Nice~!
I'm driving to upstate New York afternoon of 11-16, but would like to meet you all at a subsequent gathering. So I hope you get together again. That time's usually good for me.
Also: Infini-T, just around the corner down Witherspoon street is also a great place to meet, if it's not too crowded. It's a bit pricier but I like the drink selection better.
Right brained and left brained aren't real things, but the right hemisphere and left hemisphere are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk
...and still provide a very useful an illustrative dichotomy to work with.
Yes, it makes sense to granularize when you are first learning, and when you run into problems (troubleshooting), but not once you're already familiar with the process. When you're not in learning mode, you want to consolidate as much as possible.
The software analogy is the difference between trying to run a program line by line in a debugger (pressing F8 for Step Into or what have you) versus just running a compiled or bytecode optimized version. Even worse is trying to type every line from hand into an interpreter every single time.
I understand your point, but a seemingly ridiculous amount of granularization can still be very useful if you can group certain steps. That way, you can collapse and expand sections of hierarchies as needed. You can also find new ways of doing things.
Here is a more positive example of granularization and reconsolidation applied to everyday actions.
I suggest putting the date in the post body as well as the title. There is who, what where, and why, so it makes sense to have a "when". (...Unless this is an intentional test!)
My guess is that it's related to what makes spaced repetition work--the process of switching forces the reader to recall the context and previous facts. See if you can even vaguely recall where you read this; I'd like to take a look at any pertinent research.
Okay, holy crap Divia. That is a lot of cards.
As an Anki user (yes I switched!), I would have the cards using a model where the source post is in a separate field, perhaps with the url as another field. I guess if we're trying to stick to Q/A for compatability with other SRS systems, that's not a good idea, and what I'm suggesting is a horrific amount of work if you were to do it by hand, because you'd have to redo all the cards. So, maybe these are goals for the long term, in case SRS learning really increases in popularity, and Anki decks become a good vehicle for delivery in of themselves.
Obviously I haven't actually worked my way through the new additions (or even through most of the existing ones) but I think the cloze deletions are a good change. Overall I think your later cards reflect your increasing wisdom for structuring and formatting the cards.
Thanks and keep up the great work!
[Edit: Divia posted this one above, while I was composing this comment: http://divia.posterous.com/less-wrong-sequences-as-tab-delimited-text-file ]
Unless Divia has something better, here's a rough export to Mnemosyne:
LW Sequences .mem Deck: lw-sequences.mem
LW Sequences cards in a tab-delimited file: lw-sequences.txt
Couldn't figure out how to preserve the tags. AFAICT, Mnemosyne doesn't support importing them at present.
(Psst, Zach, maybe I should've told you this earlier, but I switched over to Anki! It was a little bit painful, since I had to abandon learning info on 600 or so cards, but Anki is just that good that I'm not sorry at all. I encourage you to continue to use what you're comfortable with and will actually learn with, but it's worth watching the Anki vids! Among other things, Anki natively supports syncing across computers, and it's possible to access the decks you've synced online via a web browser... Just sayin'.)
I know a full featured app is much better, but Anki Online is completely free, and accessible via most browsers--although it requires an internet connection. Any deck you sync from the desktop (or other) version of Anki should be available via AnkiOnline.
Only hoping I'm parsing this ramble correctly, but I agree if you mean to say:
We have plenty of people asking, "Why" but we need to put a lot more effort asking, "What are we going to do about it?"
How was the meeting? Did you plan to meet again soon?