I interned at Quixey this summer (though not as an engineer) and found some of the most skilled rationalists I'd ever met there. It was an excellent experience and comes highly recommended.

Hello!

I'm a 32 year old physics PhD, working (so far) on the oh-so-fashionable subfield of graphene and carbon nanotubes. I took Quantum field theory, which is a little unusual for an experimentalist (though not positively rare). I have a background in programming, and a moderate degree of interest in AI.

I came here by way of the Methods of Rationality. After reading that, and upon seeing that there was a sequence on quantum mechanics, I had a suspicion that it wouldn't be terrible. This suspicion was vastly exceeded. I never encountered the slightest technical flaw, which is better than many physicists can produce on the subject, let alone philosophers and amateur physicists.

I began wandering and seeing what else there was, and it is good. The atmosphere also seems quite good around here, so I thought I'd join the community rather than treating it as a collection of essays and comments.

So here I am.

~~~~ Edited to add: ~~~

I am not sure how this got so many upvotes. Was it the praise? The brevity? That I'm a physicist? The score just stands out on the page a bit, and I'm not at all sure why.

So, your earlier posts were basically lemmas? Certainly I appreciate all the reference notes.

"The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality."

-- Alan Kay, Programming and Scaling

For every non-duplicate comment replying to this one praising me for my right action, I will donate $10 to SIAI, up to a cap of $1010, with the count ending on 1 June 2011. Also accepting private messages.

Edit: The cap was met on 30 May. Donation of $1010 made.

Do you have other symptoms of ADD? Scattered memory goes hand in hand with it (along with scattered everything else).

My memory has gotten better since I started treatment.

Quick and dirty test: do stimulants calm you down? If so, you might be an ADDer.

I would just like to chime in that you're not alone. My memory problems are horrendous, and I've had too much akrasia trouble to consistently do things like Mnemosyne or dual n-back.

As for memory techniques, I dislike mnemonics and my brain does not seem to be the type that can visualize things easily.

I hypothesize that a lot of the problems here are less "forgetting" than "not remembering"-- you find yourself needing information that was never committed to long-term storage in the first place, perhaps because it was not tagged as important the first time you were exposed to it.

This is based on my own experience of being "bad with names": I fixed the problem simply by training myself to think that people's names are important to me, and to pay more attention when I hear a new one (mentally repeating it to myself, and then using it in conversation as soon as possible). I am now not particularly great with names, but good enough not to be embarrassing, and sometimes even to impress people.

So maybe you would get good results by working on your attention as well as your memory? For me, this is part of the purpose of the writing-things-down habit; I only occasionally refer to my notes because I remember things so much better once I've made the effort to write them down, or even just identified them as something I should write down.

I also resubmitted, having realized I signed up a year ago. Please use my new app!

Someone should really write a prediction market using bitcoins -- it would be simpler for US-based users to participate.