A few months ago I started using the Ultimate Geography Anki deck after performing quite abysmally on some silly geography quiz that was doing the rounds on Facebook. I now know where all the damn countries are, like an informed citizen of the world. This has proven itself very useful in a variety of ways, not least of which is in reading other material with a geographical backdrop. For example, the chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel on Africa is much more readable if you know where all the African countries are in relation to one another.
(In the process of doing this, coupled with an international event in Sweden, I’ve learned that the Scandinavian education systems are much, much better than that of the UK at teaching children about the rest of the world)
The geography deck was particularly easy to slip into because it developed an area I already (weakly) knew about. I’m looking for some new Anki content of a similar nature: a cross-domain-application body of knowledge I probably sort-of know a little bit already, that I can comprehensively improve upon.
Suggestions and anecdotes of similar experiences welcome.
Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.
Rundown of positive and negative results:
In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it’s the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with you, but I learned to love it.
I suspect that learning the dates of monarchs and Prime Ministers (e.g. of England/UK) would have a similar benefit in contextualising and de-intimidating historical facts, but I never finished those decks and haven’t touched them in a while, so never reached the critical mass of knowledge that allowed me to have a good handle on periods of British history. I found it pretty difficult to (for example) keep track of six different Georges and map each to dates, so slow progress put me off. Let me know if you’re interested and want to set up a pact, e.g. ‘We’ll both do at least ten cards from each deck a day and report back to the other regularly’ or something. In fact that offer probably stands for any readers.
I installed some decks for learning definitions in areas of math that I didn’t know, but found memorising decontextualised definitions hard enough that I wasn’t motivated to do it, given everything else I was doing and Anki-ing at the time. I still think repeat exposure to definitions might be a useful developmental strategy for math that nobody seems to be using deliberately and systematically, but I’m not sure Anki is a right way to do it. Or if it is, that shooting so far ahead of my current knowledge was the best way to do it. Similarly a LaTeX deck I got having pretty much never used LaTeX and not practising it while learning the deck.
Canadian provinces/territories I have not yet found useful beyond feeling good for ticking off learning the deck, which was enough for me since I did them in a session or two.
Languages Spoken in Each Country of the World (I was trying to do not just country-->languages but country-->languages with proportions of population speaking the languages) was so difficult and unrewarding in the short term that I lost motivation extremely quickly (this was months ago). The mental association between ‘Berber’ and ‘North Africa’ has come up a surprising number of times, though. Most recently yesterday night.
Periodic table (symbol<--->name, name<-->number) took lots of time and hasn’t been very useful for me personally (I pretty much just learned it in preparation for a quiz). Learning just which elements are in which groups/sections of the Periodic table might be more useful and a lot quicker (since by far the main difficulty was name<--->number).
I am relatively often wanting for demographic and economic data, e.g. population of countries, population of major world cities, population of UK places, GDP’s. Ideally I’d not just do this for major places since I want to get a good intuitive sense of these figures for very large or major places on down to tiny places.
Similarly if one has a hobby horse it could be useful. Examples off the top of my head (not necessarily my hobby horse): Memorising the results from the LessWrong surveys. Memorising the results from the PhilPapers survey. Memorising data about resource costs of meat production vs. other food production. Memorising failed AGI timeline predictions. Etc.
I found starting to learn Booker Prize winners on Memrise has let me have a few ‘Ah, I recognise that name and literature seems less opaque to me, yay!’ moments, but there’s probably higher-priority decks for you to learn unless that’s more your area.
sub-atomic to hypothetical multi-universes—uses pictures and numbers, no zooming. I hadn’t realized how much overlap there is in size between the larger moons and smaller planets, and (in spite of having seen many pictures) hadn’t registered that nebulas are much bigger than stars.
I’m going to post this before I spend a while noodling around science videos, but it might also be good to work on time scales and getting oriented among geological and historical time periods, including what things were happening at the same time in different parts of the world.
I’m an 4th year economics undergrad preparing start applying to PhD programs, and while I’ve never formally attempted to memorize GDPs, I’ve found that having a rough idea of where a county’s per capita GDP is to be very useful in understanding world news and events (for example, I’ve noticed that around the $8,00-12,000 per year range seems to be the point where the median household gets an internet connection). If you do attempt to go the memorization route, be sure to use PPP-adjusted figures, as non-adjusted numbers will tend to systematically under estimate incomes in developing countries.
I did British monarchs last year while on a history kick, (which I’m still on). Pro-tip: watch films, television shows and plays featuring said monarchs, as they include salient contemporary historical events. For example, Nigel Hawthorne was the mad George. Hugh Laurie was his son, the Prince Regent, a contemporary of the Duke of Wellington (Stephen Fry), which places him temporally alongside the Napoleonic wars. Colin Firth was Queen Elizableth II’s stuttering dad in The King’s Speech. His brother was Mike from Neighbours (or the bad guy from Iron Man 3 if you’re under 30) and their dad was Dumbledore.
(It turns out that royal history has plenty of independently interesting features, because it contains a lot of murders and wars and speculation about parentage. Contemporary introductions to historiography emphasise the movement away from history as the deeds of powerful men exercising their will through war and conquest, but the kings and wars are a lot more memorable and easier to place in time than the ephemeral stuff like trade routes and adoption of crops.)
Great effort. If may suggest a topic without providing a deck, I’d say learn about the vocabulary of personal finance. Or more generally, learn the vocabulary of stuff relevant to most lifes from time to time, like medicine, law and, well, finance. This helps to search for the correct things when needed and helps communicating with the relevant professionals.
Attempting to learn medicine vocabulary without understanding the underlying knowledge base is quite hard. Taking a readymade deck of corresponding vocabulary usually leads to attempting to learn something without understanding. That leads to forgotten cards and is ineffective.
Since I don’t have the books around me, I’ll have to write from memory without specific source. It might have been Decisive but I’m not sure.
In the book the authors described the problem of physicians leading patient’s questions like with the complaint “my stomach hurts” they ask “does it hurt here?” pointing to where they feel the pain should be located. The patient, intimidated by the professional in front of them, affirms the question without supplying the information that it also hurts elsewhere. This is not yet a problem of vocabulary, but nonetheless important to keep in mind. The more interesting example was of an old man that described his problem as “feeling dizzy”, so physicians tried to treat him for the syndromes that typically occur at higher ages. After some time a physician actually asked him “when do you feel dizzy?”, receiving the answer “I feel dizzy all the time, when I get up, when I stand in the kitchen, when I read my newspaper.” Turns out what this patient described as “being dizzy” was more something along the lines of “feeling confused” and was a symptom of a as-of-yet undiagnosed depression over his late wife’s passing.
The whole episode could have been avoided if the patient knew how to correctly describe his issue—and if the pphysicians were more conscientious in diagnosing a specific issue.
Learning that there a qualia of “being dizzy” and a qualia of “feeling confused” and learning being able to distinguish those two qualia’s isn’t easy, if you don’t have those qualia in the first place.
Words are cheap once you have the qualia.
Most people have fairly little awareness of what goes on inside their own body. Furthermore these days most doctors also lack the ability to perceive that information kinesthetically but focus on various tests and verbal feedback.
Practically it’s also important to think about what information a doctor actually needs. That means who have to know what’s normal and how you deviate from that.
Why not then just get a working knowledge of those languages? I had classical education and so I took latin and greek. I also speak some german as well as a working and halting conversational knowledge of french. When you have that you can understand the latin root from a word like ambulate or return.
A working knowledge of the languages is a much larger project. I’m moderately good at figuring out medical terms, but that doesn’t mean I can do more than guessing at translations of text.
The actual medical knowledge is still requires but if you know the roots of things you can learn a great deal. The medical knowledge will give you meaning these can be quickly researched. In this day and time the ability to know a great deal of something requires only simple searches. I make a list of things to search all the time regular reading a research is Aristotelian.
Could you unpack that last sentence? I can’t make sense of it. Aristotelian?
My procedure for coming up with search terms is to vaguely imagine a boring piece of writing about the subject I’m interested in, and then look for the least common words from it. If that doesn’t work, then loosely mull for words inspired by the results that came up in the unsatisfactory searches.
Aristotelian = of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that regular reading, research, and expansion of the mind on various subjects was necessary to a good life. He wrote a great deal about the good life. I suggest adding that to your reading list.
I just take a subject say, “Scoliosis” and just put that into google and see what comes up. I start with the most popular sites and then look to more personal accounts once I know what is or is not scientific about it. For example, I am working on a novel right now and I needed to know how people performed check fraud. So I put that into google and started to read and eventually found a book by a detective about different cases he had solved. That helped me create a scenario that was very good and real life for the book. If you so choose you can do that regularly on a variety of subjects to learn more about something. The luxury about having a background in classical languages is that you can decode language and derive some meaning from it. Research is about layering. You start at the surface and then go deeper, then deeper and then deeper still. Think about the hierarchy of media:
Social Media (instant)
Newspapers (or daily up to the minute news)
Magazines (or media taking 4-5 days to create)
Content aggregators/Monthly Publications
Books
So for example researching check fraud I might see:
Tweets/posts about it
A newspaper article about a check fraud ring
A Magazine piece about its prevalence in America
A group of these items over a period of time between one month and one year
A book about check fraud rings by an expert
How far you go in the hierarchy depends on how much you want to know or where that information might be located. Also, for more effective searches in the future you may wish to use full sentences (Google is getting good at that) or also learning Boolean search terms.
KnaveOfAllTrades’s idea of learning demographic & economic (GDP and its component parts) statistics of various places has occurred to me as a candidate for a useful Anki deck, so I second that.
Knowing some mathematical constants to a few significant figures can be useful. Memorizing √10 = 3.16 lets you interpret midpoints between ticks on a logarithmic scale, and √2 & √3 are the lengths of diagonals of unit squares & cubes. And knowing all three roots makes it easier to guesstimate square roots in general, using the √(ab) = (√a)(√b) result for non-negative a & b. Likewise for e.g. exp(2), exp(3), ln 2 & ln 3. The 68-95-99.7 rule should go on the list as well.
A few months ago I started using the Ultimate Geography Anki deck after performing quite abysmally on some silly geography quiz that was doing the rounds on Facebook. I now know where all the damn countries are, like an informed citizen of the world. This has proven itself very useful in a variety of ways, not least of which is in reading other material with a geographical backdrop. For example, the chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel on Africa is much more readable if you know where all the African countries are in relation to one another.
(In the process of doing this, coupled with an international event in Sweden, I’ve learned that the Scandinavian education systems are much, much better than that of the UK at teaching children about the rest of the world)
The geography deck was particularly easy to slip into because it developed an area I already (weakly) knew about. I’m looking for some new Anki content of a similar nature: a cross-domain-application body of knowledge I probably sort-of know a little bit already, that I can comprehensively improve upon.
Suggestions and anecdotes of similar experiences welcome.
Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.
Rundown of positive and negative results:
In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it’s the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with you, but I learned to love it.
I suspect that learning the dates of monarchs and Prime Ministers (e.g. of England/UK) would have a similar benefit in contextualising and de-intimidating historical facts, but I never finished those decks and haven’t touched them in a while, so never reached the critical mass of knowledge that allowed me to have a good handle on periods of British history. I found it pretty difficult to (for example) keep track of six different Georges and map each to dates, so slow progress put me off. Let me know if you’re interested and want to set up a pact, e.g. ‘We’ll both do at least ten cards from each deck a day and report back to the other regularly’ or something. In fact that offer probably stands for any readers.
I installed some decks for learning definitions in areas of math that I didn’t know, but found memorising decontextualised definitions hard enough that I wasn’t motivated to do it, given everything else I was doing and Anki-ing at the time. I still think repeat exposure to definitions might be a useful developmental strategy for math that nobody seems to be using deliberately and systematically, but I’m not sure Anki is a right way to do it. Or if it is, that shooting so far ahead of my current knowledge was the best way to do it. Similarly a LaTeX deck I got having pretty much never used LaTeX and not practising it while learning the deck.
Canadian provinces/territories I have not yet found useful beyond feeling good for ticking off learning the deck, which was enough for me since I did them in a session or two.
Languages Spoken in Each Country of the World (I was trying to do not just country-->languages but country-->languages with proportions of population speaking the languages) was so difficult and unrewarding in the short term that I lost motivation extremely quickly (this was months ago). The mental association between ‘Berber’ and ‘North Africa’ has come up a surprising number of times, though. Most recently yesterday night.
Periodic table (symbol<--->name, name<-->number) took lots of time and hasn’t been very useful for me personally (I pretty much just learned it in preparation for a quiz). Learning just which elements are in which groups/sections of the Periodic table might be more useful and a lot quicker (since by far the main difficulty was name<--->number).
I am relatively often wanting for demographic and economic data, e.g. population of countries, population of major world cities, population of UK places, GDP’s. Ideally I’d not just do this for major places since I want to get a good intuitive sense of these figures for very large or major places on down to tiny places.
Similarly if one has a hobby horse it could be useful. Examples off the top of my head (not necessarily my hobby horse): Memorising the results from the LessWrong surveys. Memorising the results from the PhilPapers survey. Memorising data about resource costs of meat production vs. other food production. Memorising failed AGI timeline predictions. Etc.
I found starting to learn Booker Prize winners on Memrise has let me have a few ‘Ah, I recognise that name and literature seems less opaque to me, yay!’ moments, but there’s probably higher-priority decks for you to learn unless that’s more your area.
What about learning a sense of scale, for both time and space?
planets and stars
replies to most common comments to the previous video
sub-atomic to hypothetical multi-universes—uses pictures and numbers, no zooming. I hadn’t realized how much overlap there is in size between the larger moons and smaller planets, and (in spite of having seen many pictures) hadn’t registered that nebulas are much bigger than stars.
I’m going to post this before I spend a while noodling around science videos, but it might also be good to work on time scales and getting oriented among geological and historical time periods, including what things were happening at the same time in different parts of the world.
I’m an 4th year economics undergrad preparing start applying to PhD programs, and while I’ve never formally attempted to memorize GDPs, I’ve found that having a rough idea of where a county’s per capita GDP is to be very useful in understanding world news and events (for example, I’ve noticed that around the $8,00-12,000 per year range seems to be the point where the median household gets an internet connection). If you do attempt to go the memorization route, be sure to use PPP-adjusted figures, as non-adjusted numbers will tend to systematically under estimate incomes in developing countries.
I did British monarchs last year while on a history kick, (which I’m still on). Pro-tip: watch films, television shows and plays featuring said monarchs, as they include salient contemporary historical events. For example, Nigel Hawthorne was the mad George. Hugh Laurie was his son, the Prince Regent, a contemporary of the Duke of Wellington (Stephen Fry), which places him temporally alongside the Napoleonic wars. Colin Firth was Queen Elizableth II’s stuttering dad in The King’s Speech. His brother was Mike from Neighbours (or the bad guy from Iron Man 3 if you’re under 30) and their dad was Dumbledore.
(It turns out that royal history has plenty of independently interesting features, because it contains a lot of murders and wars and speculation about parentage. Contemporary introductions to historiography emphasise the movement away from history as the deeds of powerful men exercising their will through war and conquest, but the kings and wars are a lot more memorable and easier to place in time than the ephemeral stuff like trade routes and adoption of crops.)
Great effort. If may suggest a topic without providing a deck, I’d say learn about the vocabulary of personal finance. Or more generally, learn the vocabulary of stuff relevant to most lifes from time to time, like medicine, law and, well, finance. This helps to search for the correct things when needed and helps communicating with the relevant professionals.
Attempting to learn medicine vocabulary without understanding the underlying knowledge base is quite hard. Taking a readymade deck of corresponding vocabulary usually leads to attempting to learn something without understanding. That leads to forgotten cards and is ineffective.
Since I don’t have the books around me, I’ll have to write from memory without specific source. It might have been Decisive but I’m not sure.
In the book the authors described the problem of physicians leading patient’s questions like with the complaint “my stomach hurts” they ask “does it hurt here?” pointing to where they feel the pain should be located. The patient, intimidated by the professional in front of them, affirms the question without supplying the information that it also hurts elsewhere. This is not yet a problem of vocabulary, but nonetheless important to keep in mind. The more interesting example was of an old man that described his problem as “feeling dizzy”, so physicians tried to treat him for the syndromes that typically occur at higher ages. After some time a physician actually asked him “when do you feel dizzy?”, receiving the answer “I feel dizzy all the time, when I get up, when I stand in the kitchen, when I read my newspaper.” Turns out what this patient described as “being dizzy” was more something along the lines of “feeling confused” and was a symptom of a as-of-yet undiagnosed depression over his late wife’s passing.
The whole episode could have been avoided if the patient knew how to correctly describe his issue—and if the pphysicians were more conscientious in diagnosing a specific issue.
Learning that there a qualia of “being dizzy” and a qualia of “feeling confused” and learning being able to distinguish those two qualia’s isn’t easy, if you don’t have those qualia in the first place.
Words are cheap once you have the qualia.
Most people have fairly little awareness of what goes on inside their own body. Furthermore these days most doctors also lack the ability to perceive that information kinesthetically but focus on various tests and verbal feedback.
Practically it’s also important to think about what information a doctor actually needs. That means who have to know what’s normal and how you deviate from that.
How about starting with the Greek and Latin roots for medical terms?
Why not then just get a working knowledge of those languages? I had classical education and so I took latin and greek. I also speak some german as well as a working and halting conversational knowledge of french. When you have that you can understand the latin root from a word like ambulate or return.
A working knowledge of the languages is a much larger project. I’m moderately good at figuring out medical terms, but that doesn’t mean I can do more than guessing at translations of text.
The actual medical knowledge is still requires but if you know the roots of things you can learn a great deal. The medical knowledge will give you meaning these can be quickly researched. In this day and time the ability to know a great deal of something requires only simple searches. I make a list of things to search all the time regular reading a research is Aristotelian.
Could you unpack that last sentence? I can’t make sense of it. Aristotelian?
My procedure for coming up with search terms is to vaguely imagine a boring piece of writing about the subject I’m interested in, and then look for the least common words from it. If that doesn’t work, then loosely mull for words inspired by the results that came up in the unsatisfactory searches.
Aristotelian = of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that regular reading, research, and expansion of the mind on various subjects was necessary to a good life. He wrote a great deal about the good life. I suggest adding that to your reading list.
I just take a subject say, “Scoliosis” and just put that into google and see what comes up. I start with the most popular sites and then look to more personal accounts once I know what is or is not scientific about it. For example, I am working on a novel right now and I needed to know how people performed check fraud. So I put that into google and started to read and eventually found a book by a detective about different cases he had solved. That helped me create a scenario that was very good and real life for the book. If you so choose you can do that regularly on a variety of subjects to learn more about something. The luxury about having a background in classical languages is that you can decode language and derive some meaning from it. Research is about layering. You start at the surface and then go deeper, then deeper and then deeper still. Think about the hierarchy of media:
Social Media (instant) Newspapers (or daily up to the minute news) Magazines (or media taking 4-5 days to create) Content aggregators/Monthly Publications Books
So for example researching check fraud I might see:
Tweets/posts about it A newspaper article about a check fraud ring A Magazine piece about its prevalence in America A group of these items over a period of time between one month and one year A book about check fraud rings by an expert
How far you go in the hierarchy depends on how much you want to know or where that information might be located. Also, for more effective searches in the future you may wish to use full sentences (Google is getting good at that) or also learning Boolean search terms.
KnaveOfAllTrades’s idea of learning demographic & economic (GDP and its component parts) statistics of various places has occurred to me as a candidate for a useful Anki deck, so I second that.
Knowing some mathematical constants to a few significant figures can be useful. Memorizing √10 = 3.16 lets you interpret midpoints between ticks on a logarithmic scale, and √2 & √3 are the lengths of diagonals of unit squares & cubes. And knowing all three roots makes it easier to guesstimate square roots in general, using the √(ab) = (√a)(√b) result for non-negative a & b. Likewise for e.g. exp(2), exp(3), ln 2 & ln 3. The 68-95-99.7 rule should go on the list as well.