career and life advice

A useful object-level introduction to Anki

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).