average WPM when reading math books...

Do you guys need an outlet for your need for the mysterious when cold hard rational thought gets too much, or something? Anyway, rationalist fiction does not have to be a rationalist fantasy or a rationalist science fiction. No magic, no vampires, no space aliens, no friendly pink immortal horses, imagine that.

Plenty of fan fiction possibilities, too. 50 shades of rationality, fighting pride and prejudice, crime and punishment: tales of a buggy mind, war and peace: System 1 vs System 2...

just finished reading.

It's kind of sad in a... grand way.

No one remembering anymore what exactly being "human" means. But... what do we expect? I don't see any human values that are not statisfied, it just does not "feel like home" that much. But still, orpbzvat bar bs gur yrffre fhcrevagryyvtraprf naq fgvyy univat n fcrpvny cynpr va zvaq sbe fgne gerx? It's as heart-warming as it gets, in a cold, dark and strange universe.

(If only we could do this well.)

The uploading process seemed to be destructive only for convenience's sake.

For me, it felt more realistic. I don't think anyone has actually thought of a non-destructive uploading process that is remotely plausible.

If you are trying to do X, surround yourself with people who are also doing X. Takes much less willpower to keep doing it.

Upvote comments that you think are useful on LW in general, not just comments you found personally useful. (A note to myself as I read this thread).

Using a debit card gives you most of the same benefits, but has slightly different costs. If your doing this it makes sense to research which one is best for you.