I overlooked a "no hug" sign myself, even though I'm an organiser and had a part in choosing them. I agree that they need to be more visually distinct and we will improve that next time.
As spaced repetition and flashcards are a technique and tool respectively it is (to me) obvious that they are useful for certain kinds of circumstances. Flashcards really are useful only when you want to associate 2 things to each other (for example a word and its translation) and might not be the best way to build an organized knowledge of a subject. Because of that I wouldn't use them for that purpose in any case.
Thank you for pointing out an area where they fail, that was useful information.
A question to the community: Do you really believe as much in spaced repetition/Anki as the post suggests?
There are a lot of good suggestions in the comments already. I'd like to emphasize immersion (films, audio books etc.) and especially lots of practice talking (!). Try to find as many possible ways to increase your talking time in the target language. E.g. by talking over skype, seeking out a local Hebrew club or whatever.
Also I'd like to point to http://www.fluentin3months.com/ because Benny (the blogger) has a lot of good tips for language learning.
Thanks for clearing that up. That was my guess, I was just confused that it suddenly popped up without me ever having heard about it. Is it popular/well-known? When I googled it, there were no hits for an explanation.
I have a (kind of) meta question: What's up with the "zir" and "zirself" in the text? I've never heard/read that word before and from context I'd infer that it should be "their" and "themselves". Would you clear that up?
I don't think it was meant as a distinction but as a description of a mental process that might not be exactly the same for everyone. So the dichotomy is between say/hear on the one side and not say/hear on the other.
For posts I use the vote as an indication of what the LW-consensus of this post is. So if the title is not that promising and the score is low I often don't read it. If I do read it though, I try to account for the "bias" of the up-/ downvote and make an effort to find an independent evaluation. So I don't really think it's an issue.
The more stories I hear of other LessWrongers' life stories (and taking my own into consideration) the more I realise how one of our defining traits is our inability and/or unwillingness to compartmentalize on important ideas.
I have to disagree a bit on the communism part. One of the ways that it went wrong, that it ended in Totalitarianism, was due to how it was implemented and foreseeable to a certain extent. All it really tells us is that we have to take human nature into account when designing a society for humans, not that we shouldn't try out powerful ideas.
Hello fellow LWs,
As I have read repeatedly on LW (http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/) you don't like discussing politics because it produces biased thinking/arguing which I agree is true for the general populace. What I find curious is that you don't seem to even try it here where people would be very likely to keep their identities small (www.paulgraham.com/identity.html). It should be the perfect (or close enough) environment to talk politics because you can have reasonable discussions here.
I do understand that you don't like to bring politics into discussions about rationality, but I don't understand why there shouldn't be dedicated political threads here. (Maybe you could flag them?)
all the best
Viper
Done. Though I feel guilty about skipping a few of the more involved questions.