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.)
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.)