All of ErrethAkbe's Comments + Replies

How do you find doing problems/exercises from these textbooks when you have prepared using Anki? And are you finding that earlier material seems obvious when reread?

Sorry if this is all coming across as critical and /or doubtful. I've tried to use Anki for theory before and dismally failed; the success you claim is very exciting and I'm trying to understand where I was going wrong.

So far I think I have focused too much on creating cards that can be memorised exactly (formulae and what-not), rather than having general concept cards that are used to develop fluency and familiarity (and later understanding), which sounds like what you are doing.

4TurnTrout
I think I do find Anki’d subjects much easier when I go back to them, yes. I think that’s probably it - focus on concepts. If you like, I’d be happy to take a look at a deck you make / otherwise give feedback!

What process do you use to review cards? Do you look at a prompt until you can say exactly what is on the card? Or if not verbatim what tolerance do you have for missing details/small mistakes?

3TurnTrout
Not verbatim. I mark the card 'correct' if I conjured the concept in the right way. If I was supposed to do a physics calculation, I don't pass it if I could recite the answer, I pass it if I went through the correct reasoning steps. "Calculate the gravitational force of a .1kg apple on a 70kg person, when they're 1m apart" -> ".1 * 70 * G / (1^2) = ?" is marked correct.

I'm a bit skeptical of what you claim because it is so different from my approach to becoming proficient at pieces mathematics: usually I will work through progressively more-complicated problems in excruciating detail. I don't claim that this is the most efficient method, and it would be nice to find such an approach, just that memorization methods have usually lead to me agreeing with the mathematics, rather than really understanding it.

But maybe you are using Anki differently to how I expect. How exactly do you review cards? Do you look at a prompt until you can say verbatim what is on the card? Or if not verbatim what tolerance do you have for missing details/small mistakes?

3Eric 'Siggy' Scott
Anki's value depends a lot on how you use it. If you use it for rote memorization, without grokking concepts deeply---then what you get is rote memorization.  Think of memorizing capitals without learning anything else about states and nations. But if you work hard to identify conceptual landmarks and add good questions to tie it all together (more like a high quality PowerPoint presentation), then it can be amazing and facilitate retention of rich intuitions for years.  Think of memorizing major topographic landmarks on a map and a bit of history, so that you have something to relate capitals to in context. Incidentally, rote-memorization cards are actually harder to review with Anki: the "glue" holding them in memory starts to fade after a month or so, so eventually the drift toward "ease hell" and otherwise become unpleasant to review.
2TurnTrout
I went into detail on how I use Anki for math in this thread. Feel free to comment there with further questions.
2michaelkeenan
That screenshot is the Robinhood UI, so looks like he uses Robinhood.

The attribution I have seen for the bull market is that investors are bullish on a return to normal via widespread vaccine distribution. If that is the case it follows that the current market is highly dependent on investor sentiment, and that a rapid, negative change in the short-to-moderate term outlook (due to the rise in a new, more-proboematic variant) will decrease the market.

However, the above line of logic is easy to follow and any investor who made or lost a lot of money last March will be on the lookout for the same thing to happen. So, the chanc... (read more)

6moridinamael
Interesting. The market has not increased much since the announcement of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, so I'd have a hard time causally connecting the market to the vaccine announcement. My feeling was that the original sell-off in February and early March was due to the fact that we were witnessing and unprecedented-in-our-lifetimes event, anything could happen. A more contagious form of the same virus will only trigger mass selloff if and only if investors believe that other investors believe that the news of the new strain is bad enough to trigger a panic selloff. There are too many conflicting things going on for me to make confident claims about timelines and market moves, but I really do doubt the story that the market is up ~13% relative to January of this year simple because investors anticipate a quick return to normal.

One could just wait until 'the market' (pick an ETF on your favourite index) drops by x%, buy back in (or buy calls) and cash out ~ a year or so later. This would have been a good trade in late March/early April and has a couple of pros: limited downside, relatively unsophisticated (i.e. easy to execute and plan), clear entry and exit signals. The cons are a lack of precision (I suspect a more targeted bet on e.g. vol could make more money, maybe buy the ATM straddle?), and that the low leverage.

There is a rich field of research on statistical laws (such as the CLT) for deterministic systems, which I think might interest various commenters. Here one starts with a randomly chosen point x in some state space X, some dynamics T on X, and a real (or complex) valued observable function g :X -> R and considers the statistics of Y_n = g(T^n(x)) for n > 0 (i.e. we start with X, apply T some number of times and then take a 'measurement' of the system via g). In some interesting circumstances these (completely deterministic) systems satisfy a CLT. Spe... (read more)

Regarding the topic of your last paragraph (how can we have choice in a deterministic universe): this is something Gary Drescher discusses extensively in his book.

Firstly, he points out that determinism does not imply that choice is necessarily futile. Our 'choices' only happen because we engage in some kind of decision or choice making process. Even though the choice may be fixed in advance, it is still only taken because we engage in this process.

Additionally, Gary proposes the notion of a subjunctive means-end link (a means-end link is a method of ident... (read more)

I don't think it's a fair deduction to conclude that Goldbach's conjecture is "probably true" based on a estimate of the measure (or probability) of the set of possible counter examples being small. The conjecture is either true or false, but more to the point I think you are using the words probability and probable in two different ways (the measure theoretic sense, and in the sense of uncertainty about the truth value of a statement), which obfuscates (at least to me) what exactly the conclusion of your argument is.

There is of co... (read more)

2Stuart_Armstrong
Note that the probabilistic argument fails for n=3 for Fermat's last theorem; call this (3,2) (power=3, number of summands is 2). So we know (3,2) is impossible; Euler's conjecture is the equivalent of saying that (n+1,n) is also impossible for all n. However, the probabilistic argument fails for (n+1,n) the same way as it fails for (3,2). So we'd expect Euler's conjecture to fail, on probabilistic grounds. In fact, the surprising thing on probabilistic grounds is that Fermat's last theorem is true for n=3.
2Pattern
That would be sufficient, but there are more easily met conditions like: 1) if you have a bunch of sequences of observations (100 or 1000 year's worth) and none of them include the counterexample as an observation with high probability 2) The frequency is low enough that it isn't worth accounting for. For example, if you flip a coin it comes up heads or tails - is it worth bringing up another possibility?