Testing effect.
(At this point, I should really know better than to trust myself to write anything at 1 in the morning.)
if you’ve read all of a sequence you get a small badge that you can choose to display right next to your username, which helps people navigate how much of the content of the page you are familiar with.
Idea: give sequence-writers the option to include quizzes because this (1) demonstrates a badgeholder actually understands what the badge indicates they understand (or, at least, are more likely to) and (2) leverages the testing effect.
I await the open beta eagerly.
Also I have already read them all more than once and don't plan to do so again just to get the badge :)
I have taken the survey.
Extremely interested, would move anywhere rationalists would set one of these up.
When I first read In Fire Forged, I really liked it, but saw things I could improve. So, I left some high-quality reviews on fanfiction.net (that is, reviews that demonstrated I somewhat knew what I was talking about) and then solicited the author. From there, networking (people who you collaborated with can collaborate with you).
Back-engineering, I'd tentatively suggest just posting somewhere with reasonable visibility that selects for writers you'd like to collaborate as, and then ask anyone interested to ping you. Alternatively, you could develop a relationship working on someone else's writing and then ask them to look at your's.
You guys voted to develop Righteous Face Punching Style and add Kagome to your party. What do you need my help in decision-making for? (But, seriously, I probably shouldn't have taken the time to get caught up, much less actively participate. Fun read, though!)
Ha! I give Lighting Up the Dark—also by Velorien—last pass editing.
Thanks for the rec. It looks really good.
Do you have any examples of pieces that were written collaboratively?
In addition to In Fire Forged (in which I did first-round micro, in addition to contributing to worldbuilding), I give a last pass micro to Lighting Up the Dark (rational Naruto fanfic). I contributed a little to the Second Secular Sermon, although verse is really not my thing. I also have a partnership with Gram Stone that includes looking over each other's LW posts.
Do you keep a history of changes and discussions?
In Fire Forged has a Skype group, which keeps an archive of our dis...
I'm sorry my title misled you.
(Since writing has trouble carrying intent: I genuinely feel bad that the title I chose caused you to believe something that wasn't true. I wish I was smart enough to have come up with a title that more precisely communicated what I was and wasn't discussing.)
This is perhaps a case of different projects being best served by different practices. There's certainly nothing stopping you from making a Google Doc where two (or more) authors have editing permission (as opposed to commenting permission).
But it's absolutely true that I...
Yes; Eliezer recommended it in an Author's Note, which is how I got involved.
It's also not dead so much as on a very extended hiatus. Our author started a computer game company and has been prohibitively busy for a while now. There's a blog with updates about the lack of updates.
If anyone would like a collaborator for something they're writing for LessWrong or diaspora, please PM me. Anyone interested in being a collaborator can reply to this comment, thereby creating a collaborator repository.
my classes continue to perform with increasingly minimal note-taking and homework.
Which homework hasn't been assigned because of Anki? Remembering back to my high school English classes, the only homework I can remember doing was reading readings and writing essays. I can't see how either could be displaced by Anki.
I have taken the survey.
And yet, humans currently have the edge in Brood War. Humans are probably doomed once StarCraft AIs get AlphaGo-level decision-making, but flawless micro—even on top of flawless* macro—won't help you if you only have zealots when your opponent does a muta switch. (Zealots can only attack ground and mutalisks fly, so zealots can't attack mutalisks; mutalisks are also faster than zealots.)
*By flawless, I mean macro doesn't falter because of micro elsewhere; often, even at the highest levels, players won't build new units because they're too busy controlling ...
Excellent points; "rigorous" would have been a better choice. I haven't yet had the time to study any computational fields, but I'm assuming the ones you list aren't built on the "fuzzy notions, and hand-waving" that Tao talks about.
I should also add I don't necessarily agree 100% with every in Lockhart's Lament; I do think, however, that he does an excellent job of identifying problems in how secondary school math is taught and does a better job than I could of contrasting "follow the instructions" math with "real" math to a lay person.
I once took a math course where the first homework assignment involved sending the professor an email that included what we wanted to learn in the course (this assignment was mostly for logistical reasons: professor's email now autocompletes, eliminating a trivial inconvenience of emailing him questions and such, professor has all our emails, etc). I had trouble answering the question, since I was after learning unknown unknowns, thereby making it difficult to express what exactly it was I was looking to learn. Most mathematicians I've talked to agree that...
It has happened more than once that a professor has assigned a textbook, which I bought, only for the professor to say in the first class that the only reason they assigned a textbook is because they were required to, but will never use it. Holding off on buying textbooks until after the first class (or, I guess, emailing the professor to ask if they plan on using the textbook) would have saved me several hundreds of dollars. (Having textbooks to study from is nice—they are, to me, the most efficient way of getting up to speed in math or science—but the ones professors assign because they need to put something down tend not to be the best ones.)
Lemma: sum of the degrees of the nodes is twice the number of edges.
Proof: We proceed by induction on the number of edges. If a graph has 0 edges, the the sum of degrees of edges is 0=2(0). Now, by way of induction, assume, for all graphs with n edges, the sum of the degrees of the nodes 2n; we wish to show that, for all graphs with n+1 edges, the sum of the degrees of the nodes is 2(n+1). But the sum of the degrees of the nodes is (2n)+2 = 2(n+1). ∎
The theorem follows as a corollary.
If you want practice proving things and haven't had much experience so ...
It helps to explicitly visualize people who I perceive as being skilled in X failing at it over and over again
Some of the greatest value I've gotten out of attending math lectures comes from seeing math Ph.Ds (particularly good ones) make mistakes or even forget exactly how a proof works and have to dismiss class early. It never happened often, but just often enough to keep me from getting discouraged.
Paul Graham writes that studying fields with hard, solved problems (eg mathematics) is useful, because it gives you practice solving hard problems and the approaches and habits of mind that you develop solving those problems are useful when you set out to tackle new (technical) problems. This claim seems at least plausible to me and seems to line up with me personal experience, but you seem like a person who might know why I shouldn't believe this, so I ask, is there any reason I should doubt that the problem-solving approaches and habits of mind I develop studying mathematics won't help me as I run into novel technical problems?
If you're after feedback-for-understanding, providing a student with a list of questions they got wrong and a good solutions manual (which you only have to write once) works most of the time (my guess is around 90% of the time, but I have low confidence in my estimates because I'm capable of successfully working through entire textbooks' worth of material and needing no human feedback, which I'm told is not often the case). Doing this should be more effective than having the error explained outright a la generation effect.
Another interesting result is that...
If we assume that the questions are designed such that a student can answer them upon initial exposure if and only if they deeply understand the material, then the question of identifying graders turns into the much easier question of identifying people who can discriminate between valid and invalid answers. I'm told that being able to discriminate between valid and invalid responses is a necessary condition for subject expertise, so anyone who's a relevant expert works. One way to demonstrate expertise is by building something that requires expertise. In ...
It seems conventional wisdom that tests are generally gameable in the sense that an (most?) effective way to produce the best scores involves teaching password guessing rather than actually learning material deeply, i.e. such that the student can use it in novel and useful ways. Indeed, I think this is the case for many (most, even) tests, but also think it possible to write tests that are most easily passed by learning the material deeply. In particular, I don't see how to game questions like "state, prove, and provide an intuitive justification for ...
One easy way I can think of gaming such a test is to figure out ahead of time that those questions will be the ones on the test, then look up an answer for just that question, and parrot it on the actual test.
I know at my college, there were databases of just about every professor's exams for the past several years. Most of them re-used enough questions that you could get a pretty good idea of what was going to be on the exams, just by looking at past exams. A lot of people would spend a lot of time studying old exams to game this process instead of actually learning the material.
Trying to find the Oxford livestream, I happened across the Saturday Afternoon video.
...And, now it's private.
In my high school career, I took precisely one non-honors/AP course when alternatives were present. Recalling my classmates... yeah, I'm now as skeptical as you are.
(I had successfully repressed those memories until now. Thanks so much for the reminder ;)
Any chance your success might influence your colleagues?
Before we started using SRS I tried to sell my students on it with a heartfelt, over-prepared 20 minute presentation on how it works and the superpowers to be gained from it. It might have been a waste of time. It might have changed someone's life. Hard to say.
I'm less skeptical. You say that you got a few students to use Anki which, while probably not life-changing, is probably significantly life-impacting. If my tenth grade English teacher had introduced Anki to me... well, right now, I'm reteaching myself introductory biology (5 on the AP exam), intr...
If I were currently teaching honors students I would also be less skeptical. My district persistently pushes its honors and AP offerings in a way that leads to an evaporative cooling of work ethic in the lower classes. I think I only had a handful of students using Anki on their own because pretty much everyone with enough ambition to have been persuaded by me was in honors.
Not seeing the benefits of what I do in the classroom goes with the territory. I do plan to give the presentation again when we start back up in a few weeks.
I'm not entirely sure who the audience of this letter is (I'm given to understand "effective altruists" is a pretty heterogeneous group). This affects how your letter should look so much that I can't give much object-level feedback. For instance, it matters how much of your audience has pre-existing familiarity with things like raising the sanity waterline and rationality as a common interest across causes; if most of them lack this familiarity, I expect they'll read your first sentence, be unable to bridge an inferential gap, and stop reading.
Id...
Introductory discrete math textbook (pdf) courtesy of MIT. I prefer it to Rosen, which is currently recommended in the MIRI research guide, although I think there exist students who would do better with Rosen's book.
(How to tell which book you should choose? Well, since this one is Creative Commons, and therefore free, I'd try this one. If you find it's not saying enough words per theorem, try Rosen. If you think it's saying too many words per theorem, try these lecture notes. A recommendation to LW's list of best textbooks is forthcoming, which will conta...
As another person who's used Anki for quite some time (~ 2 years), my experience agrees with eeuuah. I would also add exceptions to "just Google it."
It's easier to maintain knowledge than to reacquire it. The prototypical example here is tying a tie. Having a card that says "tie a four-in-hand knot", and having to do that occasionally, turns out to be a lot easier than Googling how to tie a tie, especially if you do it infrequently enough that you need to re-learn it every time.
You need to maintain working memory. The prototypical e
White noise is fine; irrelevant sound effect operates on anything that sounds like it may be human speech, which turns out to be any sort of fluctuating tone.
It has been requested that I post my own take on efficient learning. As I spend half a page describing, this is not yet ready for publishing, but I'm putting out there because there may be (great) benefit to be had. After all, there is low-hanging fruit if you're willing to abandon traditional methods: simply doing practice problems in a different order may improve your test score by 40 points.
"Baby Rudin" refers to "Principles of Mathematical Analysis", not "Real and Complex Analysis" (as was currently listed up top.) (Source)
Since this review, Axler has released a third edition. The new edition contains substantial changes (i.e. it's not the same book being released under "n+1 edition"): though there's little new material, exercises appear at the end of every section, instead at the end of every chapter, and there's many more examples given in the body of the text (a longer list of changes can be found on Dr. Axler's website). I feel these revisions are significant improvements from a pedagogical perspective, as it gives the reader more opportunity to practice prereq...
Turns out you're not the only one who wants to know this. Seems your best bet is to use C-S-v to paste raw text and then format it in the article editor.
Yeah. I've taught myself several courses just from textbooks, with much more success than in traditional setups that come with individual attention. I am probably unusual in this regard and should probably typical-mind-fallacy less.
However, I will nitpick a bit. While most textbooks won't quite have every answer to every question a student could formulate whilst reading it (although the good ones come very close), answers to these questions are typically 30 seconds away, either on Wikipedia or Google. Point about the importance of having people to talk to ...
The argument goes "paying 20k camera-people for one year can replace 2M full-time equivalent jobs next year, which can either go into something more useful without changing anything else (1). Of course, once you're going to do that, you'd do well to look into seeing what elements of anything else could be changed to make it even more awesome."
If we optimize properly, I believe we wind up open-sourcing textbooks, somewhat like Linux. We have a core textbook, which has recieved enough feedback to make sure that everything is explained well enough t...
There's two problems here. First, we have duplication of labor in that we have something like 1% of the population doing essentially the same task, even though it's fairly straightforward to reproduce and distribute en masse after it's been done once. This encompasses things like lesson plans, lectures, and producing supplementary materials (e.g. a sheet of practice problems).
This leads into the second problem, which is a resulting quality issue: if you have a large population of diverse talent doing the same task, you expect it to form some sort of a bell...
I'll give you that nutrition/exercise is very high on the list of things to do to optimize memory, but I'm skeptical that it's more important than mnemonics.
Personally, movement from fairly wretched nutrition/exercise to Lifestyle Interventions to Improve Longevity/Optimal Exercise-compliant nutrition/exercise has helped lots and lots, but (for the limited cases it applies), Method of Loci helped more.
Nootropics Depot. If you dig around the comments of the Reddit link, you'll find that it's the same one as the first one in the OP there.
Yes (4 credits).
There is an easy way of watching the lectures. It involves paying Harvard University $1,250 whenever the class is next offered. Their video streaming is on par with Youtube circa 2007, but at least it works.
There is also a free way of watching the lectures, but it involves me breaking a contract I made with Harvard University, which I'm all manner of unwilling to do. However, they've made the video to the first lecture publicly available in the course description, so there's that.
Yes. Lots of them. Right now, my memory deck has about 200 cards, and I'm only about 2/3 done with the course. I'll point again to Baddeley Eysenck Anderson. You seem primarily interested in long-term memory (although that may be an artifact of not knowing a lot about memory; a large benefit of having a textbook on memory is to point out "unknown unkowns"), so here are some big ones off the top of my head.
Implicit and explicit memory (also known as declarative and nondeclarative, respectively).
Memory researchers do, in fact, make a distinction between accessibility (can I retrieve a memory?) and availibility (does the memory trace exist?).
The best textbook on memory I'm aware of is Baddeley Eysenck Anderson. It is quite good, but some of the definitions are vague, so you'll need to reference Wikipedia,.
Memory palaces, more formally known as Method of Loci, are well-supported by the academic literature. Brienne's presentation is a fantastic introduction, in line with all the academic literature I've read.
I use Anki. It gets the job done quite well, and although other software may be just as good or better, I'm left with no desire to try anything else. See janki method for implementation sugg...
Definitely. I wanted to make that point because, until I read Varian, I accepted the naive argument and not everyone here has studied economics, and the less they know, the more this entire "financial effectiveness" post is aimed at them, and this is something I found completely nonintuitive before reading about it and transparently obvious afterwards.
Well, if real interest rates are negative, everything reverses, and you should start favoring more expensive things now.
Also, it's possible to be realistic and say things like "if 2 + 2 = 5, then 5 = 2(1+1) and therefore isn't prime".
If I'm understanding you correctly, you don't think people who can't individually affect the equilibrium are evil? Scientists who would be outcompeted, and therefore unable to do science, if they failed to pursue a maximally impressive career seem an example of this. If they're good (in terms of both ability and alignment), there's some wiggle room in there for altruism when it's cheap, but if err too far from having an impressive career, someone else, probably someone not making small career sacrifices for social benefit, get... (read more)