Benefits of having a general interest in many fields

Things I suggest you write about

• against productivity gurus
• maintains unorganized notes
• believes "everything that isn’t writing, revising, or editing is a waste of time"
  • this extends to notetaking
• "People often look at my large collection of books, or see the articles I tweet about, and ask, how do you remember everything you read? And the answer is, I don’t. Remembering is for chumps."

List of arguments:

• notetaking makes you go from remembering only what stays organically to what seems like it might be interesting
• "Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things"
  • same thing applied to books/courses/videos on notetaking systems (the only part that I agree with)
• the majority of interesting writing is off-the-cuff
• distraction by presentation of factual insight (?)
• this stuff doesn't apply to summarizing huge swaths of literature or if the person has "truly bad, unfixable memories"
• author is "waiting for any evidence" that the best thinkers rely on notetaking systems, and thinks those that are taught it "produce unexciting work" (emphasis mine)
• isn't anti-notetaking, but is anti-systems
• avoid useless adoption of the aesthetic

The foundational texts of Western civilization are on the reading list for St. John's College, where all students study the Great Books curriculum.

1. Use as few tags as possible.
2. Limit yourself to a self-defined set of tags.
3. Tags within your set must not overlap.
4. By convention, tags are in plural.
5. Tags are lower-case.
6. Tags are single words.
7. Keep tags on a general level.
8. Omit tags that are obvious.

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   And my own addition: never allow a "general" or "misc" tag because everything is "general" or "misc". It just highlights the areas a tagging system is lagging.

A useful object-level introduction to Anki

When I ask them about their blogging adventures, they readily admit that they only write when they’re out of work to promote their freelance work. That’s not a blog. That’s corporate sales. Things like Blogging For Devs make my stomach turn. I’m glad it helps people get into blogging, but please, stop thinking about SEO and how to “build a resume”. Again, that’s not blogging. That’s corporate sales. Sure, nothing wrong with a bit of self-promotion, but if it ain’t nothing but that, to me, it’s not worth reading it.

Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.

• "if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it’s worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition."
• "don’t use spaced repetition if you need it sooner than 5 days or it’s worth less than 5 minutes"

Not only is any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced technologist seems like a magician. In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical.

Trying to envision magicians feels less clear, at least for me. My vision is likely to stem from a combination of a bunch of people or concepts I’ve encountered, so the same strategy applies as for finding magicians (giving my brain a lot of examples to work with). Questions I like to ask myself include:

• ‘What is the most capable version of me that I can imagine?’
• ‘What would I be like/spend my time doing if all my current major problems had been solved?’
• ‘What are the things I say I value but don’t act as if I value, and what would my life feel like on inside if I actually acted as if I valued those things?’
• ‘What am I afraid of doing, and what would my life be like if I wasn’t afraid of doing those things?’.

You can’t keep your gaze tightly fixed on the outcome you want because it will lock your mind onto the strategies you currently have for meeting them, which by definition probably don’t work (otherwise you would have succeeded already and you wouldn’t need to use the strategy).

A timeline from a person for self-reference of important dates. Topics range from movie releases to major book publishing to technology development.

Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no individual or preference criterion can be better off without making at least one individual or preference criterion worse off or without any loss thereof. The following three concepts are closely related:

• Given an initial situation, a Pareto improvement is a new situation where some agents will gain, and no agents will lose.
• A situation is called Pareto dominated if there exists a possible Pareto improvement.
• A situation is called Pareto optimal or Pareto efficient if no change could lead to improved satisfaction for some agent without some other agent losing or if there is no scope for further Pareto improvement.

A limitation with the concept of Pareto efficiency is that it assumes that knowledge about other market participants is available to all participants, in that every player knows the payoffs and strategies available to other players so as to have complete information. Bayesian efficiency is an analog of Pareto efficiency for situations in which there is incomplete information.

Things you sometimes forget are options

• Hire a tutor
• Ask your acquaintances, “Hey, I want to leave my house more, are there any cool events you’re going to soon?” (HT Sasha Chapin)
• Modify your own stuff (tape over annoying LEDs, remove logos, etc)
• Be willing to spend a few minutes fixing small annoyances