All of Ravi D'Elia's Comments + Replies

We have a round running now, it closes on the 27th. Instructions are here. There are prizes of up to $65 per question, and it also helps us out for the planned BIG tournament later.

This is all focused on single-winner elections, which is the main kind we have in the US. The standard way elections for multiple slots are handled in the US is you vote for up to N people, and the N with the most votes win. Switching to approval voting would be as simple as changing "vote for up to N" to "vote for any number". (There's also generalization of Instant Runoff called Single Transferrable Vote, which Cambridge MA uses for City Council)

I've found Anki really terrible for learning, even for simple things like vocabulary; what it does is help me remember things I've already at least half-learned.

Anki might not be suitable for anything other than vocabulary extension (and medical school). I'm not really sure. I've only ever successfully used it for vocabulary extension. I may be biased because I use Anki to study Chinese, an unusually difficult language. The relative merits of Duolingo vs. Anki may be less clear-cut for easier languages like Romance languages where it's not necessary to learn the language so systematically. In the case of Chinese, grammar is so simple and vocabulary is so hard that vocabulary extension is pretty much the entire game, so optimizing for anything other than vocabulary acquisition can cause you to fail in the long intermediate slog. What language(s) are you studying? This makes sense. I prioritize vocabulary over grammer for a couple reasons. [1] You can communicate effectively with vocabulary and without grammar (but not vice-versa) and [2] the difficulty of learning a language's grammar is far outweighed, in the long run, by the difficulty of learning vocabulary. It may make sense for someone to start learning with Duolingo and then transfer to Anki (for hard languages) or just reading material in the language (for easy languages). I'm happy to hear that Duolingo works for you.

Starting with Duolingo might be OK, but it’s very bare-bones and unlike the real deal of having thoughts in a language and then expressing yourself. In fact, I recommend not using it after you have a rudimentary grasp of the language. Try entering full sentence-to-sentence cards in Anki. At first, you won’t be able to write good sentences on your own, so use a sentence-search service for that (I don’t remember what they’re called, but at the least you can use the example wordreference sentences). Over the course of a year, I input all the thoughts I’d had that day which I couldn’t translate. By learning to produce words in-context instead of memorizing the multilingual dictionary, I began to run out of additions to the Anki deck. That exercise gave me near-fluency, which has persisted to this day. So, I think Anki is suited for nearly everything except oral skills. Plus, spaced repetition saves time. Also, you might try an app like Tandem. If you’re single, try learning to be interesting in the foreign language - it’s naturally motivating, and both of you can chalk up any awkwardness to mistranslation. :)

To me this pattern-matches to something else. The thing we need isn't just interaction, but "authentic" interaction. Let me unpack that: An interaction is authentic when there is no inhibition involved. You're not hiding your true feelings and/or thoughts. You're not playing a role, or putting on a mask. You're just allowing your system 1 to do the interaction all by itself. Hardly any interaction is 100% authentic. Even if you don't feel like you're inhibiting yourself, you most likely are. Still, there's a very important difference between 90% and 10% inhibition. An interaction is only as valuable as it's authenticity. (on a side note, this is why I'm worried about today's tendency for people to forbid some forms of speech)