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I do this often, and over time. I've noticed quite a bit of digital pack rat genetics in myself, not just related to Anki but data in general. Over this December holiday I reindexed and cleared out over 16 years of digital projects, I was amazed at the amount of things I thought I'd have use for again at some point.
What was however fun, was seeing how I've grown as a programmer and developer.
With Anki, I do it gladly, every note deleted with no practical value, saves me first the cognitive overhead and stress of review and second all those wasted little future times. With things like Coursera material, I've found that some information loses it value for me over time, so I might keep a personal note deck then, but export it, if I wanted to glance over it in future.
That makes sense, I however try to keep my new cards low as I'm mostly bulking academic content and vocabularies. I still recall the first month with Anki, where the planning fallacy had me learn so many new cards that I was stuck within 2 weeks with something like a 2 hour deck, which then luckily eased off to a more sensible 35 minute deck I could squeeze in to my day.
That was probably more sensible. Post here
Hi LW, I've been a lurker for the quite some time, it ended this week.
The sequences and blog (ebook compilation I found somewhere) have a comfortable text-to-speech place in my commutes and I've incorporated quite a bit of the lingo, bias definitions and concepts into my daily Anki decks. It's not that this community was that daunting but rather that I thought I could play catch up. My reluctance reminds me of a programmer asking if it's worth getting on github if he's only joining the party now. I've studied computer systems engineering (electronics, digital circuit design, programming, math) and I'm spending most of my time teaching and writing, although most of my work focuses on internet technologies, security and automation - I've veered of quite a bit from my assembly beginnings to the Python world I seem to be living in now.
Some things that have already been actionable for me since around the end of 2011, after reading LW material and more specifically Shut up and do the impossible, includes
- cramming around 12.8k German words into my vocabulary in a mere 35-45 minutes daily in 12 months (which Goethe Inst. deemed impossible) - I do swear by SRS now,
- finally finishing my thesis in security (software fingerprinting and vulnerability mapping) after realising my supervisor might just be incentivised to keep me around for articles - whilst teaching full time - I finally realised focusing on student throughput might mean subsidy for the university but penultimately I need to focus on my work first in order for everyone to benefit - after 10 years of teaching graduate level programming,
- I jumped into a couple of technologies that seemed daunting in terms of scope and people that have used them for years, including LaTeX (no idea how I would live without it now), emacs and org-mode (still only 6 months, but it's getting its grip on me firmly) and also R (although my gut feel is that I'll probably rather veer into using pandas later),
- turning into a QS oversubscriber with tools like RescueTime, Beeminder and selfspy keeping track of my goals and my actual CLI time, and
- lastly probably becoming a more critical reader of everything including my own work. However fuzzy this might make me feel and regardless of how it might sound, some of the sequence material left me with a feeling of coming home.
Soon I hope to be emigrate to Germany from the beautiful South Africa that is suffering at the hands of peak-level irrational politicians (discussions on this in later posts).
I hope to become more involved in discussions to ensure I get a deeper understanding of the concepts. As someone that have spent large amounts of time with curriculum development I'm also very interested in how rationality could be taught, not only to more adults but starting much younger (having grown up under Christian parents myself).
Thanks to @army1987 for the prod to post here, and sorry for all the specific technology mentions - I just find specifics give me more information than saying 'learning' or SRS and such. Also, English is my second language, German third, so excuse the odd pillaging of your tongue. This feels longer than anything I've written about myself.
I'm happy to answer any questions, and I hope I can keep throwing my ignorant rock of understanding against this anvil for a hopefully more interesting shape. There is so much to learn if one approaches this with a growth mindset.
Definitely brings déformation professionnelle to mind for me, I'm not sure if there is anything in there about the community aspects of it though.
I feel like I'm whoring for upvotes just so I can post links. I've been lurking for so long, but I guess the 20 karma finally got me into action in the last two weeks.
2 more to go cracks best rationalist grin and winks
I like this idea, and I'll post if I can get around to it over the weekend.
In the past I've used https://thoughtback.com to send me quotes,ideas and maxims I thought useful. These come up at semi random times in email, and retriggers the memory and context - probably not as good as Anki, but I enjoy having these show up in my email stream.
You could also supplement your learning by doing a couple of standard industry certifications related to security, although I do not know how relevant something like CISSP would be in quant finance environments, it would give you a little bit of background, especially if you haven't been interested previously. This and other similar courses also give you a considerable foot in the door at certain environments requiring security clearances.
I agree with the rest of the comments that a github profile (even contributing to interesting projects you didn't create yourself) outclasses a CV, I'll post a video by Continuum Analytics about why python is getting so strong in science in analytics, but can't seem to find right search criteria, right now.
The panel idea - especially if this can be done early, has a lot of value, could boost discussion and also provide a possible influx here.
I've definitely experienced strong adverse reactions to discussing eugenics 'cavalierly' if you don't spend at least ten to fifteen minutes covering the inferential steps and sanitising the perceived later uses of the concept.
Good point about the possible three communities. I haven't posted here much, as I found myself standing too far outside the concepts whilst I worked my way through the sequences. Regardless of that, the more I read the more I feel I have to learn, especially about patterned thinking and reframes. To a certain extent I see this community as a more scientifically minded Maybe Logic group, when thinking about priors and updating information.
A lot of the transhumanist material have garnered very strong responses from friends though, but I've stocked up on Istvan paperbacks to hopefully disseminate soon.
Thanks I needed that with my afternoon coffee. Now to clean this keyboard and table. 'Free kids!' begs the question for me how many economists donate swimmers.
I have five of six chapters of my thesis done. It feels great to be able to finally apply for PhD positions. Choosing a future supervisor, I'll do a lot more checks to ensure my continued sanity. LaTeX & knitr saved the day with regards to document and layout management.
On to the conclusion chapter, then 3 weeks with a language editor, and hand in is so near I can taste it.
I was hoping for a minute that this would be able to truncate the horrid use of auto-tune but then I remembered I mostly, luckily, stay away from the radio regardless of its use.
Would love to see a larger scale study with more specifics done with this especially with regards to language acquisition.
This might be very late in the game for a reply. I use it mainly for MOOC and textbook learning as well as very successfully dumping large amounts of German vocabulary into my head.
From February I have the following deck stats (usually 1/2 hour in the morning, whilst stationary cycling - one boring high-intensity body task and one boring high-intensity mental task hack):
Mature: 12094
Young+Learn: 392
Unseen: 59142
Suspended: 11528
The decks take a bit of fiddling to ensure you have the correct amount of cards setup. Initially in my first two months, I had too many 'new cards' set up. This would lead to a massive escalation in required time (peaked at 90 minutes in 2 weeks). I then cut new cards, just specified 10-15 new a day, depending on the deck. This evened me out to 30 minutes a day.
One caveat, I don't skip a day, ever. When I go hiking, I pre-learn the 2-3 days that I'll be away from any technology in order to pre-empt coming home to a disheartening deck. There are tablet and phone apps available, but usually when traveling I don't want to wake up to Anki when there is a view. :)
Currently I don't really have a workflow for card addition, although in the past I have mainly used CSV files that were nicely laid out and quality checked before importing. I've also done some BeautifulSoup scraping for website data extraction and word frequencies from books. I also use DuoLingo daily (German again), and the words and useful phrases I typically just dump into org-mode for transfer later (usually once weekly) when I have time.
Initially when creating and managing your decks I would suggest making backups often as sometimes syncing makes weird things happen (mostly media related disappearances between linux desktop client and android tablet) but other than that I love this tool.
For language word lists, I have also created a script that pushes the word or phrase to Google Translate (yes, yes, terms of service fingers in ears) and downloads and saves an MP3 locally. I know AwesomeTTS does most of this, but it is nice to have the media available in countries where internet access is at best intermittent and always capped.
I hope some of this helps. Have fun.
. wrong click, couldn't find delete - posted above.
I can't access Mysterious Answers deck. Does anyone have a non-Posterous copy of this please?
Thanks, this has been very helpful, I've previously used the wiki and personal notes, but this contains a decent summary.
Can you suggest where a Karma-less account (new) can post then? As everything ends up as draft for me.
As a relatively new member of this community I was wondering what implications you could foresee because of this:
http://understandinguncertainty.org/court-appeal-bans-bayesian-probability-and-sherlock-holmes
I know this might not be the right place to post, but Karma disallowed me from posting anywhere else, and I was hoping to get some thoughts on this.
Same here, I'd gladly test it. Also read the two recommendations 59 seconds and Eat that Frog after reading this thread, having fallen head first into the Anki rabbit hole about a month back.
Thanks for that.