Raj Thimmiah

• Raj Thimmiah 9 Jul 2020 7:55 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Fe­bru­ary 2020

  What do you mean by n-blind­ness?

• Raj Thimmiah 30 Jun 2020 7:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: MarcelloV’s comment on: Five Ways To Pri­ori­tize Better

  I’m also in­ter­ested in this, there are lots of things I’d want to track (and use the data from) but I don’t know a good not messy frame­work for it.

• Raj Thimmiah 24 Jun 2020 11:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: rosyatrandom’s comment on: The point of a mem­ory palace

  I don’t have so much ex­pe­rience with mem­ory palaces but I have used mnemon­ics a fair bit with SRS/​IR. It’s hard to ex­plain and I have no idea how trans­fer­able it is but I don’t think it’s as hard to make mnemon­ics as you think. E.g.: if you’re try­ing to mem­o­rize a word in Ja­panese which sounds like ran­dom syl­la­bles, if you lift the filters on your brain it isn’t as bad as you’d think to figure out some con­nec­tion by which to give those syl­la­bles mean­ing where they had none and to more eas­ily mem­o­rize the word.

• Raj Thimmiah 24 Jun 2020 10:57 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Rudi C’s comment on: The point of a mem­ory palace

  Pretty much my ex­pe­rience un­til I dis­cov­ered Su­perMemo/​In­cre­men­tal Read­ing/​SRS. It’s pretty weird how lit­tle teach­ers think about teach­ing stu­dents how to learn when they’re sup­posed to spend so much of their time do­ing it.

  I’m cu­ri­ous about the vi­su­al­iza­tion stuff. I don’t think it’s all just tal­ent but I don’t know how much of it could be gained from prac­tice ei­ther.

• Raj Thimmiah 24 Jun 2020 10:55 UTC

  1 point

  on: The point of a mem­ory palace

  4) Vi­su­al­iza­tion prac­tice and mem­ory palaces make you more able to see and ma­nipu­late 3D struc­tures.

  
  

  Have you seen any stud­ies on this by chance? I’ve thought about learn­ing draw­ing for roughly similar rea­sons but I’ve never been able to quan­tify well enough if the benefits are wroth the time in­vest­ment.

• Raj Thimmiah 24 Jun 2020 10:54 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Litememe’s comment on: Per­sonal ex­pe­rience of coffee as nootropic

  I like mate and I mainly chose it over coffee be­cause of the is­sues the OP men­tioned. It feels like it works fairly well, I usu­ally make a tea of 1-2 spoons and have it af­ter wak­ing up from night sleep and again af­ter wak­ing up from af­ter­noon nap.

  
  

  I have no idea how I’d do it but I think I’d like to try mak­ing mate gum at some point be­cause ap­par­ently gum has benefits for fo­cus­ing as well.

• Raj Thimmiah 19 Jun 2020 4:15 UTC

  4 points

  on: Us­ing a mem­ory palace to mem­o­rize a text­book.

  Have you con­sid­ered try­ing Su­perMemo in­stead of Anki? Anki is a pain to use be­cause it gives you tools for mem­o­riz­ing but noth­ing else. Su­perMemo works way bet­ter be­cause it has tools for learn­ing/​pro­cess­ing/​man­ag­ing ma­te­rial then mem­o­riz­ing it, when it’s rea­son­ably learned.

  Video I made on SM re­cently: Su­perMemo for Wizards

• Raj Thimmiah 8 Jun 2020 17:59 UTC

  4 points

  on: Wire­less is a trap

  Re­gard­ing wires, have you tried wire boxes? Like this: https://​​www.ama­zon.com/​​Bluelounge-CableBox-Cable-Man­age­ment-Sys­tem/​​dp/​​B0019T0JA2/​​ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&key­words=wire+box&qid=1591639112&sr=8-1

  They’re pretty sim­ple but by eat­ing up all slack on your wires they make things look way nearer. They’re the only wire or­ga­niz­ing solu­tion that I’ve found to re­ally hold up over time.

• Raj Thimmiah 7 Jun 2020 15:05 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: kotrfa’s comment on: Effec­tive chil­dren education

  I’m happy to hear that!

  1-self learn­ing: How I read it so far is that in­stead of se­lect­ing “the way” first and op­ti­miz­ing it later, in­stead it might be a good idea to fo­cus on learn­ing how to learn by your­self first, rec­og­niz­ing what’s the most effec­tive in any given case, be it via in­ter­net or an ac­tual hu­man re­source such as a tu­tor.

  Sort of, though this is mostly my vague the­ory. I think the ul­tra­learn­ing thing that Panashe men­tioned could be a use­ful frame­work though I’m not su­per fa­mil­iar with it. Peo­ple like Peter Gray who are ex­perts on home­school­ing/​self di­rected learn­ing could also be worth look­ing into.

  By the way, my solely main mo­ti­va­tion for her to know English was the ac­cess to much bet­ter ma­te­ri­als so she can learn by her­self.

  Yeah, that’s a pretty im­por­tant long-term skill. It would be re­ally challeng­ing to have be able to freely learn what­ever you want with­out ac­cess to the English in­ter­net.

  A quick search shows that there are some very rea­son­ably priced demo­cratic schools around. So great to see there are some op­tions like this (at least, I will be able to get some refer­ences or even visit them my­self)

  Awe­some. One thing to be care­ful of is that peo­ple think schools are im­por­tant for so­cial­iza­tion. I like Sey­mour Papert’s an­swer to that:

  Noth­ing both­ers me more than when peo­ple crit­i­cize my crit­i­cism of school by tel­ling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spel­ling, they are places where chil­dren learn a vaguely defined thing called so­cial­iza­tion. I know. I think schools gen­er­ally do an effec­tive and ter­ribly dam­ag­ing job of teach­ing chil­dren to be in­fan­tile, de­pen­dent, in­tel­lec­tu­ally dishon­est, pas­sive and dis­re­spect­ful to their own de­vel­op­men­tal capacities

  I’ve found the above crit­i­cism fairly true for my ex­pe­rience with school. I ended up with a lot of not great so­cial­iza­tion habits that took a long while to un­ravel.

  It feels like I’m go­ing on a bit too much but one other heuris­tic to con­sider: try to do for your daugh­ter what you would have liked as a child rather than what you as a par­ent think you should do. It’s very easy to as­sume that you know bet­ter than your child, and you do, but co­er­cion is re­ally bad. Try­ing to in­fluence choices by mak­ing them ap­peal­ing is far healthier than forc­ing things which I think younger you prob­a­bly would have ap­pre­ci­ated too.

• Raj Thimmiah 7 Jun 2020 14:44 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Panashe Fundira’s comment on: Effec­tive chil­dren education

  His book touches on spaced rep­e­ti­tion (he’s a big pro­po­nent of the test­ing effect) and other things. It’s re­ally about how to put to­gether effec­tive learn­ing pro­jects, from the re­search phase, through ex­e­cu­tion.

  Oh I didn’t know that. Raises pri­or­ity a bit then.

  I am in­ter­ested in IR, but I don’t have a win­dows ma­chine (MacOS/​Linux) and don’t think the over­head of main­tain­ing a VM would be worth it. Do you IR ev­ery­thing you read on­line, or do you re­serve it for ma­te­ri­als in your field? I mostly take notes in roam, and add par­tic­u­larly salient things that I think I’ll want to re­mem­ber to anki.

  If you use IR well, in my opinion it would in­crease long-term po­ten­tial by at least 1,5-2 times. If you don’t trust me and take my claim at say 1.2 times, I think even then it’s worth the time in­vest­ment of try­ing a VM and try­ing SM for a while to ver­ify the claim (I don’t think there are any other in­ter­ven­tions that would im­prove long-term po­ten­tial as much as SM).

  I’m ac­tu­ally us­ing it on a Mac in par­allels and it works pretty well. VMWare on Linux is also mostly good though in the end I ended up switch­ing from Linux be­cause VMWare has this weird be­hav­ior where it ex­ists ful­lscreen ev­ery­time you change workspaces. It drove me crazy. You can run SM through wine with this with a few con­straints. I haven’t tried it per­son­ally though.

  I don’t have a par­tic­u­lar field (I am in uni­ver­sity but I don’t care about it very much), I learn based on what I find in­ter­est­ing and ap­pli­ca­ble. I’ve found a lot of golden nuggets I oth­er­wise would never have with in­cre­men­tal read­ing. I tend to just im­port ev­ery­thing I see that looks shiny but it’s still man­age­able be­cause of Su­perMemo’s pri­or­ity sys­tem. I’ll prob­a­bly never get to all the things I im­port be­cause of the rate of new things vs. rate of re­view but I’m slowly mak­ing peace with that. At the least, pri­or­ity sys­tem makes it pos­si­ble to im­port as much as you want but still be cer­tain that you fo­cus most of your time on the things that mat­ter more.

  Roam seems pretty nice to me and I re­ally wish there was an SM plu­gin to repli­cate graph con­nec­tion func­tion­al­ity. I write a lot in Su­perMemo and while it is ex­tremely use­ful to be able to write things in­cre­men­tally, graph view would be likely a bet­ter way to work on things.

  Noted. The Su­perMemo wiki has always seemed quite un­wieldy to me, but I’ll take closer to what he says to say on top­ics out­side of spaced rep­e­ti­tion.

  For Su­perMemo doc­u­men­ta­tion, I would definitely agree. It is not fun figur­ing it out on your own. From re­cent ex­pe­riences teach­ing peo­ple, I think be­ing taught 1-1 is a far eas­ier way to get started with it. I can gen­er­ally teach peo­ple in 1-2 hours what it took me around a fair while (at least a month) to figure out.

  For other sub­jects on su­per­memo.guru blog, I think the ar­ti­cles are pretty good though not many peo­ple seem to be aware of them which is un­for­tu­nate.

• Raj Thimmiah 6 Jun 2020 6:31 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Panashe Fundira’s comment on: Effec­tive chil­dren education

  In­ter­est­ing about ul­tra­learn­ing, I will need to skim that in more de­tail some point. Without spaced rep­e­ti­tion/​in­cre­men­tal read­ing, that looks like the best method of learn­ing to me. I get the feel­ing this is why my gen­er­a­tion (2000s on­wards) lack prac­ti­cal skills, we al­most never learn for a pur­pose so we end up lack­ing the no­tion that we can do things your­selves. There are plenty of things I re­ally wanted to do (like build­ing a table from scratch [I re­ally love big ta­bles]) that I never did be­cause I had no ex­pe­rience and had never had any ex­pe­rience that would tell me where to start.

  Re­gard­ing Su­perMemo, yes, I use the soft­ware and in­cre­men­tal read­ing ex­ten­sively (if you have an in­ter­est in learn­ing it, I would hap­pily teach you). I would go in­sane learn­ing with­out it, es­pe­cially be­cause I have ADHD and in­cre­men­tal read­ing makes man­ag­ing what to learn easy.

  I also sub­scribe heav­ily to Woz’s ideas. I like them be­cause they tend to be much closer to global max­i­mas (e.g. free run­ning sleep) be­cause so­cietal/​aca­demic norms do not re­strict his views.

  A lot of them, es­pe­cially about learn­ing, re­ally changed my life. Though I also love what he has writ­ten about sleep, stress, ADHD, ad­dic­tion amongst other things.

• Raj Thimmiah 4 Jun 2020 8:35 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Ericf’s comment on: Effec­tive chil­dren education

  Did you read about B2D linked by OP? This is what Bloom found (from wikipe­dia):

  the av­er­age tu­tored stu­dent was above 98% of the stu­dents in the con­trol class”.[1]:4 Ad­di­tion­ally, the vari­a­tion of the stu­dents’ achieve­ment changed: “about 90% of the tu­tored stu­dents … at­tained the level of sum­ma­tive achieve­ment reached by only the high­est 20%” of the con­trol class.

  I don’t think high school can hold a can­dle to that. All the con­tent in any spe­cial­ized class can be found on­line and learned at the leisure of the child rather than pray­ing for a de­cent teacher that fits the kid.

• Raj Thimmiah 4 Jun 2020 8:32 UTC

  7 points

  on: Effec­tive chil­dren education

  B2D shows clear su­pe­ri­or­ity of 1-1 over 1-many but I think it ne­glects some­thing even bet­ter: 1 to self. IMO, is­sues with 1 to many teach­ing re­sult from high se­man­tic dis­tance: teacher is ei­ther too far ahead of stu­dent or are teach­ing things the stu­dent already knows. Thus, they’re always stuck ei­ther frus­trated or bored. 1-1 teach­ing elimi­nates that be­cause a tu­tor knows what the stu­dent does or not know; they can teach with con­tin­u­ous low se­man­tic dis­tance that isn’t frus­trat­ing.

  I think 1-self teach­ing goes be­yond tu­tor­ing be­cause:

  1. you know what you don’t know so if you need some pre­ced­ing in­for­ma­tion you can find that for your­self (in large part thanks to the in­ter­net)

  2. teach­ing is cen­tered around the idea that a teacher knows what you should know bet­ter than you do. In many cases, I don’t think this makes much sense. If I want to learn how to make x thing, get­ting a gen­eral ed­u­ca­tion on the field x falls into (field y) doesn’t make sense. Learn­ing a bunch of use­less things in field y is a waste of my time. If I’m de­cid­ing what to learn by my­self, I can make sure that I’m not only learn­ing things effi­ciently but that I’m choos­ing what to learn effec­tively.

  As a re­sult, I think pri­ori­tiz­ing large be­hav­ioral spaces where your daugh­ter can make mis­takes and figure things out by her­self is bet­ter than any rigid sys­tem forc­ing her to learn things she doesn’t want to. (Note: you might think that hav­ing her ed­u­cated in depth on some topic and hav­ing lots of knowl­edge is use­ful. Free learn­ing leads to higher co­her­ence which in turn makes knowl­edge more ap­pli­ca­ble and bet­ter re­tained. No mat­ter how well your daugh­ter is taught tri­gonom­e­try, if she learns it in­de­pen­dent of her own de­sires the abil­ity will likely stick to be­ing use­ful only for use­less math prob­lems.)

  I highly recom­mend read­ing any of the ar­ti­cles in I would never send my kids to school; par­tic­u­larly the ones you find your­self dis­agree­ing with the most.

  I would also check out Sud­bury or demo­cratic schools, which are schools with high be­hav­ioral space and very low in co­er­cion.

  The peo­ple at the bot­tom here men­tioned in fur­ther read­ing could also be helpful.

  
  

  I’m vaguely try­ing to work on look­ing at 1-self learn­ing as a means for solv­ing B2D (thanks for the acronym by the way) bet­ter than 1-1 learn­ing. I have no for­mal sci­ence back­ground but I’ve started talk­ing with a pro­fes­sor who found it very in­ter­est­ing. Hope­fully we can find some­thing con­crete though I have no idea how we’d test it right now.

  
  
  
  

  Un­for­tu­nately, I’m too con­fi­dent in my own views and there are a lot of pri­ors I’m guess­ing we don’t share that might make some of this not make sense. Please bring them up and I will try to an­swer them though most an­swers could prob­a­bly be found in some way on su­per­memo.guru.

• Raj Thimmiah 4 Jun 2020 6:21 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Model­ing sleep patterns

  I know this is a long dead thread but on the off chance no­tifs reach any of you guys, do you folks still use Su­perMemo?

  
  

  Edit: I just re­al­ized I can dm peo­ple di­rectly. Gonna do that

• Raj Thimmiah 4 Jun 2020 6:13 UTC

  1 point

  on: Spaced Rep­e­ti­tion Database for the Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers to Mys­te­ri­ous Ques­tions Sequence

  Are you still us­ing Su­perMemo?

• Raj Thimmiah 3 Jun 2020 6:49 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Pavlov Strategy

  The link for “Chaos: When the pre­sent de­ter­mines the fu­ture, but the ap­prox­i­mate pre­sent does not ap­prox­i­mately de­ter­mine the fu­ture.” ap­pears to be not working

[Question] How can you find the best in­for­ma­tion out of all in­for­ma­tion?

• Raj Thimmiah 23 May 2020 9:13 UTC

  2 points

  on: What are your great­est one-shot life im­prove­ments?

  Ear­muffs have helped me a lot for pro­duc­tive time. The silence lets me fo­cus more on what I’m try­ing to work on. Com­pared to my noice can­cel­ling head­phones (qc 35 II) I can’t play mu­sic even if I want to to so less like­li­hood of dis­trac­tion. On oc­ca­sion though, if they aren’t enough by them­selves I’ll put ear­buds in­side the ear­muffs with low wind noise. I can hear pretty much noth­ing ex­ter­nal af­ter that.

  
  

  They also help me sleep on planes since they block out a fair por­tion of the noise.

  
  

  This is the one I use: https://​​www.ama­zon.in/​​3M-Pel­tor-X5A-Over-Ear­muffs/​​dp/​​B00CPCHBCQ

  It looks ridicu­lous when you wear it. Really ridicu­lous, I won’t lie.

• Raj Thimmiah 23 May 2020 9:10 UTC

  1 point

  on: What are your great­est one-shot life im­prove­ments?

  Eye­masks and earplugs have helped a lot for sleep. I’m not sure how to quan­tify the benefit but I haven’t slept with­out them (for night­sleep) in at least a year from what I can re­call.

• Raj Thimmiah 23 May 2020 8:59 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: What are your great­est one-shot life im­prove­ments?

  Have you tried bare­foot run­ning? I haven’t tried run­ning with shoes on all that much so I don’t have much to com­pare to but I find bare­foot run­ning re­ally fun and anec­do­tally it seems my knees act up a bit less with it. I was par­tially in­spired to try it origi­nally by:

  https://​​www.ted.com/​​talks/​​christo­pher_mc­dougall_are_we_born_to_run?lan­guage=en