For about a yearish I’ve been with varying frequency writing down things I’ve learned in a notebook. Partly this is so that I go “ugh I haven’t even learned anything today, lemme go and meet my Learning Quota”, which I find helpful (I don’t think I’m goodharting it too much to be useful). Entries range from “somewhat neat theorem and proof in more detail than I should’ve written” to “high level overview of bigger subjects”, or “list of keywords that I learned exist”. For example, recently I learned that sonic black holes which trap phonons (aka lattice vibrations) are a thing, and the quantum theory predicts they should emit sonic hawking radiation, and unlike hawking radiation we’ve actually observed this directly by making a sonic black hole in the lab.
A side effect is that… wow I learn more than I think I do. My retention isn’t perfect but it’s a lot better than what I would’ve expected had I known I learn that much. Every month there’s usually a handful of things I’ve learned that register as “Really really cool/important/fundamental”.
Also: I think I learned the fastest when I was in highschool, when there were both more low hanging fruit and I was spending much more time on it (unrelated to school except that I might’ve done less had I had more friends). And glacially slow before that.
So… perhaps this explains a bit more of the thing where I and felt like I became an adult mind a little after the start of that ‘intelligence explosion’.
How useful were those entries, or to put it another way: how many impactful decisions over the year were directly improved because of things you wrote down?
Thanks to @Raelifin’s Utopian Dreams for showing me the power of TL;DR:’s at the start of every post. If it weren’t for substack thinking I was a robot or something, I would like even the posts where I read the TL;DR: and go “this is all I want right now from the post, then”.
I read like 3-4h of posts every day and at this point I try to put most posts that have the slightest chance of being retroactively not worth reading into LLM and ask for a summary instead
There’s manifold markets for the LW review; presumably making them for curated status would not be worth it given how fast you’d need to be to be useful and how your net needs to be wider (maybe? alternatively “posts about x karma threshold in last 1-5 days not curated” seems pretty small if you set the threshold to what seems like my minds using in my heuristic).
But for example: it doesn’t seem hard to tell in advance. e.g. i’d bet mana that gene smith’s practical guide to superbabies gets curated by the end of the week. I wish I could take a curate bot’s ‘free’ mana.
(This also means I don’t expect I’d learn much from the market (at least compared to most markets where I have nothing to add), but it might help the mods? I don’t know what their post/day reading rate is—and it might be a fluctuating thing that could sometimes use a kick to go read a high probability curated post).
For about a yearish I’ve been with varying frequency writing down things I’ve learned in a notebook. Partly this is so that I go “ugh I haven’t even learned anything today, lemme go and meet my Learning Quota”, which I find helpful (I don’t think I’m goodharting it too much to be useful). Entries range from “somewhat neat theorem and proof in more detail than I should’ve written” to “high level overview of bigger subjects”, or “list of keywords that I learned exist”. For example, recently I learned that sonic black holes which trap phonons (aka lattice vibrations) are a thing, and the quantum theory predicts they should emit sonic hawking radiation, and unlike hawking radiation we’ve actually observed this directly by making a sonic black hole in the lab.
A side effect is that… wow I learn more than I think I do. My retention isn’t perfect but it’s a lot better than what I would’ve expected had I known I learn that much. Every month there’s usually a handful of things I’ve learned that register as “Really really cool/important/fundamental”.
Also: I think I learned the fastest when I was in highschool, when there were both more low hanging fruit and I was spending much more time on it (unrelated to school except that I might’ve done less had I had more friends). And glacially slow before that.
So… perhaps this explains a bit more of the thing where I and felt like I became an adult mind a little after the start of that ‘intelligence explosion’.
How useful were those entries, or to put it another way: how many impactful decisions over the year were directly improved because of things you wrote down?
about 0. It’s just not that kind of list? Usually impactful decision stuff wouldn’t even go there.
Thanks to @Raelifin’s Utopian Dreams for showing me the power of TL;DR:’s at the start of every post. If it weren’t for substack thinking I was a robot or something, I would like even the posts where I read the TL;DR: and go “this is all I want right now from the post, then”.
Carl Shulman’s Reflective Disequilibrium does this well, too.
I read like 3-4h of posts every day and at this point I try to put most posts that have the slightest chance of being retroactively not worth reading into LLM and ask for a summary instead
Random fraternity on my university campus has a polymarket flag. I guess they really are mainstream now!
There’s manifold markets for the LW review; presumably making them for curated status would not be worth it given how fast you’d need to be to be useful and how your net needs to be wider (maybe? alternatively “posts about x karma threshold in last 1-5 days not curated” seems pretty small if you set the threshold to what seems like my minds using in my heuristic).
But for example: it doesn’t seem hard to tell in advance. e.g. i’d bet mana that gene smith’s practical guide to superbabies gets curated by the end of the week. I wish I could take a curate bot’s ‘free’ mana.
(This also means I don’t expect I’d learn much from the market (at least compared to most markets where I have nothing to add), but it might help the mods? I don’t know what their post/day reading rate is—and it might be a fluctuating thing that could sometimes use a kick to go read a high probability curated post).