If you were to write an advice guide about doing incredibly well in this class, what would the chapters be?

Sure, you can bitch with other students in the same class, and maybe perform the occasional group study session, but in the end, it’s you alone battling the mysterious forces of your professor and his capricious whims.

students’ study habits are heavily influenced by their peers.

These connections are fuel for deep understanding.

To aid your attempt to process and capture information in the fast-paced environment of a lecture, you need an efficient, fill-in-the-blanks format that you can rely on to simplify the decision of how to record the results of this process. As you know, I’m fond of the Question/Evidence/Conclusion format described in Straight-A.

To reduce the time required to study, you must try to do as much thinking and processing of the information as possible while still in the classroom. You’re there anyways, you might as well make the most of it! Don’t record what the professor says, record the importance of what he says.

Raw facts are useless for college-level essay questions.

If you ask a straight-A undergraduate, however, (which, in my infinite oddness, I have done many times), he would instead answer: to reduce my study time.

Policy's a big part of the story, but policy is "the art of the possible"

“Both the optimist and the pessimist contribute to society: the optimist invents the airplane, and the pessimist invents the parachute.”

But in the end, appeal to authority/weebs isn't enough; you have to actually understand the dang thing. (Which you are doing, by reading this! So thank you.)

maybe understanding AI will help us understand ourselves

AI with intact skills, but broken goals, would be an AI that skillfully acts towards corrupted goals.

Humane Values: “What are humane values, anyway?” (a problem for philosophy & ethics) The Technical Alignment Problem: “How can we make AI robustly serve any intended goal at all?” (a problem for computer scientists - surprisingly, still unsolved!)

A human may or may not be humane

Without intuition, AI can't understand common sense or humane values. Thus, AI might achieve goals in logically-correct but undesirable ways.

And the bias blind spot, unlike many biases, is especially severe among people who are especially intelligent, thoughtful, and open-minded.

the more you learn, the smaller your error will tend to be.

To be able to look backwards and say that you’ve “failed” implies that you had goals.

Francis Bacon once remarked, “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

It means you’re likely to parrot an opinion that isn’t yours as if you had done the work.

Attachment theory hypothesizes that early caregiver relationships establish social–emotional developmental foundations

But my biggest problem is that I'm really bad at learning mathematics.

One common pattern is that people think they're getting stuck on esoteric, complex issues. But when you dig down it turns out they're having a hard time with basic notation and terminology.

I can't replace note taking with Anki – it's too slow, and for many things a poor use of my long-term memory.

Instead of getting out Anki, I will quickly make a mental (or paper) note of what I want to Ankify. I then enter it into Anki later. This requires some discipline; it's one reason I prefer to set a small quota, so that I merely have to enter a few questions later, rather than dozens.

Put another way: to really internalize a process, it's not enough just to review Anki cards. You need to carry out the process, in context. And you need to solve real problems with it.

The act of constructing an Anki card is itself nearly always a form of elaborative encoding

orphan questions

The world isn't divided up into neatly separated components, and I believe it's good to collide very different types of questions. One moment Anki is asking me a question about the temperature chicken should be cooked to. The next: a question about the JavaScript API. Is this mixing doing me any real good? I'm not sure.

These are goals which, for me, are intellectually appealing, but which I'm not emotionally invested in.

This entire process took a few days of my time, spread over a few weeks. That's a lot of work.

Of course, instead of using Anki I could have taken conventional notes, using a similar process to build up an understanding of the paper. But using Anki gave me confidence I would retain much of the understanding over the long term.

I began reading it quickly, almost skimming

I occasionally wonder what the impact would be of memorizing a good book in its entirety; I wouldn't be surprised if it greatly influenced my own language and writing.

and over the years I made multiple attempts to use it, each time quickly giving up.

I review my Anki cards while walking to get my morning coffee, while waiting in line, on transit, and so on.

Anki in all parts of my life

ad hoc

In my personal memory practice, nearly all the benefit has come from learning how to: better digest material; make better questions and answers; better connect the memory system to my life and creative work

big disgrace

Time spent in rabbit holes on cognitive science is thrilling, but there’s always a niggle of guilt about the “wasted time”. Time spent productively is tangible and satisfying, but there’s a small part of me that feels missing. The war between these two sides has been going on for the better part of a year, especially because no matter how much I experiment with different time-management strategies, I can’t seem to reconcile both sides in a way that feels consistently balanced.

There’s a point where it’s time to start shifting away from exploring and toward exploiting. Eventually, you have to hunker down on a few key things and dive deep. This is where curiosity can become a silent killer.

Letting kids engage in unstructured play, letting them solve their own problems, and emphasizing learning from a young age naturally builds a curious mindset. Curiosity even circumvents the need for a growth mindset.

Mood is more objective than objects (41) because it primes how we see the world.

And through this logic, the fastest way to understand someone is to explore what primes their mood.

Whenever we want to improve ourselves, we like to focus on what we can do and what we can acquire. We focus on actions and objects while disregarding "mood" because it seems frivolous.

music taste doesn't come from arbitrary preferences, and trying to change someone's music taste is harder than convincing my grandparents that ketchup on dumplings might be a good idea.

Finally, parents who are educated by the system are not educated to think. So, parents don't ask. Did you know that most parents choose school based on how close the school is (easy and convenient) and how much the fee is (cheap). So, no one cares a dam about education.

India has a better and rich educational history but destroyed by colonialism

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

maybe, we ought to be more observant