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"The reason the inventor of SuperMemo pursues extreme anonymity, asking me to conceal his exact location and shunning even casual recognition by users of his software, is not because he's paranoid or a misanthrope but because he wants to avoid random interruptions to a long-running experiment he's conducting on himself. Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in strict obedience to reason." The problem wasn't shyness but the same intolerance for inefficient expenditure of mental resources

remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.
"There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory.
amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well - easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something - are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future.

the value of what he remembered depended crucially on what he studied, and what he studied depended on his goals, and the selection of his goals rested upon the efficient acquisition of knowledge, in a regressive function that propelled him relentlessly along the path he had chosen.
optimal learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.

Wozniak's days are blocked into distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period, an exercise period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a second creative period. He doesn't get up at a regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks. If excitement over his research leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts to sleeping in the day. When he sits down for a session of incremental reading, he attends to whatever automatically appears on his computer screen, stopping the instant his mind begins to drift or his comprehension falls too low and then moving on to the next item in the queue. SuperMemo graphs a distribution of priorities that he can adjust as he goes. When he encounters a passage that he thinks he'll need to remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced repetition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain indefinitely. "Once you get the snippets you need," Wozniak says, "your books disappear. They gradually evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge."
You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life. It is a severe prescription. And yet now, as I grin broadly and wave to the gawkers, it occurs to me that the cold rationality of his approach may be only a surface feature and that, when linked to genuine rewards, even the chilliest of systems can have a certain visceral appeal. By projecting the achievement of extreme memory back along the forgetting curve, by provably linking the distant future - when we will know so much - to the few minutes we devote to studying today, Wozniak has found a way to condition his temperament along with his memory. He is making the future noticeable. He is trying not just to learn many things but to warm the process of learning itself with a draft of utopian ecstasy.

learning memory

in list: BUILD SOCEITY: psychological law

active lecture

academics learning presentation

it’s easy to be judgmental of inaction. Explain it away as simply being laziness or weakness. But the truth is probably more basic: self-motivation is really hard to do, especially for tasks you don’t enjoy
if you already had a good reason to exercise but you’re staying home again, what difference will having a slightly better reason make?
I feel a better strategy is instead of summoning up more willpower, trying to hack the activity in question so it becomes more enjoyable. Instead of driving the change with more force, you use a catalyst.
What if the goal of exercise was to find something physical you really liked, not to lose weight? The goal of socializing was to find activities you enjoyed, not to fit some mold people expect you to follow?
the first priority should be to enjoy an activity. This applies whenever you find yourself procrastinating constantly or finding that you’re putting off a goal for months. After you don’t have a problem showing up, every day, the goal should be efficiency, which reaps greater rewards.
Don’t worry about finesse or mastering the craft, just get out there and write what you’re passionate about. After a hundred or so articles, you might want to spend more time carefully examining how you can improve.
Listening to music while working tends to lower my efficiency, but increase my enjoyment. Going to the gym with friends can be a distraction if you’re on an intense schedule, but also more fun.
less-fun but high-results dieting approach is better than one which is easy, but may not give the tangible benefits that encourage you to continue.
What do you think? Should your initial action plans focus on what is going to be the most effective strategy, or the one you’ll enjoy most? If it depends, what causes you to make that distinction?

academics to-do insight learning

in list: PERSONALITY TYPES & Thinking patterns in decision-making, how to be an adult & be great at it too

tutorial level where the player is told how to play
If you are starting your own business, why not read a lot of material on starting a business? You could also interview other entrepreneurs and ask them about their experiences.
If you are having trouble getting in shape, why not join a fitness class or hire a personal trainer? If you are a bad cook, go to a cooking class. If you want to become more proficient at speaking why not join Toastmasters?
gradually increasing the difficulty so that initial levels are incredibly easy but soon become more difficult.
make your first step just to show up at the gym for a half hour every day.
You don’t have to be good at anything you start at. You are going to learn and improve not to stroke your ego.
The second invalid belief we can have is that something is impossible if we don’t “get it” at first.
Be patient and also realize that developing your skills in an area is just as important as solving your problem or becoming good. So if you start cooking a new exotic meal but it tastes horrible, that doesn’t mean that cooking is impossible or that you just wasted your time. You gained valuable experience that moves you further in your next attempt.
you actually can do some things you previously felt were impossible for you.
you need to separate your skill with the task and the task itself. If you are frustrated with how badly you are performing the skill then chances are it is simply the Frustration Barrier at work. However, it might be that you really dislike playing and you believe you would dislike playing even if you were excellent at it.

learning insight academics to-do

in list: PERSONALITY TYPES & Thinking patterns in decision-making, how to be an adult & be great at it too

"a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Bohr's quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn't magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong the mind will never revise its models. We'll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence.

learning

"consciously admiring and recognizing the excellence of someone is the first step to becoming a master yourself. If the key to mastery of any skill is deconstructing what current masters did to get to where they are, then step one is knowing when you're around professionals--and letting yourself admire them!"

strategic learning

strategic learning starred HLtechniques

"impossible to entice, to cajole, or to discipline a child into maturity"

maturity learning

in list: PERSONALITY TYPES & Thinking patterns in decision-making