All of Parker Conley's Comments + Replies
How large do you think the marginal benefits of doing the full workout you recommend in Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade versus the quicker version in this post?
Useful clarification and thanks for writing this up!
Inspired by and building on this, I decided to clean up some thoughts of my own in a similar direction. Here they are on my short forum: What are the actual use cases of memory systems like Anki?
What are the actual use cases of memory systems like Anki?
Epistemic status: spent 30min cleaning up some notes from my Obsidian I jotted down yesterday. This ontology is rough and a bit illegible but potentially useful for narrowing down the actual use cases of memory systems.
Inspired by @Saul Munn's recent short form: Active Recall and Spaced Repetition are Different Things. The concepts of active recall and spaced repetition apply pretty well here, but I saw Saul's post after writing most of the text below.
Roughly, there are types of knowledge in domains...
Another caveat:
- I am believable and have expertise in very few major life skills, and possibly don't have expertise in the thing you're asking advice for.
Related note: I think developing the skill of identifying believability and expertise is very powerful (though I have only been applying said skill for a couple of years explicitly; caveat emptor, lol.)
Here's Cedric Chin outlining believability defined by Ray Dalio:
...Technique summary:
Believable people are people who have 1) a record of at least three relevant successes and 2) have great explanations o
[I only skimmed the post so you might have addressed this, but…]
I once met a sometime who made super intense eye contact all the time, and it gave me weird vibes. Sort of uncanny valley vibes, if I try to put words to it? It was like they were staring at me in normal conversation. One hypothesis I had as to why is that maybe he did one of these type of activities that you outline here (iirc, I was introduced to the idea being a thing through an old LW post on scientology doing it?).
Epistemic status: I don’t know if an event like this was the cause of this ...
Tacit Knowledge Videos added to the list from May–August, 2024. Enjoy!
- Kenneth Folk, pranayama breathing.
- “Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. After twenty years of training in the Burmese Theravada Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries in Asia and the U.S., he began to spread his own findings, successfully stripping away religious dogma to render meditation accessible to modern p
I’m considering live-streaming (or just making a video) of myself doing this on a totally new topic to show how I do this in real-time, since it works so well for me. Let me know if you think this could be helpful.
I'd be curious to see this video of you creating flashcards on a new topic! And would very likely add it to the post.
1Below are the new tacit knowledge videos added to the post since mid-April, 2024.
- Paul Meehl, Philosophical Psychology 1989 course lectures, "deep introduction to 20c philosophy of science, using psychology rather than physics as the model science -- because it's harder!" (via @Jonathan Stray)
- "Meehl was a philosopher of science, a statistician, and a lifelong clinical psychologist. He wrote a book showing that statistical prediction usually beats clinical judgement in 1954, and a paper on the replication crisis in psychology in 1978. He perso
Updates Thread. Below are occational updates with lists of new tacit knowledge videos so you don't have to scroll through the list again to find new videos.
You can subscribe to the Tacit Knowledge Video Updates Substack to have these emailed to you or sent to an RSS feed (https://tacitknowledgevideos.substack.com/feed).
Thanks for the feedback! I too am skeptical of the finance videos, agreeing that the video probably came across my radar due to the figures being popular rather than displaying believable tacit knowledge.
I've gone back and forth on whether to remove the videos from the list or just add your expert anecdata as a disclaimer on the videos. In the spirit of quantity vs. quality, I'm leaning toward keeping the videos on the list.
Thanks! Added.
Relevant note from the entry:
Me: I was hesitant to add a lecture series to this list at first. I changed my mind after listening to the first video, where Meehl provides interesting details (gossip, almost) about the life of an academic and the various personalities of his successful academic peers.
@habryka / @mods - would it be possible to pin (1) the 'Review Thread' and (2) this thread?
I think these will be the two most valuable comments on this post. The comment video submissions are a bit cluttered due to embeds and submissions are more accessible/navigatable through the OP.
Adding to this: an interesting frame is to think about how subcultures develop illegible shadow structures beyond their legible structure and communities. Similar to how banks/bureaucracies do: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
Review of: Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise: GiveWell's Public Board Meetings (2007–2020 have audio).
I'm a college student with only pretty low-stakes work experience. I listened to the first 5–10 meetings as I would a podcast last week. Some takeaways, emphasizing that I only just watched them last week:
- It was interesting to follow the narrative of Holden and Elie getting started on the project. Like, anecdotes about people's experiences starting a startup are everywhere,
2[pasting a comment of mine on Zvi's recent monthly roundup]
If anyone has anecdotes as to why they think the videos have been useful to them I'd be curious to hear. I'm still unsure of their benefit; the interest could just be novelty/insight-porn (Andy Matuschak speculates something in this direction, though he too seems ambivalent). I wrote the post partly as a test to see if there is much use.
...Do people really learn anything from these streams? People certainly claim to learn things from my note-writing stream. I can believe it, maybe, but I wonder to wha
Do people really learn anything from these streams? People certainly claim to learn things from my note-writing stream. I can believe it, maybe, but I wonder to what extent people are deluding themselves. Certainly it’s extremely inefficient: what’s the insight-per-minute?
— Andy Matuschak, Could streaming help convey tacit knowledge? (Working Notes)
Post attempts to compile The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject. I notice I lack motivation to use this modality, and think it would be a poor fit for how I learn, and that it is relatively less tempting now than it would have been two years ago before LLMs got good. The problem is that you don’t direct where it goes and can’t interact, so they’re not so likely to be teaching you the thing you don’t know and are ready to learn. But many people benefit?
If anyone has anecdotes as to why they think the videos have been useful to them I'd be curious ...
Glad to see that people find the post useful! I hope it will see many future contributions as well. In case interesting to anyone, I've just put together a google form Substack (edited 5.6.24) to create an email list for those who would like to be sent lists of newly added videos every month or so.
Situating the Contributions of LessWrong to the Philosophy of Language by @Suspended Reason seems to address this topic in a pretty thorough fashion.
You've probably thought of this and have reasons for and against it, but maybe some hotels (bedside) and restaurants (on tables) would be willing to take copies too? Seems much less likely that libraries though.