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Articles to Read.
How to remember what you learn
“I don’t remember a damn thing.”
The book I held my hands was full of highlights. It seemed like I’ve got all colors of the rainbow on a page. Apparently, this didn’t help. When I tried recalling ideas from the book, I didn’t hear a thing. Just. Silence.
Terrified, I started questioning how much I really know. If I forget everything I read, I can’t apply my knowledge to the problem at hand. I can’t transfer it. And without transfer, knowledge is very much like music for deaf ears.
I quickly did the math. I was planning to invest in learning a few hours a day for the next ~75 years of my life. Staring at the number of potentially wasted hours, I knew exactly what I had to do.
The most important thing is that my learning is time-based, not goal-based. Setting learning goals such as “read X pages today” is a way to fail because you set up the wrong incentives. When you plan to read X pages by lunch, you can’t help but begin optimizing for the goal, which leads to focusing on speed instead of understanding. And when you don’t have those “aha” moments, it is hard to remember what you learn.
It’s also important to not overload yourself and take breaks. I do 3h learning sessions every day split into 30 min intervals with 5 min breaks. Breaks help to fall back into the diffuse mode of thinking and get access to a broader set of neural networks in my head. They also warm up my body, and I feel better after moving around for a few minutes.
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You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss
Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.
I began to suspect this after spending several years working with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts.
Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be working in a way that's more natural for humans.
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.
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“Why can’t life be simple?”
We’ve all likely asked ourselves that at least once. After all, life is complicated. Every day, we face processes that seem almost infinitely recursive. Each step requires the completion of a different task to make it possible, which in itself requires another task. We confront tools requiring us to memorize reams of knowledge and develop additional skills just to use them. Endeavors that seem like they should be simple, like getting utilities connected in a new home or figuring out the controls for a fridge, end up having numerous perplexing steps.
When we wish for things to be simpler, we usually mean we want products and services to have fewer steps, fewer controls, fewer options, less to learn. But at the same time, we still want all of the same features and capabilities. These two categories of desires are often at odds with each other and distort how we understand the complex.
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Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think
The family tree of humanity is much more interconnected than we tend to think. “We’re culturally bound and psychologically conditioned to not think about ancestry in very broad terms,” Rutherford says. Genealogists can only focus on one branch of a family tree at a time, making it easy to forget how many forebears each of us has.
Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time. In the nth generation before the present, your family tree has 2n slots: two for parents, four for grandparents, eight for great-grandparents, and so on. The number of slots grows exponentially. By the 33rd generation—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than eight billion of them. That is more than the number of people alive today, and it is certainly a much larger figure than the world population a millennium ago.
This seeming paradox has a simple resolution: “Branches of your family tree don’t consistently diverge,” Rutherford says. Instead “they begin to loop back into each other.” As a result, many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree. For example, “your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt,” he explains.
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Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit
It it possible to feel playfulness while reading a chemistry textbook? Or is it better to optimize for an efficient, if dry, learning experience, and find ways to reward yourself afterward? If it is possible to feel playfulness while reading an o-chem textbook, it would be worth trading off at least some efficiency in favor of positive feeling. The question is how much. Of course, the best case scenario is where it's both possible to feel playfulness while reading, and it makes you learn more efficiently.
In my experiments of feeling playful while alone, I took away a few key insights.
Starting with an open, unfocused, non goal-oriented mindset was crucial.
The feeling of playfulness was based on connecting physical objects with memories, a sense of profound personal meaning, and possibility. There was a poetic, metaphorical, associative quality to the experience. These associations were neither purely spontaneous and involuntary, nor deliberately constructed. It was more a sense of resting my attention and gaze on an object, and then gently asking my mind to remember or imagine a psychological association.
I remembered the act of remembering afterward, and it made those memories more available to me in the future.
Playfulness while reading a chemistry textbook might take a similar form, something quite different, or simply be unavailable.
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US Insulin prices 8 times higher than in other nations
Insulin prices are more than eight times higher in the United States than in 32 high-income comparison nations combined, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
The study compared how much different types of insulin sold in the U.S. would cost if bought at prices in other countries. The average price per unit across all types of insulin in the U.S. was $98.70. Other countries would have paid a fraction as much for the same insulins.
U.S. prices were higher than each of the 32 comparison countries individually, ranging from 3.8 times higher than those in Chile to 27.7 times those in Turkey. U.S. prices were 6.3 times higher than those in Canada, 5.9 times higher than those in Japan and 8.9 times higher than those in the United Kingdom.
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More to Check Out:
- The (Mostly) True Story of Vanilla Ice, Hip-Hop, and the American Dream
- 9 in 10 Adults Think Buying the Latest Smartphone is a Waste of Money
- Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole
- Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane
- A list of post mortems
My Update:
Think going to move to LA next, and then back to SF!
Running. Follow me on Strava.
Reading Snow Crash. Finished Shadow of the Wind.