zerobits

A site about the most effective techniques to improve your memory, intelligence, and effectiveness. Built with a custom software stack, want to put more time into it soon.

Selection of posts:

· Adults learn faster than children: challenging a discouraging myth that children are suited for learning more than adults. (https://wetware.engineering/adult-learning)

· A new curriculum: The topics we fail to emphasize in school. Was on HN front page for a bit. (https://wetware.engineering/curriculum)

· Everyday memory palaces: How to increase your memory by orders of magnitude, and apply that in daily life (https://wetware.engineering/memory-palaces)

· How to draw a 4D hypercube: Wrap your mind around higher dimensions. (https://wetware.engineering/hypercube)

They give you so many hints, I don't think you can draw conclusions from this.

For example:

- In multiple videos an ape is eating, and another ape is trying to grab food out of their mouth. The options presented are like: "Give me that food" or "Move to a new position". Obviously the food is relevant.

- In multiple videos a larger ape presents its back to the other, while the smaller moves towards hopping on or grooming it. Clearly this is the "climb on my back" or "groom me" options.

In addition to providing a highlighted illustration, multiple choice, and slow-mo replays, it really just seems like this quiz was (intentional or not) designed to show an obvious positive result. Looking forward to better research on this.

This has gotta be one of the most important investments for humanity and our planet. Hard to fathom these timeline predictions in the same world where mRNA vaccines and various spacecraft have scaled in <1 year.

· Became dominant strain in South Africa in like a week (way faster than Delta). Must be either a superspreader event, much more transmissible, or much more evasive of antibodies.

· No real data on that cause, and no evidence for increased lethality. Will find out in next 1-2 weeks probably. Decent chance this becomes dominant worldwide and US soon, but not clear if that will be a problem or not.

· The one worrying data we know is the variant has a lot more mutations than other variants, which would make it likely to evade vaccine/antibody treatments – but not necessarily the other kinds of treatments.

· WHO not recommending countries to limit travel. Also problematic that vaccines aren't updating for new variants, and good chance FDA will be the bottleneck there.

I agree it would be challenging to have deep and useful markets, but perhaps there’s more innovation to be made there — and many of these high level markets that are top of public consciousness I’d expect to have plenty of liquidity.

They went into quite a bit of detail but can’t cover everything. Most of the examples were quite top of funnel, fire the CEO markets, economic impacts of new laws being passed. I wouldn’t expect for major bills or companies there would be any shortage of liquidity there.

It’s typical of comments in any forum to mostly be critical, but what takes more guts and cleverness is to connect the dots to improve upon the idea. You seem to have a good mind so I’d encourage you to try applying it in that way.

We can definitely debate the methods.. but the findings from this growing body of evidence should probably be the ‘default’ stance, until we see more causal or controlled correlational evidence pointing the other way.

In fact, the study they cited which also showed an increase in stroke risk actually showed cannabis users exercised more.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?author=T+Parekh&au...

Is it not entirely possible a drug and method of consumption which stresses the cardiovascular system increases odds of an adverse cardiovascular event?

Rather than 10 library/book/etc. recommendations on every topic, I'd love just a few: "Best beginner book" .. "Best advanced book" and a few alternatives.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get very different results or value from just Googling the same topics.

The virus wants to maximize transmissibility, and that might require trading off further against the host's health and increasing its death rate.

An example is Myxoma virus. It was intentionally introduced to pest Australian rabbit populations (to cull them) and studied.

After ~30 years of evolution, they found the dominant strain had a 70-95% death rate and left long-lasting lesions. Other strains with higher (~99%) and lower (~50%) death rates weren't as stable & prevalent.

Once a virus is transmitted (enough), what happens to the health of its host is irrelevant.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbio...

I have no idea how this compares to other vaccines, and you can pessimistically extrapolate a bit from this tiny, healthy sample from the high dose (n=15 in middle dose group).

I'd imagine some % of people when this scales to millions will have a bad response, and the high dose group might provide some model of the worst cases.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2022483

103F+ fevers are relatively rare from typical vaccines, and from my understanding a lot of the damage from COVID is immune response related.

mRNA vaccines and our immune responses to these are uncharted territory, so I’m not sure how much we can reason by analogy from other vaccines vs. first principles.

I didn’t mean to be disingenuous. I forgot they rejected that dosage.

Overall, the picture does look potentially concerning for the side effects of that vaccine and efficacy is still unclear.

If that's the reaction in small sample with a healthy 29 year old (most volunteers had high fevers), I can't imagine old or unhealthy people will be unharmed. I was more concerned about the mRNA vaccines being at risk initially.

Things aren't looking great...

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/26/moderna-vaccine-candidat...

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...

Coincidental timing of publication - one day after John Conway's passing. We may be in a n-dimensional Game of Life after all.

there are 100s of great resources (Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, GitHub, Wiktionary, to name a few) and techniques (Google search tricks like using quotes, site: tag, etc., good habits like avoiding distractions) to augment Internet learning

you could evenly weight this area like any other class, and expect to spend many hours on it.

My point isn't about crossing these items off a checklist, but re-balancing the effort we put towards these core skills, instead of memorizing arcane trivia about U.S. history, literary figures, and some impractical Math/English skills that seem to be more of the focus.

I went to a "good" school, whatever that means, but I've found myself and many of my peers lacked many of the skills and deeper understanding of these topics even during/after university.

I still meet many people who don't quite understand what a stock is, and most people seem surprised to hear Wi-Fi is a type of invisible light. Many people seem to be pretty bad at communication. About 1/3 of the US seems to not be convinced we are actually apes.

at a minimum, it would've been nice to spend less time on brain-numbing repetitive tasks and test preparation.

there is value in memorization as a precursor to true understanding, you can't have understanding without association

examples:

- math: memorization of single digit addition/multiplication makes higher digit arithmetic easier, and comes in handy in higher-level math

- music: memorization of scales unlocks better ability to play & improvise songs (before deeper knowledge of how it relates to other notes/scales/modes, how this connects to dividing the frequencies of air waves, etc.)