All of richard_reitz's Comments + Replies

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)

4cata
There are definitely a lot of people who are competing on the margin, for whom deviating from their individual incentives would cause them a lot of suffering and eliminate other ways they can do good in the world; I really can't fault them for not making those sacrifices. However, I think there are many people who only have to make relatively small personal sacrifices to this end. For example, one link in the footnotes is about the failure of companies to reward interviewers for doing a good job. Many -- most -- interviewers are people with established careers and non-zero political capital. If so, you may very well have the slack to just spend extra time doing a good job anyway, and suck up the fact that your other work will slow down a little. If you think that doing a better job hiring people will have an important impact in the world, and you have the ability to sacrifice a relatively small slice of your career to do it, you should do it. It's not OK to do a bad job just because it's maximizing your self-interest. Note that many of the most powerful decision-makers in our society are also the most privileged; they are wealthy, have high status, and have personal attributes that make their lives easier. (AFAIK this is least evident in the academic community -- but consider, for example, celebrities, rich capitalists, and many upper-middle class professionals.) My experience is that by and large, those people have the latitude to largely blow off bad incentives while incurring mild personal suffering at best -- e.g. they might risk a single job in a world where many similarly good jobs await them, or risk some money from a pile of money that is already not getting them much more marginal utility per dollar. When those people still choose to maximize their own self-interest? That's as close to evil as you can get. (I get the sense that Eliezer thinks that this "free energy" gets eaten up very quickly by other actors who will outcompete the person who is ma

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 :)

2Raemon
leverages the which? In any case, I like the idea, although it may be in the backlog for awhile.

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!)

1Cariyaga
Hahah! Kagome's the best. We're presently debating the merits of international merchant adventure, and creating a village hidden in low earth orbit.

Ha! I give Lighting Up the Dark—also by Velorien—last pass editing.

Thanks for the rec. It looks really good.

3Cariyaga
It is exceptional. If you have the time, once you get caught up I'd suggest getting involved in decision-making! It's really fun to be involved and also like crack for apparently multiple readers, including myself, and at least one of the writers (who has the common "I'll just refresh one more time before sleeping...") problem. The people there are actually really mature and empathetic too, though I think that the forum itself is partially to thank for that. The rating system on posts (Like, Hug, Insightful, Informative, Funny) does a lot to encourage empathy.

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

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.

1cousin_it
Interesting! I'd love to try it in my spare time. Do you have any examples of pieces that were written collaboratively? Do you keep a history of changes and discussions? How do you determine the direction of the story, is there a single leader who makes the big decisions, or is it more egalitarian?
7Elo
yes

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.

1tanagrabeast
I've cut back on note-taking quite a bit thanks to Anki. They weren't looking up those notes anyway. If they want them bad enough they can look them up on my web page or go straight to the Anki cards. Anki hasn't displaced much homework, though, as there wasn't much left to displace. I don't give it mostly because few of my students would do it; they are not strongly motivated by grades. This is especially true of reading homework; I gave up on that a year after I stopped teaching honors after getting about 10% compliance. Reading happens in class or not at all, and yes, it is a big challenge to squeeze this in and still do all of the other things we need to do. It's important, though. For most of my students, the reading we do together is the only reading-at-length they do all year. They admit this readily -- even proudly. Essays are more mixed. We don't do too many full ones, and the ones we do mostly get done in class. The "homework" is there just as safety valve for those who care enough to make their essay great.

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 ... (read more)

-2Lumifer
Nobody said that flawless micro is sufficient and figuring out the rock/paper/scissors dynamic is not hard. Plus, given that it has enough "attention" for everything, an AI is likely to keep a dancing scout or two around the enemy base and see those mutalisks early enough.
2skeptical_lurker
Zealots/muta/dragoons/Hydralisks is just a standard rock/paper/scissors game theory thing, and it shouldn't be too hard to calculate an approximate nash equlibrium. The problem is that there is micro, macro, game theory, imperfect information, and an AI has to tie all these different aspects together (as well as perhaps some perceptual chunking to reduce the complexity) so its a real challange for combining different cognitive modules. This is too close to AGI for comfort IMO.

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... (read more)

2Lumifer
Interesting. One of my recurring themes is that mathematics and statistics are very different things and require different kind of brains/thinking -- people good at one will rarely be good at the other, too. If you define mathematics as being about proofs (and not so much about computation), the distinction becomes more pronounced: statistics isn't about proofs at all, it's about dealing with uncertainty. There are certainly areas where they touch (e.g. proving that certain estimators have certain properties), but at their core, mathematics and statistics are not similar at all.
3Strangeattractor
Your comment made me think, and I'll look up some of the recommendations. I like the analogy with musicians and also the part where you talked about how the analogy breaks down. However, I'd like to offer a bit of a different perspective to the original poster on this part of what you said. Your advice is good, given this assumption. But this assumption may or may not be true. Given that the post says: I think there's the possibility that the original poster would be interested in computational mathematics. Also, it's not either or. It's a false dichotomy. Learning both is possible and useful. You likely know this already, and perhaps the original poster does as well, but since the original poster is not familiar with much math, I thought I'd point that out in case it's something that wasn't obvious. It's hard to tell, writing on the computer and imagining a person at the other end. If the word "computational" is being used to mean following instructions by rote without really understanding why, or doing the same thing over and over with no creativity or insight, then it does not seem to be what the original poster is looking for. However, if it is used to mean creatively understanding real world problems, and formulating them well enough into math that computer algorithms can help give insights about them, then I didn't see anything in the post that would make me warn them to steer clear of it. There are whole fields of human endeavor that use math and include the term "computational" and I wouldn't want the original poster to miss out on them because of not realizing that the word may mean something else in a different context, or to think that it's something that professional mathematicians or scientists or engineers don't do much. Some mathematicians do proofs most of the time, but others spend time on computation, or even proofs about computation. Fields include computational fluid dynamics, computational biology, computational geometry...the list goes o

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.)

6username2
Library Genesis provides a way to access pdf of textbooks. In many cases PDFs are superior than textbooks. They aren't heavy objects that you have to carry around. You can search in them.

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 ... (read more)

0Gram_Stone
I really appreciate this comment, thank you. I've actually never studied automata, computability, or complexity before either, so that's really why I picked up Sipser. But I'm downloading your other recommendation now (just moved, mobile Internet only); I can certainly imagine that some books are more useful than others for learning proof, I just saw an opportunity to practice and see how my natural ability is. I'll try to include things more specifically for learning proof in my diet. I sure will PM you if I need some feedback (I expect to), thanks.
4gjm
I think it's actually cleaner to prove the theorem non-inductively (though I appreciate that what GS asked for was specifically a cleaned-up inductive proof). E.g.: "Count pairs (vertex,edge) where the edge is incident on the vertex. The number of such pairs for a given vertex equals its degree, so the sum equals the sum of the degrees. The number of such pairs for a given edge equals 2, so the sum equals twice the number of edges." (More visually: draw the graph. Now erase all of each edge apart from a little bit at each end. The resulting picture is a collection of stars, one per vertex. How many points have the stars in total?)

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?

3[anonymous]
Simple: Where's the evidence? Let me make a simple parsimonious assertion: knowledge acquisition is limited to the precise information acquired with zero secondary benefits to any other areas of the brain. Furthermore, unless practiced regularly this information will most likely not be retained. While such an assertion is in all likelihood not true, in the absence of evidence, it is more likely to be true than a more complex theory of how knowledge is acquired and retained. Now, if I was to put Paul Graham's argument into precise, scientific terms, it would be: Holding time constant, time spent on more difficult problems is more likely to produce measurable improvements in fluid intelligence than time spent on simpler problems. Or possibly: holding time constant, time spent on more difficult problems is more likely to produce measurable improvements in conscientiousness than time spent on simpler problems. I'll stick with the first definition for simplicity. But increasing fluid intelligence is a hard thing to do. This famous study argues that solving working memory tasks increases fluid intelligence however this meta-analysis argues that the evidence in this area is still inconsistent. Even if working memory tasks do generate increases there is still the problem of whether it's better to solve a few really difficult tasks or lots of easy tasks or somewhere in between. Then there is the issue of how long this increase is retained. Is it something like exercise where benefits mostly disappear within 6 months? And even if working memory tasks do increase fluid intelligence, that doesn't mean difficult math problems increase fluid intelligence. My own impression is that the best way to increase intelligence is by just reading a lot. As evidence, this study found that reading was the best predictor of increased success on a standardized test. The next highest predictor was being social. Studying had a positive, but non-significant impact. This was an observation

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... (read more)

0Lumifer
That's a very important point. My impression is that people can be divided into two general categories -- those who learn best by themselves; and those who learn best when being taught by someone. I suspect that most people on LW prefer to inhale textbooks on their own. I also suspect that most people outside of LW prefer to have a teacher guide them.
3Vaniver
The core material for teaching is not the subject to be taught, but human confusions about that subject.

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 ... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

Illano110

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.

9NancyLebovitz
How do you identify people who can grade answers to questions which show deep understanding?
3Dagon
Testing and credentialism is a mess. The basic problem is that it's unclear what the result should measure: how much the student knows, how much the student has learned, how intelligent the student is, how conscientious, or how well the student's capabilities line up with the topic. The secondary problem is that in most settings, the test should be both hard-to-game AND perfectly objective, such that there is no argument about correctness of answer (and such that grading can be done quickly). I spend a lot of time interviewing and training interviewers for tech jobs. This doesn't have the first problem: we have a clear goal (determine whether the candidate is likely to perform well in the role, usually tested by solving similar problems as would be faced in the role). The second difficulty is similar - a good interview generates actual evidence of the candidate's likely success, not just domain knowledge. This takes a lot of interviewing skill to get the best from the candidate, and a lot of judgement in how to evaluate the approach and weigh the various aspects tested. We put a lot of time into this, and accept the judgement aspect rather than trying to reduce the time spent, automate the results, or be purely objective in assessment.

Trying to find the Oxford livestream, I happened across the Saturday Afternoon video.

...And, now it's private.

See Appendix B here and a long, rambly, unproofread fb post I don't entirely agree with (it's a stream-of-consciousness, get-an-unrefined-idea-on-paper-so-it-can-get-revised thing) here.

0[anonymous]
Yes, I broadly agree with both of those. Thanks for the links.

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?

7tanagrabeast
There is talk of me giving some training on it, yes. Teachers are so different from each other, though, and we easily become set in our ways. I'll count myself lucky for getting even a few to try it, and some of those may be doomed to fail because of their very different styles. That said, the foreign language department, at least, should have a way easier time capitalizing on SRS than I did. I'll try to give them some extra attention.

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... (read more)

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.

2ChristianKl
When I was in school and I thought I needed a memorizing tool I was ignorant and went for Phase6. If a teacher would have recommended Anki to me, I would have used Anki.

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... (read more)

0Gleb_Tsipursky
The letter would be passed to people involved in the EA movement interested in knowing about Intentional Insights and our efforts to spread rationality, so they would be heterogeneous but more rationality-oriented than most. But I think you're right about the inferential gap, I'll need to work on rewording that section, thank you!

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... (read more)

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."

  1. 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.

  2. You need to maintain working memory. The prototypical e

... (read more)

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.

3Bound_up
Thank you VERY much. This is very interesting; I'm off to go try it. If you happen to know, does your understanding about background noise suggest that using a white noise generator of some kind is ineffective at combating a "quiet room?" I've been going between nature sounds and pink noise in such an environment. It'd be convenient if that were sufficient, but I'd much like to know if I can squeeze out some extra efficiency by moving my study environment. Thanks again, this was very well put together (as far as communicating the ideas goes), no fluff.

"Baby Rudin" refers to "Principles of Mathematical Analysis", not "Real and Complex Analysis" (as was currently listed up top.) (Source)

1lukeprog
Fixed, thanks!

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... (read more)

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.

3[anonymous]
Worked, thank you....

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

0Adam Zerner
As for your point about quality I sense that it'd be inefficient to just take the lectures at the top of the bell curve and distribute them. I sense that it'd be more efficient to pool resources and "have them collaborate to make a super-lecture, and then get feedback on that particular unit, so they can improve the superlecture into a super-duperlecture". Could you elaborate a bit on this? Note: I agree with you about the wrinkles and I think they need to be accounted for. This may be oversimplified, but I think of it as a spectrum of how much you pool resources. The wrinkles explain why it isn't best to simply pool all resources. However, I think we both agree that right now we're hardly pooling resources at all and that we should be way more towards the side of pooling. I sense that talking about the wrinkles may be distracting from the core point of "why do you receive gains from pooling", but if you disagree please do what you think is best.
2gedymin
A good writeup. But you downplay the role of individual attention. No textbook is going to have all the answers to questions someone might formulate after reading the material. They also won't provide help to students who get stuck doing exercises. In books, it's either nothing or all (the complete solution). The current system does not do a lot of personalized teaching because the average university has a tightly limited amount of resources per student. The very rich universities (such as Oxford) can afford to give a training personalized to a much larger extent, via tutors.

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.

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.

0Capla
Am I correct that I get course credit as a part of that bargain?

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).

Episodic and semantic memory (are subsets of explicit... (read more)

2Capla
Primarily, but not exclusively. If there are tricks by which I can look at page for 3 minutes and then recite it from memory, I want to hear bout them.

Memory researchers do, in fact, make a distinction between accessibility (can I retrieve a memory?) and availibility (does the memory trace exist?).

4Capla
Ok, great. General accessibility is what I mean by "recall." Any other terms that I should be familiar with for this discussion?

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... (read more)

0John_Maxwell
Which source?
0Capla
I want to take that course. I was looking around, but it may be easier to just ask: is there an easy way to watch the lectures, perhaps for free?

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".

3Lumifer
At the moment, TIPS (US government securities that pay interest + whatever inflation turns out to be) trade at negative yield for maturities up to five years. That's the point of monetary stimulus, among other things.
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