I chose this picture both because I find its composition to be aesthetically striking, and for its portrayal of Piotr Wozniack, in deep thought and ready to jog (an activity which I personally find conducive to great thinking), someone who represents many of the traits I appreciate in a rationalist mind:
Wozniack wanted to learn as much as possible, as efficiently as possible, and ran into fundamental limitations with the capabilities of the human mind, without access to any technology that could help him overcome the barriers he faced. So he did the only reasonable thing: he ran experiments on himself, recording how effective different methods of learning were; he read and learned as much as he could about the psychology of learning to find hints as to how to solve his problem; and once he finally figured out a way to dramatically increase the efficiency of his learning, he gained access to a computer (by means that were borderline illegal in then-Communist Poland) to actually implement his solution.
Wozniack’s story is the meta-story for the importance of the virtue of scholarship, and thanks to his hard work and ingenuity, there now exists SRS (that is, the underpinnings of software like Anki), a technology that has played a massive role in my life- it allowed me to learn a second language to a high level of proficiency when I was a teenager, and I still interface with the algorithm Piotr wrote on a daily basis (as I know a good number of other LW’ers do) to help me store a large amount of useful information in my head.
Piotr Wozniack, inventor of SRS, the algorithm behind Anki
I chose this picture both because I find its composition to be aesthetically striking, and for its portrayal of Piotr Wozniack, in deep thought and ready to jog (an activity which I personally find conducive to great thinking), someone who represents many of the traits I appreciate in a rationalist mind:
Wozniack wanted to learn as much as possible, as efficiently as possible, and ran into fundamental limitations with the capabilities of the human mind, without access to any technology that could help him overcome the barriers he faced. So he did the only reasonable thing: he ran experiments on himself, recording how effective different methods of learning were; he read and learned as much as he could about the psychology of learning to find hints as to how to solve his problem; and once he finally figured out a way to dramatically increase the efficiency of his learning, he gained access to a computer (by means that were borderline illegal in then-Communist Poland) to actually implement his solution.
Wozniack’s story is the meta-story for the importance of the virtue of scholarship, and thanks to his hard work and ingenuity, there now exists SRS (that is, the underpinnings of software like Anki), a technology that has played a massive role in my life- it allowed me to learn a second language to a high level of proficiency when I was a teenager, and I still interface with the algorithm Piotr wrote on a daily basis (as I know a good number of other LW’ers do) to help me store a large amount of useful information in my head.
(I enjoyed reading this article (which is the source of the picture) on Wozniack, and would recommend it to anyone who is curious about this character)
(FYI, I wasn’t familiar with SRS and had to Google it.)
It’s a thing on LW, which I guess MikkW should have linked. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/spaced-repetition