On Autodidactism

Combination of SRS and memory castles.

For the thought experiment, instead of flashcards, suppose you have a stack of cheatsheets. You wanna memorize them. You go and put the cheatsheets in a memory castle.

In mindspace, you can alter the cheatsheets – the words are no longer confined to A4 sheets, and art can be three-dimensional and include the sense of touch.

Obama's insight about blue suits can be represented by Obama wearing a blue suit, e.g. Though the presence of a person would be overpowering, so persons should only be used for important insights. A framed Obama?

For advanced potential, perhaps add smell to different rooms – if you focus inwardly on really feeling that smell, you kind of will smell it, regardless of what your flesh nose is sensing. And then, turn your attention to the room, and it should come back more easily. To mint new memory objects, it may help to go in meatspace to smell the appropriate thing for that room.

For example… a Chinese-styled room, smelling of chai tea. Go smell some meatspace chai before even trying to envision it (because memory retcons itself, you may cause details to disappear forever).

Instead of words, you can have objects. Suppose you've read a book and written notes from it. Eventually these notes become a box of objects in your memory castle.

In meatspace SRS, you can put pictures of your memory rooms. Eventually you can even draw the objects you've created and put those drawings in SRS – along with the actual flashcards they represent! (Option: attach a random image to every flashcard, well before turning them into memory objects)

For a grace period, you practice on flashcards both on actual paper/SRS, and in mindworld.

Take care, don't create too many objects. You don't need as many flashcards as you think.

Memory objects can themselves hold memory objects. For example, in one room, you might find a Ribbing bike. On its saddle, you might find a Buddha statue. On his lap, you might find a flower. On the petals, you might find a fly. On the fly, you might find a crown. On the surface of the crown (really zoomed in), you might find a golden castle on a flat field of gold. Inside the castle, you might find a banquet. In the banquet, you will NOT find another Ribbing bike – don't reuse objects.

For true spaced repetition, try a Leitner system. Arrange your objects. Hold them, smell them – every time you handle an object. Arrange them in a system. Not necessarily numeric. Just "on that desk" is recent stuff, "upstairs on that bookshelf" is old flashcards, "in the wine cellar behind that scary vampire nest and in front of the liliputian" is some old but important stuff. Re-use things from your life. The amphitheatre, some notes on love and relationships in Momo's room, with whom you can have a conversation while you're at it. You would of course draw your imagination of Momo's room often.

Sketch, sketch, sketch. No need to sketch the memory objects in use (you can if you want), just sketch the rooms, the 'bases'.

Use emotion. Fear (the scary vampire nest) is one. A narrow bridge…

Flashcard front: Buddha Flashcard back: Buddha with rose on his lap

Flashcard front: Rose Flashcard back: Rose with a fly

etc.

In political elections, it would generally be nice if people just read the parties' promises direct from the source and avoided hearsay. When was the last time you did that? I mean their actual website on their "give me your detailed plan" page, not a flyer)? Well, people may rarely do it, but you can!

After that, if you think a party's program doesn't make sense, you could probably join their forums and simply ask them to rehash your confusion until you see where they're coming from. You should be able to play a good devil's advocate for every party, because you took the time to understand where they're coming from, even if you disagree on fundamental priorities.

Doing this will probably reveal holes in your understanding of society, both on economic topics and on how you ought to fit into society and the meaning of life itself. Be prepared that you'll have to introspect as well as study up. Then it will be clear that political debate is generally pointless with people who haven't tried to cover their own holes too: they don't know where their values come from.

I learned to speed-read by accident. The trick: watch movies and TV-shows without sound, then speed them up. As you get used to it, you can speed up more and more, and pretty soon you're no longer moving your eyes over every word, you're just getting the whole subtitle in one go.

• Learning
• Incremental reading
• spaced repetition

• How to Get Academic Papers for Free
• Knowledge is Worth Paying For
• Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently
• The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship
• Problem of verifying rationality (have you become stronger?)
• Build Small Skills in the Right Order
• How and Why to Granularize
• No, Seriously. Just Try It.