Excellent! We will endeavor to. I look forward to meeting you.

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.

I suppose that the relevant proverb is "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

On the other hand, it is probably possible to over-granularize: you break a process down into small enough tasks so that when you look over the list of every step you'd have to do, it seems overwhelming.

For example, here's some overly granularized directions for cooking scrambled eggs.

Step 1: Clear junk from stove.
Step 2: Get non-stick frying pan from cabinet.
Step 3: Put pan on stove.
Step 4: Get plate from cabinet.
Step 5: Put plate on stove near pan.
Step 6: Get butter knife from drawer.
Step 7: Get stick of butter from refrigerator.
Step 8: Cut off a small piece of butter from the stick into the pan.
Step 9: Put butter knife into sink.
Step 10: Return stick of butter to the refrigerator.
Step 11: Remove egg carton from refrigerator.
Step 12: Place egg carton on counter next to stove.
Step 13: Remove two eggs from egg carton.
Step 14: Place eggs on stove next to pan.
Step 15: Return egg carton to refrigerator.
Step 16: Pick up plastic spatula.
Step 17: Turn on burner under pan.
Step 18: Use plastic spatula to spread butter on pan as it melts.
Step 19: Put down plastic spatula.
Step 20: Pick up egg from stove.
Step 21. Crack egg on the side of stove.
Step 22: Open egg above pan, so that its contents fall into the pan.
Step 23: Throw eggshell into trash can.
Step 24: Repeat steps 17-20, using the second egg.
Step 25: Wash hands to remove traces of raw egg that may contain salmonella bacteria.
Step 26: Dry hands.
Step 27: Pick up plastic spatula.
Step 28: Using plastic spatula, stir eggs in frying pan as they cook.
Step 29: When eggs are cooked, turn off fire under pan.
Step 30: Pick up pan.
Step 31: Transfer eggs from frying pan to plate. Use plastic spatula if necessary.
Step 32: Put pan down on stove.
Step 33: Put down plastic spatula.
Step 34: Move plate to table.
Step 35: Get ketchup bottle from refrigerator.
Step 36: Squirt ketchup on plate.
Step 37: Put ketchup bottle on table.
Step 38: Get fork from drawer.
Step 39: Eat scrambled eggs.

And now you know why I hate cooking. ;)

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!)

I recall reading that we typically learn best if we take several, say four, college courses simultaneously per semester as is normally done, all of them lasting say four months, as opposed to a hypothetical program in which we take the courses sequentially each one lasting a month.

If true, this may suggest that simultaneously working through several books over a given time period is better for retention than reading them sequentially within that same time period.

As to why, my guess is that this is related to the fact that cramming is very bad for retention.

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!

are the LW sequence decks available for Mnemosyne?

Has anyone gotten the (pricey - $25) Anki iphone app? Does the app still make it easy to look up the Less Wrong deck? Alternately, has someone tried importing the deck into some (cheaper) SRS app?

I've disappointed in LessWrong too, and it's caused me to come here more and more infrequently. I'm even talking about the lurking. I used to come here every other day, then every week, then it dropped to once a month. This

I get the impression many people either didn't give a shit or despaired about their own ability to function better through any reasonable effort that they dismissed everything that came along. It used to make me really mad, or sad. Probably I took it a little too personally too, because I read a lot of EY's classic posts as inspiration not to fucking despair about what seemed like a permanently ruined future. "tsuyoku naritai" and "isshou kenmei" and "do the impossible" and all that said, look, people out there are working on much harder problems--there's probably a way up and out for you too. The sadness: I wanted other people to get at least that, and the anger--a lot of LessWrongers not seeming to get the point.

On the other hand, I'm pleased with our OvercomingBias/LessWrong meetup group in NYC. I think we do a good job in-person helping other members with practical solutions to problems--how we can all become really successful. Maybe it's because a lot of our members have integrated ideas from QS, Paleo, and CrossFit, Seth Roberts, and PJ Eby. We've counseled members on employment opportunities, how to deal with crushing student and consumer debts, how to make money, and nutrition. By now we all tend to look down on the kind of despairing analysis that's frequently upvoted on here LW. We talk about FAI sparingly these days, unless someone has a particular insight we think would be valuable. Instead, the sentiment is more, "Shit, none of us can do much about it directly. How 'bout we all get freaking rich and successful first!"

I suspect the empathy formed from face to face contact can be a really great motivator. You hear someone's story from their own mouth and think, "Shit man, you're cool, but you're in bad shape right now. Can we all figure out how to help you out?" Little by little people relate, even the successful ones--we've all been there in small ways. This eventually moves towards, "Can we we think about how to help all of us out?" It's not about delivering a nice tight set of paragraphs with appropriate references and terminology. When we see each other again, we care that our proposed solutions and ideas are going somewhere because we care about the people. All the EvPsych speculation and calibration admonitions can go to hell if doesn't fucking help. But if it does, use it, use it to help people, use it to help yourself, use it to help the future light cone of the human world.

Yet if we're intentional about it I think we can keep it real here too. We can give a shit. Okay, maybe I don't know that. Maybe it takes looking for and rewarding the useful insights and then coming back later and talking about how the insights were useful. Maybe it takes getting a little more personal. Maybe I and my suggestions are full of shit but, hell, I want to figure this out. I used to talk about LessWrong with pride and urge people to come check it out because the posts were great, the commenters /comment scheme is great, it was a shining example of what the rest of the intellectually discursive interwebs could be like. And, man, I'd like it to be that way again.

So damn, what do y'all think?