Spaced repetition is optimal for recalling factual information. It won't necessarily teach you anything that you haven't already learned. It helps you retain knowledge, and won't necessarily help you develop skills. But, within the domain of factual information that you can already comprehend, spaced repetition systems are pretty optimal. So,...
I belong to a group at my university that organizes a backpacking trip for incoming freshmen in the two weeks before orientation week. This organization, which I will refer to as HIKE (not the real name), is particularly interesting in terms of group design. Why? It is approximately 30 years...
This study seems to show that minocycline helps to resist placing too much trust in attractive women. > Recently, minocycline, a tetracycline antibiotic, has been reported to improve symptoms of psychiatric disorders and to facilitate sober decision-making in healthy human subjects. Here we show that minocycline also reduces the risk...
Spaced repetition is optimal for recalling factual information. It won't necessarily teach you anything that you haven't already learned. It helps you retain knowledge, and won't necessarily help you develop skills. But, within the domain of factual information that you can already comprehend, spaced repetition systems are pretty optimal. So, if you want to train your brain on a bunch of Spanish-to-English sentence translations, or stock market tickers, or definitions, or sample questions, you should use something like Anki.
Once you start using spaced repetition, you learn that one of the biggest limits is the card-making process. Making your own cards is time-consuming, although experience will make you much faster. Experience will also... (read 650 more words →)
I belong to a group at my university that organizes a backpacking trip for incoming freshmen in the two weeks before orientation week. This organization, which I will refer to as HIKE (not the real name), is particularly interesting in terms of group design. Why? It is approximately 30 years old, is run entirely by current students, and brings together a very large group of people and knits them into a largish community. Pretty much everyone involved agrees that HIKE works very well. During my involvement (I was a participating freshman, and I have since become staff) I have continually wondered, why is this group so much more fun than any other... (read 568 more words →)
This study seems to show that minocycline helps to resist placing too much trust in attractive women.
Recently, minocycline, a tetracycline antibiotic, has been reported to improve symptoms of psychiatric disorders and to facilitate sober decision-making in healthy human subjects. Here we show that minocycline also reduces the risk of the 'honey trap' during an economic exchange. Males tend to cooperate with physically attractive females without careful evaluation of their trustworthiness, resulting in betrayal by the female. In this experiment, healthy male participants made risky choices (whether or not to trust female partners, identified only by photograph, who had decided in advance to exploit the male participants). The results show that trusting behaviour in male participants significantly increased in relation to the perceived attractiveness of the female partner, but that attractiveness did not impact trusting behaviour in the minocycline group. Animal studies have shown that minocycline inhibits microglial activities. Therefore, this minocycline effect may shed new light on the unknown roles microglia play in human mental activities.
Exactly the right avenue. Unfortunately, Anki typically uses its own idiosyncratic data format that's not very handy for this kind of thing, but it's possible to export and import decks to text, as it turns out.
The issue with this is that if you're months into studying a deck and you'd like to merge edits from other contributors, I'm not certain that you simultaneously import the edits and keep all of your progress.
Even so, the text deck route has the most promise as far as I can tell.
I was about to post a comment that said the same!
I think that Quantified Mind provides some high-value tests. So long as you're willing to sit down and take a test, you can get data on:
Also, looking at what Gwern tracks, it seems helpful to have long-run data on subjective mood and energy. I randomly sample myself on that with PACO. PACO can allow you to poll yourself on any kind of thing you can imagine, like whether you're sitting, standing, or walking, or whether you're in public or private.
Edit: Added detail on QM.
Does anyone know of a way to collaboratively manage a flashcard deck in Anki or Mnemosyne? Barring that, what are my options so far as making it so?
Even if only two people are working on the same deck, the network effects of sharing cards makes the card-making process much cheaper. Each can edit the cards made by the other, they can divide the effort between the two of them, and they reap the benefit of insightful cards they might not have made themselves.
True. It seems like the great-papers avenue is being pursued full-steam these days with MIRI, but I wonder if they're going to run out of low-hanging fruit to publish, or if mainstream academia is going to drag their heels replying to them.
Does anyone else here have bizarre/hacky writing habits?
I discovered Amphetype, a learn-to-type application that allows you to type passages from anything that you get as a text file. But I've started to use it to randomly sample excerpts from my own writing. The process of re-typing it word for word makes me actually re-process it, mentally speaking, and I often find myself compelled to actually re-write something upon having re-typed it.
Something similar that I've had positive results with is to print out a draft, open a new file, and make myself transcribe the new draft to a new file.
I totally agree. Shared decks encourage a lot of SRS vices.
But, given that they exist and that people are going to use them, is there a way to raise the quality of a shared deck significantly above the average? You can page through the shared decks on Anki's shared decks page and dredge up extremely low quality. If you look at the repository of decks by LW users, the average quality is much better, but could still be improved.
I propose that the MIRI courses are valuable, and that people learning them could benefit from Anki decks. I think the best way to make these Anki decks is a wiki-style collaborative effort.
So, as I've heard Mike Munger explain it, fairness is evolution's solution to the equilibrium outcome selection problem. "Solution to the what?" you ask. This would be easy to explain if you're familiar with the Edgeworth box.
In a simplified economy consisting of two people and two goods, where the two people have some combination of different tastes and different initial baskets of things. Suppose that you have 20 oranges and 5 apples, and that I have 3 oranges and 30 apples, and that we each prefer more even numbers of fruits than either extreme. We can trade apples and oranges to make each of us strictly better off, but there's a whole... (read more)
I'm not certain that getting a degree now counts as the traditional route. Also, I don't think that an additional degree is particularly damaging to his image. People aren't going to lose interest in FAI if he sells out and gets a traditional degree. Or they are and I have no idea what kind of people are involved.
Well, yes, there is going to be some inevitable crap, but the purpose of signalling is so that you could impress a much larger pool of people. So it might not be much help for gossip journalists, but it might help with the marginal professional ethicist, mathematician, or public figure. In that area, you might get some additional "Anybody who can do that must be damn impressive.". Does the additional damn-impressive outweigh the cost? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.