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There's a number of anime series I've found deep and/or intellectually stimulating and/or novel-like in feel, for example:
- Neon Genesis Evangelion
- Serial Experiments Lain
- Revolutionary Girl Utena
- Legend of the Galactic Heroes
I would add Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
I read the quote to mean that it's silly to claim that a plan is perfect when it's actually unworkable.
Of note, Alfred von Schlieffen, the architect of the original deployment plan for war against France, was on record as recommending a negotiated peace in the event that the German Army fail to quickly draw the French into a decisive battle. Obviously, this recommendation was not followed. Also of note, Schlieffen's plan was explicitly for a one-front war; the bit with the Russians was hastily tacked on by Schlieffen's successors at the General Staff.
Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.
Rundown of positive and negative results:
In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it's the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with you, but I learned to love it.
I suspect that learning the dates of monarchs and Prime Ministers (e.g. of England/UK) would have a similar benefit in contextualising and de-intimidating historical facts, but I never finished those decks and haven't touched them in a while, so never reached the critical mass of knowledge that allowed me to have a good handle on periods of British history. I found it pretty difficult to (for example) keep track of six different Georges and map each to dates, so slow progress put me off. Let me know if you're interested and want to set up a pact, e.g. 'We'll both do at least ten cards from each deck a day and report back to the other regularly' or something. In fact that offer probably stands for any readers.
I installed some decks for learning definitions in areas of math that I didn't know, but found memorising decontextualised definitions hard enough that I wasn't motivated to do it, given everything else I was doing and Anki-ing at the time. I still think repeat exposure to definitions might be a useful developmental strategy for math that nobody seems to be using deliberately and systematically, but I'm not sure Anki is a right way to do it. Or if it is, that shooting so far ahead of my current knowledge was the best way to do it. Similarly a LaTeX deck I got having pretty much never used LaTeX and not practising it while learning the deck.
Canadian provinces/territories I have not yet found useful beyond feeling good for ticking off learning the deck, which was enough for me since I did them in a session or two.
Languages Spoken in Each Country of the World (I was trying to do not just country-->languages but country-->languages with proportions of population speaking the languages) was so difficult and unrewarding in the short term that I lost motivation extremely quickly (this was months ago). The mental association between 'Berber' and 'North Africa' has come up a surprising number of times, though. Most recently yesterday night.
Periodic table (symbol<--->name, name<-->number) took lots of time and hasn't been very useful for me personally (I pretty much just learned it in preparation for a quiz). Learning just which elements are in which groups/sections of the Periodic table might be more useful and a lot quicker (since by far the main difficulty was name<--->number).
I am relatively often wanting for demographic and economic data, e.g. population of countries, population of major world cities, population of UK places, GDP's. Ideally I'd not just do this for major places since I want to get a good intuitive sense of these figures for very large or major places on down to tiny places.
Similarly if one has a hobby horse it could be useful. Examples off the top of my head (not necessarily my hobby horse): Memorising the results from the LessWrong surveys. Memorising the results from the PhilPapers survey. Memorising data about resource costs of meat production vs. other food production. Memorising failed AGI timeline predictions. Etc.
I found starting to learn Booker Prize winners on Memrise has let me have a few 'Ah, I recognise that name and literature seems less opaque to me, yay!' moments, but there's probably higher-priority decks for you to learn unless that's more your area.
I'm an 4th year economics undergrad preparing start applying to PhD programs, and while I've never formally attempted to memorize GDPs, I've found that having a rough idea of where a county's per capita GDP is to be very useful in understanding world news and events (for example, I've noticed that around the $8,00-12,000 per year range seems to be the point where the median household gets an internet connection). If you do attempt to go the memorization route, be sure to use PPP-adjusted figures, as non-adjusted numbers will tend to systematically under estimate incomes in developing countries.
Animation:
- Madoka: Rebellion (a must-watch for anyone who enjoyed the TV series; I am not certain in general what to make of it, and need to rewatch it. If you're going to watch it at all, I recommend avoiding spoilers.)
- Ayakashi (3-part anthology; skip the truly wretched first part, watch the second if you have time for a mildly-interesting metafictional kabuki play, and enjoy the third part which started Mononoke)
- Frozen (unobjectionable for a Disney movie although not without flaws - slangy dialogue will date it fast, plot made characters unnecessarily evil, snowman was the most hateful character since Jar Jar Binks)
Madoka: Rebellion
I am ambivilent towards this. It had some clever bits, and I think I understand what Urobuchi was trying to do with the ending, but the overall execution did not live up to the standards of the orignial series.
As I understand it, a problem the privilege model is designed to address is people who ignorant about important difficulties, and are unwilling to listen. "Privilege" raises the temperature enough to get some people to bend. Of course, psycho-chemistry being what it is, it gets other people to become more rigid, to melt down, or to explode.
That's another problem with overuse of the "priviledge" concept: the more people throw it around, the less punch it packs.
1 of 100 students that seek a community college transfer degree succeed
A few minutes of Google puts the figure at more like 60% if I'm unpacking "succeed" correctly, although I'd be happier with that number if I'd found citations not pointing to the National Student Clearinghouse. In any case, though, 1% doesn't pass the giggle test for me.
I'm a community college transfer currently at UC Davis. Some quick googling turned up these figures from 2004, which give a graduation rate of 84% for transfer students, compared to 89% for students who enrolled as freshmen, conditional on acheiving junior standing (the probability of graduation for any random student who enrolled directly out of highschool is actually lower than for transfers). These numbers are a decade old, but are roughly in line with my current experiences, so I don't expect them to have changed that much.
There are (at least) two things wrong with "the right side of history". One is that we can't know that history has a side, or what side it might be because a tremendous amount of history hasn't happened yet, and the other error is that history might prefer worse outcomes in some sense.
I find the first sort of error so annoying that I normally don't even see the second.
My impression is that Eugene is annoyed by both sorts of error, but I hope he'll say where he stands on this.
There's a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
Neoreactionaries doesn't like that sentiment that history decides what's morally right.
I am not a neoreactionary and I think the sentiment that history decides what's morally right is a remarkably silly idea.
In general, neoreactionaries seem to have cribbed this position from Herbert Butterfield's critique of what he called the "Whig Interpretation of History". Butterfield was not himself a neoreactionary, and infact warned against the trap that many neoreactionaries fall into: that of thinking that just because Whig histories are invalid, that this somehow makes Tory histories valid.
It's particularly apropos that Lord of the Flies is common required reading in American high schools.
If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
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I'm just about done with Michael Herr's Dispatches, a war correspondent's view of Vietnam circa the Tet Offensive.
It's about the opposite of objective journalism: first-person, tightly focused, episodic, vividly emotional and impressionistic. And it does that very well. I'm getting the feeling that it might have been responsible for the particular shade of hellish Kafkaesque insanity that we associate with the Vietnam War after films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket; in fact several episodes and characters seem to have been composited into those movies. In a modern context, unfortunately, that strips the book of some of its potential impact; if you have a passing knowledge of Vietnam in modern pop culture, it's not going to be showing you much that you haven't already seen.
I'd recommend it if you liked Generation Kill but are too young to have seen the 80s wave of war movies, or for people that like emotional intensity in their journalism. If you're looking for a more historical or less conventional approach, though, this isn't the place to find it.
Speaking of Generation Kill, I recently got done reading One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, the platoon commander featured in Generation Kill, which covered many of the same events, but with a somewhat different focus (Evan Wright's book aimed at representing the experiences of as many of the Marines he was embedded with as possible, were as Fick's book explicitly about his experiences in particular), as well as Fick's experiences at Officer School and in Afghanistan.
In general, Fick's book is more sympathetic to First Recon's leadership, and to its commander Lt. Col Ferrando in particular, saying that he suspected Ferrando of caring about his men much more than he lead them (and by extension Wright) to believe. On the other hand, Fick agrees with Wright that Bravo Company's commander, whom Wright identifies as Encino Man and Fick just calls "the captain" or "my CO", was dangerously incompetent. Fick also describes having a hostile relationship with the battalion's XO (who was only briefly mentioned in GK), and writes about imagining himself fragging the XO.
Overall, I thought it was engagingly written, and a good companion piece to Wright's book (and the HBO series).