eigen

Karma: 316

eigen Aug 31, 2019, 1:28 AM
0 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: How to Make Billions of Dollars Reducing Loneliness
Putting aside the technological requirements of the product, and the big investment an individual would have to make in order to carry this forth. Your premise is that there’s a crisis of loneliness and the solution is to have people live with each other. I just don’t see how that’s evident.
Furthermore, you talk about AirBNB (stands for airbed and breakfast) which started as making a bed (airbed) and breakfast for a guest, a stranger, in your house! most of the interviews I read/listen about those guys (I think Brian Chesky it’s a quite interesting character) they had not idea about what they were making at the beginning, now they have the beneffit of hindsight and the product is definitely not based on house-sharing.
I think more of what AllAmericanBreakfast talks about is closer to a solution to the “lonely” crisis
When people do try and start intentional group houses, they’re often organized around a shared social movement, which already have word-of-mouth and social media channels where people can learn about these opportunities for free.
Besides that, I do see value in making something easier which now is somewhat hard, although I don’t think the defining feature of the product would be to mix people who like the same food, game, etc...
But you do propose interesting features of a product, I do see a lot of value in this:
Since a hypothetical roommate matching service has a birds-eye view of everyone who’s searching for rooms, it can deal better with managing house cultural changes in a sensible way when multiple rooms open up at once.
Or fixing the problem of community in a broader sense.
But if you are not willing to jump in why should anyone else bother? Startup founders who are passionate about what they make are the most important predictors of success, no one who is browsing Lesswrong or the Effective Altruism Forum will suddenly find their passion and make a billion dollars of it.

eigen Aug 31, 2019, 12:51 AM
1 point
in reply to: benwr’s comment on: benwr’s Shortform
Assuming that you actually get it to work and that you provide, at best, mediocre diagnostic (which is already really difficult to make), this is a regulatory nightmare and a plain hazardous tool to exist.
I’d even say that people cannot make decisions based on statistics (I doubt that most can even differentiate between anecdotal advice and scientific evidence) that’s why physicians make these decisions for them and if ever a tool is allowed it would only be available for physicians.
For anyone interested in making this sort of tool, the enthusiasm doesn’t last a day or two after talking to a lawyer for a few minutes!

eigen Aug 31, 2019, 12:42 AM
6 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: eigen’s Shortform
You are very on point with passivity being bad for remembering, completely agree.
Seems like the rule is that you can only meaningfully process a limited amount of topics during a day.
I think I’m starting to disagree with this. (weird phrasing but I’ll explain).
For the longest time I used to think that I had at most only a few hours to learn/study in a day. But what happened was that I pretty much overloaded my working memory with a particular subject and then tried to keep building on that, it reached a point where I just could not keep up (maybe four hours straight on a subject); when I started changing subjects (and using much more of Anki which plays the biggest role here) I found out that I could keep going on learning and dedicate another four hours to another subject, while knowing that Anki takes care that I don’t forget anything of both subjects.
I think, more or less, the same idea applies here, as you remark:
- Twitter: One tweet, a few comments and then I drop it all from my memory. Go on to the next tweet.
- Reddit: One post, few comments and to the next post.
What I’m trying to say is that you can read a book, drop it and then go on to the next and the same applies for learning. You don’t have to read just one book, you don’t have to study only one subject in a day.
What links here?
- eigen's comment on Eli’s shortform feed by Eli Tyre (Sep 1, 2019, 5:13 PM; 2 points)

eigen Aug 29, 2019, 8:11 PM
3 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Kaj’s shortform feed
I’d really like to read more about what you think of this. Another closely related feature they need is:
- Content well formatted (The Sequences are a great example of this,The Codex). Of course, blogs are also a good basic idea which allows incremental reading.
- Length of the posts? Maybe? I think there may be a case to be made for length helping to generate that cult following since it’s directly related to the amount of time invested by people reading. There are many examples where posts could be summarized by a few paragraphs but instead they go long! (But of course there’s a reason they do so).

eigen Aug 29, 2019, 12:27 AM
1 point
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Matthew Barnett’s Shortform
Two easy things you can try to feel less groggy in the morning are:
- Drinking a full glass of water as soon as you wake up.
- Listening to music or a podcast (bluetooth earphones work great here!). Music does the trick for me, although I’m usually not in the mood and I prefer a podcast.
About taking naps, while it seems to work for some people, I’m generally against it since it usually impairs my circadian clock greatly (I cannot keep consistent times and meddles with my schedule too much).
At nights, I take melatonin and it seems to have been of great help to keep consistent times at which I go to sleep (taking it with L-Theanine seems to be better for me somehow). Besides that, I do pay a lot of attention to other zeitgebers such as exercise, eating behavior, light exposure, and coffee. This is to say—regulating your circadian clock may be what you’re looking for.
A link of interest is gwern’s post about vitamin d experiment and other posts about sleep also.

eigen Aug 28, 2019, 10:35 PM
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: eigen’s Shortform
Yes, your comment makes me thing, maybe the post should be named “Beware of demands of goodness” à la Scott. But I have tried this before (not systematized like it’s suggesting here, but rather in a nonchalant way) and I have found that the thing which I exchange for say Reddit is usually better by general standards. I’ve done this with Facebook, maybe TV shows, etc...
The good thing (to be mindful) is to catch us if we’re going adrift. Like, if I can tell I’m missing something, then the thing I cut is probably it.

eigen Aug 28, 2019, 10:29 PM
2 points
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: eigen’s Shortform
I agree, but I think that the answer to the immediate inquiry question is clearer if I shift my time to books or specific blogs instead of a subreddit where I may be liable to read about mindless conversations (sometimes even engage!).
About on-demand inquiries, this is somewhat off-topic, but it relates to how much can we retrieve after learning, or how many times we plateau. I’ve found that embedding Anki in my learning, I can’t just forget about immediate retrievals (go on learning while changing the subject) and the Anki questions will take care of that stuff!

eigen Aug 28, 2019, 10:10 PM
3 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Kaj’s shortform feed
This is a great idea!
I also had somewhat the inclination to do this, when I first read about Anki on Michael Nielsen’s -Aumenting Cognition, he speaks about using Anki to store memories and friends’ characteristics such as food preferences (he talks about this on the section: “The challenges of using Anki to store facts about friends and family”).
I did not do this because I did not want to meddle with Anki and personal stuff but I found another similar solution which is MONICA a “Personal Relationship Manager”, the good thing about it is that it’s open source and easy to set up. I did use it for a bit and found that it was very easy to use and had all the things one may want.
I ended up not going through using the app at the time, but considering the post and the fact that people love when you remember facts about them (I also’d like to remember things about them!) I may pick it up again.

eigen Aug 28, 2019, 9:50 PM
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: eigen’s Shortform
Reddit, of course, is an example; the same can be asked of Facebook, Twitter, a group of friends and of course Lesswrong.com.
But in the case of Reddit, I usually frequent subreddits like /r/slaterstarcodex, /r/machinelearning, maybe communities like /r/Rust, and I don’t dare go anywhere near the frontpage or /r/popular, it’s like someone putting a magazine on my face while I’m walking on the street. (I’m trying to be more focused on what I consume around the internet, so I don’t go anywhere near feeds, such as Youtube index or things like that; an extension like Distract Free Youtube for Chrome work great here).
Indeed I find value on Reddit but only on restricted-and-very-focused discussions which I’m already searching for, like entering /r/SeanCarroll to see what people are saying about a certain podcast episode; About funny comments (usually my friends or family would send me memes and I cannot avoid those!) I think I may be better considering a stand-up of Dave Chapelle or something to the like!
Or, there’s always another option which is that I will end up going back, but at least I can say that I did the test!

eigen Aug 28, 2019, 4:27 PM
9 points
on: eigen’s Shortform
Last week I had a rather random thought come immediately at my mind. It was about the things I use and frequent daily. It was something like this:
“What has reddit.com provided you this week?”
I could not find a single thing that benefited me from looking at Reddit every day, I could not take a single insight from all the news and from the discussion that I read. Of course, what came naturally afterwards was to prohibit all interaction with Reddit.
Instead of visiting Reddit I shifted my focus and started reading books that I had currently on hold, and without needing to say, I have much more to say about these books than to lurking the web aimlessly.
I want to hold on a little bit on using it this question for other things (like for lesswrong.com) but I know that regardless I will do it.
“So what has x provided you this week?”

eigen’s Shortform

eigenAug 28, 2019, 4:27 PM

3 points

38 comments LW link

eigen Aug 28, 2019, 3:50 PM
1 point
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: How do you learn foreign language vocabulary, beyond Anki?
I find my ability to speak foreign languages greatly improved by listening to music, conversations, TV shows and movies.
At least at the conversational level; this is more notably so in German where there are so many articles to learn, and many expressions such as ‘doch’ and ‘ach so’ which are so common in every day speaking. By watching and listening people converse with each other —instead of just reading and memorizing over and over the same sentence—the articles and these expressions began to appear naturally and many of my previous mistakes subdued.
So, if your end goal is to understand a language there is a case to be made for listening rather than just reading, it may very well be just how we really learn languages. Of course this is always one test away.

eigen Aug 27, 2019, 1:14 AM
5 points
in reply to: tilia’s comment on: tilia’s Shortform
Some studies, such as this one, have been focusing more and more around the influence of gut bacteria control over eating behavior including the microbial influence on reward and satiety pathways and most importantly microbial influence on generating cravings for foods that they specialize on or foods that suppress their competitors.
This implies a few ways to change cravings:
- Stop eating sweets altogether, the gut bacteria structure changes drastically within 24 hours of changing the diet, so cravings should cease in due time. (until you eat another sweet again, which is a way back to the start!).
- Probiotics (the paper I cited above says that an increased microbiota diversity is predicted to reduce cravings significantly).
- Administration of antibiotics which may destroy your flora (cease your craving altogether, it goes without saying that I do not recommend this).

eigen Aug 26, 2019, 11:35 PM
0 points
on: How do you learn foreign language vocabulary, beyond Anki?
I’m an avid Anki user, but I don’t think I would use it to learn a new language. I think the way I would go about this (I’ve done this before although I’ve not really optimized the “method”) is to have TV shows or movies with the audio in the particular language you want to learn while having both your native language subtitles and the audio-language subtitles up in the screen (there are actually several programs that allow you to do just this, one is: GOMPLAYER).
This could work even better if you see a TV show or movie you have already seen previously but this time in the language you’re trying to learn (this has the downside of not being the natural audio of the show, you already know everything that happens and you miss the cultural knowledge but you can also pay half of the attention you would than if it were a new show).
I do want to note that I haven’t tried Anki for languages and since it works quite surprisingly well for mathematics I would be willing to give it a try (for doing this I would use many of the plugins).
EDIT: Since this has been initially down-voted, I want to add that I’ve done exactly this to learn various languages and very quickly so. I also think it could be a very good complement to learning foreign languages with Anki (without replacing it).

eigen Aug 20, 2019, 4:31 PM
5 points
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: Swimmer963′s Shortform
I’m more directed towards figuring things out as I go.

While directly writing what comes to mind, I think that I rarely put myself into a corner, like saying,”huh this doesn’t quite work because of this and that” but rather I do that task when reading the first-draft and then clarifying and solving inconsistencies in the second draft.

I’ve listened to an interview with J.K. Rowling (maybe one of the best world-builders of this generation) and she said that she had sort-of like an epiphany, like a dump into his consciousness of the world of Harry Potter; she wrote the ideas as it came to her mind, which is to say that I don’t think she ever stopped in the tracks to start thinking what the world was capable of (at least not until later books maybe).

eigen Aug 18, 2019, 7:12 PM
1 point
in reply to: Sunny from QAD’s comment on: Hazard’s Shortform Feed
Yes! Thinking about it is a great idea.

Is there any particular open source software you use to set this up?

eigen Aug 18, 2019, 6:22 PM
4 points
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Swimmer963′s Shortform
In your case, my prediction would be that your perception of the world includes many unknowns or points of confusion that you find to be resolved by writing fiction, and you believe writing to be satisfying many other important needs you have.

If it is not that, I believe it to be something very close to that.

I remember reading Stephen King’s book about writing fiction (On Writing: Memoirs of the Craft) and I remember him particularly talking about the overall themes of his books. In particular he seemed to confess that his books were only a few limited subjects he wanted to know more about:
- If god exists why does he allow bad things to happen.
- Where does this technology revolution is taking us.
- The attraction of violence to good people.
So it’s quite possible he uses writing to minimize his error predictions about those particular subjects. What’s more, he also talks about that “shiny” thing to reach and what it means to him.

As for me, I clearly do the same, elucidating my thoughts be it on fiction or in plain-notes is completely satisfying the curiosity and at the same time illuminating what I thought to be obscure, although I am not entirely sure how it relates to other feedback loops.

eigen Aug 17, 2019, 10:22 PM
6 points
on: How can you use music to boost learning?
Not listening to music while I learn, for me, it’s the same as walking the street without shoes or going without an umbrella below the pouring rain.

It’s a huge no-no, now that I’ve been regularly listening to music as I learn, that I see such a huge difference.

I haven’t read any research on the matter but I can confidently say that not only my memory seems greatly improved by listening to music but my mood while learning also gets a boost. I have a set of albums for each of the different topics I learn, they are almost exclusively soundtracks of popular movies. For example when studying Physics I usually listen to The Theory of Everything soundtrack on Youtube.

I cannot pinpoint exactly what’s happening under the hood but I can say, in my case, that the music needs to be instrumental and not be so “loud” or with huge changes in harmony. Further, I’ve found that some music does not work for certain topics.

On this comment I talk about a little bit about relation of sleep and learning via a interview of a sleep researcher (DR. Matthew Walker) who also talks in that interview about the relation of music while learning and specially listening back that music while sleeping as to repeat patterns and solidify long-term memory. I have not pursued this particular experiment but as far as listening to music for me has been a great improvement.
What links here?
- What are your strategies for avoiding micro-mistakes? by NaiveTortoise (Oct 4, 2019, 6:42 PM; 17 points)

eigen Aug 13, 2019, 11:03 PM
4 points
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Matthew Barnett’s Shortform
I was of the very same mind that you are now. I was somewhat against textbooks, but now textbooks are my only way of learning, not only for strong knowledge but also fast.

I think there are several important things in changing to textbooks only, first I have replaced my habit of completionism: not finishing a particular book in some field but change, it if I don’t feel like it’s helping me or a if things seem confusing, by another textbook in the same field. lukeprog’s post is very handy here.

The idea of changing text-books has helped me a lot, sometimes I just thought I did not understand something but apparently I was only needing another explanation.

Two other important things, is that I take quite a lot of notes as I’m reading. I believe that if someone is just reading a text-book, that person is doing it wrong and a disservice to themselves. So I fill as much as I can in my working memory, be it three, four paragraphs of content and I transcribe those myself in my notes. Coupled with this is making my own questions and answers and then putting them on Anki (space-repetition memory program).

This allows me to learn vast amounts of knowledge in low amounts of time, assuring myself that I will remember everything I’ve learned. I believe textbooks are key component for this.

eigen Aug 6, 2019, 11:04 PM
3 points
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed
I’m interested about knowing more about the meditation aspect and how it relates to productivity!