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Yeah that's reasonable. I read your post as being unwilling to bet even $1000 overall, my b if that was a misinterpretation.
I didn't expect you would be making any money on this venture (social organizing is usually expensive) - I expect that anyone willing to put together a venture like this is doing it because they think the outcome will be good, not because they think it will be personally profitable.
Regardless, I look forward to seeing what comes of your experiment.
For an experiment that is going to have an explicit cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, and an even higher implicit cost, $1000 doesn't seem like very much to bet on an aspect of it which you are confident in.
Not that the experiment would necessarily be an overall failure if some participants experience great emotional stress and washed out. A sufficiently high performance pressure org should expect wash outs.
(For what it's worth, I am sympathetic to the sort of thing you're trying to do here, and would be interested in participating in a similar experiment, but am very turned off by particular elements of your approach.)
You can fake this reasonably well with tags, or alternately, just importing on a chapter by chapter basis.
The expression is "against the grain", deriving from cutting wood against its grain, fyi.
I don't know why common opinion is against it, it's just the impression I've gotten. I think it stems from the tendency to caution against blindly memorizing things that you could just look up when needed.
But there's a middle ground of things that I'll forget without anki cards but that I do use often enough to justify memorizing.
I don't have a ton of math cards, but I have a few, plus I've used anki alongside a few other textbooks (as well as for learning programming languages, which is against the grain of common advice), and I've been using anki effectively for about three years now (I used it ineffectively for several months before that - I think the learning curve of making good cards about the right things is one of the hardest parts of anki).
I think long term retention of these texts is one of the biggest advantages it has. I tend to go through phases of caring and not caring about topics, and with anki I've been able to ignore a text for months and then jump back in pretty quickly (where before I would have had to start mostly over, even if I could move through the old material much faster than before).
How do you get notifications only if there are still due cards? I would like this
To flesh out my opinion:
- I have basically all notifications off (really only for calls, texts, and alarms), which minimizes the downsides
- having maps / search available all the time is really convenient. I used to spend a lot of effort either looking up directions or being lost, now I don't
- I've found that using my phone to triage emails / rss / whatever is faster than on a full computer, because of the touchscreen
- it functions as a mobile hot spot (not sure if older phones do this) so when it's nice out I can sit in the park and work, which is pretty pleasant
- it converts small amounts of downtime into interesting reading opportunities (not really roi, but enjoyable)
Generally speaking, the smartphone keeps my tools close to me instead of at home. I use anki, beeminder, my calendar and other electronic assistance heavily, so I think that might be why I get more value out of it.
Yeah I really should use moisturizer more often, but I can never seem to find a convenient place in my daily routine for it
I could send you some of my anki cards, but I don't know that you'll get useful structural information out of them. They tend to be pretty random bits that I think I'll want to know or phrases I want to build associations between. For most things, I take actual notes (I find that writing things down helps me remember the shape of the idea better, even if I never look at them), and only make flashcards for the highest value ideas.
It took me several months of starting and quitting anki to start to get the hang of it, and I'm still learning how to better structure cards to be easier to remember and transmit useful information.
I found this blog post and the two it links to at the top to be useful descriptions of an approach to learning, which incorporates anki among other things
I have been wanting to increase my general kindness lately. If anyone is looking for an accountability partner for random acts of kindness, gratitude journaling, or anything similar (or has good ideas), let me know.
Yeah that seems like it would work pretty well for the case of country data. Let us know how development goes!
This kind of thing sounds very useful especially if easily extensible. How are you planning to make the ui for this work? I think it would be fairly challenging to make it both easily available without being obnoxiously overpresent and am interested to hear your approach to the problem.
For what it's worth, when I first started trying to improve my social skills, I spent a fair amount of time chatting with strangers at bus stops. I guess the less wrong study hall is probably not as useful for pomodoros if you can't see (since I don't think people usually actually talk much).
Speaking of, I should probably try pomodoros again :) I've also failed to adopt them usefully the last couple times
Try doing whatever it is you need to do (not sure from your posting) physically with other people doing the same thing. I've found that this is both the lowest effort and most effective way for me to overcome akrasia. If you feel like you can't motivate yourself, put yourself somewhere where your goals are downhill from you and let gravity carry you.
Not sure what your exact goals are, but feel free to ask if you want more help.
Overall I agree with your post. As someone who feels like they're getting a lot out of anki, a few quick notes on my experience with it (been using for ~15 months continuously now)
- The first 2-4 months of use for me were very difficult, and consisting mostly of making bad cards that didn't usefully cement knowledge. I quit (for about 6ish months each time) twice.
- Anki is much better suited to some knowledge domains than others. I think the classic example of this is language learning - many people undisputedly have a lot of success with srs in this domain.
- Your steelman of using anki to make concepts highly available is something I use it for. I've installed a number of triggers where starting to think down a certain line brings up "autocompletions" that point me in a useful direction.
- The common srs advice to understand before memorizing is absolutely true. Not to harp on the point, but don't underestimate the importance of this.
- I put key points of a lot of workflows into anki. I wasn't sure this was going to work out (and it didn't 100%, but I've fine tuned my process based on results), but it's been very valuable in reducing warm up times when getting back into workflows I used to do very regularly that I haven't need for 6-8 months.
- Finally, anki is absolutely the wrong knowledge store for a lot of stuff. While there are many facts I think I am saving on by spending ~5 minutes over my lifetime (at a slight discount, since anki cuts mostly into nonproductive time while lookups cut mostly into maximally productive time), most aren't. Computers enable big, searchable knowledge stores which is highly valuable. Evernote is in this category, although it didn't really appeal to me. Gmail archives are another example. I've been using and enjoying workflowy for this lately.
Well this turned into a wall of text, so I hope someone can get some benefit from it :)
That's slightly terrifying, but I guess makes sense as an incentive to perform life saving medical interventions
Does this criteria apply to present-day questions that are in vaguely the same ballpark? That is, do you choose who to help based on whether or not you can force them to pay you?
Good point here - I don't usually have any mechanism to force people to pay me. I usually to help based on how likely I think it I am to get what I want out of it. A few examples:
- I help my employer accomplish their goals very often, because I think they will pay me.
- I help my friends with things because so far they have cooperated and helped me things in return.
- Sometimes I help strangers with their problems with no expectation to get anything back from them. When I do, it's usually because we're part of a shared community and I am looking after my reputation.
- If it costs me close enough to nothing, I try to help other people so I can maintain a positive self image.
You seem to be assuming that immediate economic value is the only value worth considering; was this your intent?
I'm not sure what you mean by economic value. If you mean money, no. I think that humans value many things. I could certainly see a respected artist being revived even if the reviver could not directly tax the artist's production.
If I may ask, are you yourself a cryonicist who might end up facing the question from either side?
I'm not a cryonicist at this time. I do think there's a pretty good chance that either cryonics, brain uploading, or something similar will see some people from my lifetime recreated in a form after their deaths.
You would need to be able to provide value for me - so you would need to have skills (or the ability to gain skills) that are still in expensive and in demand, and society would need to give me an enforceable right to extract that value from you. Slavery or indentured servitude, perhaps.
You keep bringing up sucking at writing as a core reason there's a poor reception to your ideas. This doesn't seem correct to me, the mechanics of your writing seem fine. A couple things you could do to improve to improve your posts:
- Cut the length. I've noticed this especially with your comments. You can't assume a reader is going to take five minutes to really dig into what you're saying. You need to make your basic case in the first twenty seconds or so, and keep it brisk.
- Inline information. Instead of throwing a bunch of links out there, explain a little of an interesting idea, and then give the reader a link that will help them learn more.
- Your tone. You can be a little heavy handed, which will discourage readers from clicking into your links. Talk less about the people in the conversation (yourself and the audience), and more about your core idea.
Learning these things was very helpful to me, and I hope I can pass that along to you.
A smart phone is easily the highest roi purchase I've ever made. For people who don't have them, seriously it's worth it.
they're also on record as having really regretted doing it
Xubuntu / Lubuntu, then.
Mostly agree with your point (I don't really recommend linux for most people, despite having happily used archlinux for years), but minor nit in that photoshop is primarily made for os x, I think. At least all of the designers I know use macs (slightly confounded by working for a SaaS startup).
My skin (particularly my hands, because soap is harsh) is prone to drying out, so a humidifier really reduces small issues.
the buttons on a high end suit can cost much more than 10 euro. First hit on amazon for mother of pearl buttons is $36, and I'm sure there are more expensive materials in use. Likewise for fabric, I think. Do you need these things? No. But they exist, and you can pay for them.
Also typically the cost of clothing approximately doubles every times it changes hands, so if cost of product was $500, the retailer might pay $1000, and the consumer might pay $2000.
High fashion really is expensive just to be expensive, though.
- the font is obnoxious
- I've already tried gratitude journaling, and don't expect this to be hugely different
- seems like other-optimizing
The biggest hangup I've found in using multiple computers simultaneously is copy pasting long strings. I can chat them to myself, but it's still slightly awkwarder than I'd like.
Otherwise, Sherincall is pretty on point.
If your goal is for this to be a temporary step, pick whichever one will make a stronger argument. I.e. if one has much better substitutes available, get rid of it now.
Shouldn't outcome 2 be given higher weight on account of having actually happened before? Reallocation of wealth seems to be a pretty common outcome of shifts in power.
One thing that can affect this is the material used in the jeans. Typically, a lot of synthetic fabrics tend to start smelling more easily, while wool and silk are known for being naturally odor resistant. This can vary some, but it's a good general guideline.
Additionally, if you're on os x, Textmate is basically the other Sublime. While I don't use any of their super advanced features, I've used the two interchangeably essentially without having to relearn any key commands.
I think this is part of where the emacs / vim divide comes from.
How did you learn to think without verbal structure? That sounds very interesting and possibly useful.
Long distance foot commuting is still pretty bad. In my experience I don't hate the world as much, but burning two plus hours a day commuting sucks no matter what. The subway is definitely much better than car commuting, but not as nice as biking or walking. I think subway commuting is vastly improved by good distractions available through a smartphone, though.
I enjoy sugarless black tea. I didn't use to. I got into through green tea (which I admittedly still prefer in the general). I think drinking a lot of green tea and getting pretty into it (trying lots of different loose leaf types, learning about ideal steeping temperatures and times) got me used to the basic form of tea, after which it's a lot easier to get into black tea.
If you work somewhere they do pair programming that can help with a lot of the issues though.
Let's talk about the fact that the top two comments on a very nice contribution in the open thread is about how this is the wrong place for the post, or how it is why LW is dying. Actually let's not talk about that.
Thanks for sharing the extension! I'll try to post a walk through of how I got it working if I do.
In my anecdotal experience, being underweight is correlated with being unusually susceptible to cold. Building some mass might help. Consider doing a more general strength program too.
Probably not, but my point still stands for most leather shoes and other sneakers.
I would second that futon
Having static informational windows that you can view without getting rid of what your working on is highly valuable in my experience.
I've found I can successfully use 4 screens (primary screen for document editing, secondary for documentation, tertiary for viewing of test output, extra laptop with all my chats open (so I don't have to change mouse focus to talk to someone)), but I've never tried more.
Is that really true though? I've found with sneakers the sole lasts 250-500 miles, so buying a shoe that costs more than $40 is almost certainly bad value from a durability perspective.
For shoes that can be resoled, this number increases, as you want an upper that will last through a number of resoles, but the shoes with highest durability/cost are still not going to be on the expensive end of the shoe type.
I'd send myself an email or text my girlfriend. If I was more worried about it I'd leave myself a note in the place I typically leave myself notes.
Ask for a second to write the name of the book down, that probably wouldn't be rude in context. If I can't do that but I have a pen, write it on my hand. If I had no other choice I would try binding an image of my door shattering as I opened it.
Bind the habit I want to the fridge door, and explicitly practice closing it a few times a day for a while.
Get them to point out the location on my gps, if possible. I never understood directions anyway.
Memorize the outline of my speech. I'd practice giving it a few times, to get used to filling in the holes in order.
If I knew one of the fancy mnemonic methods for numbers, I'd use it. But I don't, so memorizing the number seems more effort than it's worth. I'd write it down in a second place so I didn't accidentally forget to bring it. Maybe on my arm if I thought it was going to get used that much.
I'd wonder if I actually knew where my phone was, flip out, and tear the room apart looking for it. At that point, I might as well just enter the thought (if I even still have it).
Look up some names, faces and facts. Write a small fact-name association sheet for my phone, and do my best to bind names and faces in memory as we meet.
I don't know. I always thought wanting to be a doctor was weird. At my last job interview they would have looked at me funny if I hadn't pulled up google.
Project Euler is a really good tool for getting the hang of a new language, imo. Strongly recommend it to anyone who wants an interesting project that will teach basic skills.
I actually did mean does :) Sinatra is definitely easier to understand than Rails and I agree that if the first code I had worked on with ruby was Rails instead of Sinatra I would have been pretty fucking confused (note that, at least in App Academy's case, the precourse work involves a fair amount of pure ruby). The real benefit of the bootcamps (I hope, anyway) is taking someone from saying, "okay, I can comfortably write a program, but what else do I have to know to do a real job?" and teaching the rest of the production environment and techniques, not just concepts of programming.
I think I agree with your core point, if I'm reading it correctly, that that if you aren't in a huge hurry (and ideally, even if you are), taking the time to really master the basics and understand your toolchain one piece at a time is very valuable.
The fact that most bootcamps focus on webdev is probably not for any theoretical reason, but just that the practical uses of what you do are very apparent and you will see visible evidence of skills for which there is market demand very quickly and very often.
What would your ideal of a good place to start learning programming conceptually? I think phone app dev tends to be less elegant than webdev. While understanding C and pointers has value, imo, being able to do something useful with it is not within the reach of a bootcamp and learning it just for theory is nice, but only if you can afford to spend essentially several unproductive months on it.
I am probably a bit biased though (I'm planning on doing a coding bootcamp, and prefer ruby syntax to python), and what you've provided does seem like real alternatives for anyone who doesn't want to go the web dev route.
Recommendations for good collections of common Deep Wisdom? General or situation specific would be helpful (e.g. all the different standard advice you get while picking your college major, or going through a tough break up).
Hey. I'm doing App Academy this summer, so I can't tell you about the program, but I can give you my thoughts on the interview. Based on what you said in the comments above, it sounds like we have somewhat similar backgrounds.
The interview was mostly pretty simple code problems. If you felt like you knew what you were doing in your cs classes and that you were keeping up with the other students, you'll probably be able to handle these. Just make sure you're comfortable with the ruby needed to do the practice problems.
Good luck!
Device manufacturers that ship certain google apps and code are not generally allowed to ship competitor apps.
This article goes into some detail, the bit about the OHA is on page 3, if I recall correctly.
But to come back to the topic at hand, Google is a company who wants to make money. When releasing something as open source interferes with that mission they won't release something as open source. On the other hand there are plenty of cases where Google supports Open Source.
I think this is one of the concerns that the author of the original post is referring to.