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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2089 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 16, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Rather than just trying to remember rotely, deeply engage with the knowledge by connecting it to other knowledge. You've now added multiple recall points to your brain for the single fact, and as long as any of them are intact, you can get the fact.

You remind me of this article

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2007/03/25/how-to-ace-your-finals-without-studying/

Back in high school, I was on the "academic bowl" team (it's academic jeopardy) and our team captain was some dude with glasses from Myanmar. His skill at the game was truly astonishing, and when I asked him how he learned, he said he spent hours reading wikipedia each night. Unsurprisingly, I tried a few variations on this and none of them bore fruit. But as @self_made_human mentions, there's a degree to which this memory faculty feels sort of natural, like we're each given the capacity we need for our interests. If you find yourself going on Wikipedia binges, making deep connections, reading tons of books and forgetting them shortly after, most probably it's a defect in your natural memory; you should be remembering everything you have interest in. Otherwise it's likely a disease.

So, no, it isn't - it's redundant encoding that gives you more threads by which to remember. In CS terms, I no longer have to linearly loop through my list-o-facts; instead, I map quickly to the needed fact via any of a number of hashes (connections).

This is a good analogy. We don't often talk about how inefficient the written word usually is.

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