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All of Warrigal3's Comments + Replies

SolidGoldMagikarp III: Glitch token archaeology
Warrigal340

I have a hypothesis as to how the token ーン originated and why it's associated specifically with the character Mejiro McQueen. The results from Google Images seem to show that the character is often referred to in Japanese as "メジロマックEーン"—notice the Latin letter E near the end!

Obviously, using a solitary Latin letter in the middle of a Japanese spelling is extremely unusual, but somebody (likely the creators of the character) decided to do it for artistic purposes. (It's a bit like if Toyota Motor Corporation decided to start writing their name as "Toヨta.")

A... (read more)

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Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
Warrigal320

So, I read textbooks "wrong".

The "standard" way of reading a textbook (a math textbook or something) is, at least I imagine, to read it in order. When you get to exercises, do them until you don't think you'd get any value out of the remaining exercises. If you come across something that you don't want to learn, skip forwards. If you come across something that's difficult to understand because you don't fully understand a previous concept, skip backwards.

I almost never read textbooks this way. I essentially read them in an arbitrary ord... (read more)

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1Adele_L
This is how I read too, usually. I think it's one of those things that works better for some people but not others. I've tried reading things the standard way, and it works for some books, but for other books I just get too bored trudging through the boring parts. BTW, I've also been reading HoTT, so if you want to talk about it or something feel free to message me!
1polymathwannabe
On one hand, it's a good sign that you have a keen sense of what you need to know, how and where to look for it, and at what pace. On the other hand, authors who know more about a subject than you do must have had their reasons to choose the order in which they present their material. I'd say keep listening to your gut on what is important to read, but at least try to get acquainted with the other topics you're choosing not to go deeply into.
Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
Warrigal300

All right. The thing is, I don't see how "flow is antithetical to interleaved practice" leads to "flow is a poor ideal for learning", so for me, the sentence "flow is a poor ideal for learning because flow is antithetical to interleaved practice" doesn't make sense.

Actually, I also don't see how flow is antithetical to interleaved practice. The article you linked to says that the "Mixers" (who used interleaved practice) were more successful than the "Blockers", but it doesn't seem to give much of a reason t... (read more)

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0[anonymous]
I'm not sure if it's been studied specifically, so all I can say is that interleaved practice tends to frustrate me, whereas block practice tends to get me into a rhythm which leads to flow. I'm unsure if this generalizes to others, is placebo, or is confounded by other factors.
Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
Warrigal310

Can you explain what the diagram means? I haven't been able to come up with a good guess as to what the arrows mean, or how the principles govern what.

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2[anonymous]
It's been a bit since I've researched this stuff, so I'll do my best: The right hand side of the diagram represents the social cognitive theory of Albert Bandura, which applies mostly to our Long term planning brain (What I now think of as system 2) Essentially, it's saying that we have thoughts, which can affect our behaviors and and our perception of our environment. The thoughts can also be affected by our behaviors and our environment. Finally, our thoughts can effect how we use our behaviors to change our environment, and vice versa. What this means is that we can use this mode of our brain take the long term view, using introspection to choose our behaviors and shape our environments such that we can ultimately achieve our goals. This is great for planning and stopping destructive behaviors. It also suggests that the way to change our actions when in this mode is to change our environments and change our thought patterns. ---------------------------------------- The left side represents behaviorism, encompassing the instinctual processes of operant and classical conditioning (what I now know as system 1). The arrows show how everything is caused by a stimulus, which either causes us to find that an action leads up to a result (classical conditioning), or causes us to associate an action with a positive or negative result (operant conditioning).' What this means is that we can use this mode of our brain when we need immediate instincts on something because we're under a time crunch, or we need to get ourselves to take immediate action. It's great for time limited activities (social interactions, sports), as well as when we want to take action immediately (beat procrastination). It also means that if we want to change our behavior when in this mode, we should work to change either our immediate stimuli, or our immediate rewards/punishments. The top and bottom represent the mutual laws that govern both modes. The Profit of Action Principle says that th
Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
Warrigal300

You could say that "A and B happen to be in sync for a while" is possibility 3, where C is the passage of time. (Unless by "happen to be in sync for a while" you mean that they appear to be correlated because of a fluke.)

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Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
Warrigal300

On an unrelated note it se,ems flow is actually the great state for peak performance, but it turns out to be a poor ideal for learning because it's antithetical to interleaved practice.

Would "because it's insufficiently challenging" be at least as good an explanation?

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0[anonymous]
Only if had a control where I tried to make things harder without using interleaved practice. I haven't done that, I have less reason to suspect that simply making learning harder would make you learn better.