I've been noticing some complaints (such as this post by Richard Ngo) lately about the quality of the modern LW community's contribution to the big picture of humanity's knowledge.
Ideally, if it were the case that reading something automatically made you internalize deeply everything it said, then just by having a group of people who have read The Sequences, you'd have a superteam of intellectuals. And while I do think LW is a pretty cool group of smart thinkers, that isn't fully the case- just reading The Sequences isn't enough. To really internalize the lessons that one must learn, one must apply the principles, push against the problem, see where their understanding needs improvement, and where they are good enough.
The simplest form of this is having a high-quality Anki deck that tests users on the principles, both by testing recall of the stated principle itself, and even more importantly, giving them test cases where they can apply the principles (in the same vein as Ankifying medium-difficulty multiplication problems). I have seen some rationality-themed Anki decks, but many of the cards are poorly formatted (both esthetically and in terms of learnability), and are also poorly curated. Ideally, if there were to be an Anki deck, it would be well formatted, and the cards would be carefully chosen to maximize quality of information.
Another idea that I've been thinking about is making explorables, a la Nicky Case, that would introduce important rationality concepts. This would have the advantage of providing more flexibility in experience than Anki, but also would sacrifice the benefits of having already implemented SRS.
My question is: if there were to be either an Anki deck or an explorable teaching concepts from The Sequences, targeted primarily as an aide for current LW users, but also as an introduction aimed at the public at large, what concepts from The Sequences would you most want to see covered?
Having an Anki deck is kind of useless in my view as engaging with the ideas is not the path of least resistance. There's a tendency to just go "oh, that's useful" and do nothing with it because Anki/Supermemo are about memorisation. Using them for learning, or creating, is possible with the right mental habits. But for an irrational person, that's exactly what you want to instill! No, you need a system which fundamentally encourages those good habits.
Which is why I'm bearish about including cards that tell you to drill certain topis into Anki since the act of drilling is itself a good mental habit that many lack. Something like a curated selection of problems that require a certain aspect of rationality, spaced out to aid retention would be a good start. But
Unfortunately, there's a trade off between making the drills thorough and reducing overhead on the designer's part. If you're thinking about an empircally excellent, "no cut corners" implementation of teaching total newbs mental models, I'd suggest DARPA's Digital Tutor. As to how you'd replicate such a thing, the field of research described in here seems a good place to start.
Agree on this, memory coherence is pretty important. Cramming leads to results sort of like how you can't combine the trig you learned in highschool with some physics knowledge: there aren't good connections between the subjects, leaving them relatively siloed.
It requires both effort and actually wanting to learn a thing for the thing to integrate well. We tend to forget easily the things we don't care about (see school knowledge).