You do less than you could, and know more than you need. What happens to those who exercise and eat well? They become fit. Are you fit? If you’re unfit, is it due to a lack of knowledge? Any exercise works, any diet works. Eat less, move more. It’s certainly not the knowledge that is the problem. Millions of people choose to learn instead of do, and they die quite unaccomplished and smart. This is the quiet desperation of the intelligent. Be smart, even wise; but only as a means, not an end. Knowing isn’t doing and knowledge isn’t action. What you need isn’t more know-how, but more desire. If the world were to transform to one where everyone did what they thought they should, then it’d need more know-how. While you live in a world where almost no one does all the things they think they should, you have more a discipline problem than a knowledge problem. Would you rather have your cake, or eat it? There’s a similar challenge choosing between knowing how to do something, and actually doing it. They’re related, but quite different in practice. That’s why great sports players learn from coaches that can’t play better than the players. Knowing and doing are different, yet related. Grow your mind with action as a guide. Adding to the list of things you know you should do, but do not, is pain. The value of knowledge comes only from application.

What languages you should speak

Speak a single language

If it’s better to say new better things in a single language, then the same limited things in several language.

Learn these language

Learn the language you need.

Learn the language of business (Warren Buffet’s advice) (accounting).

Learn the language of scalability (programming).

Learn the language of entrepreneurship (influence).

Stop breaking all the words! Do not call everything rape and everything racism, and destroy the usefulness and uniqueness and power of those words! Perception, attention, lens, focus, and paradigm are all words that should be used properly.

Perception, attention, lenses, focus, paradigm

Focus control and attention economy; have high standards for what you pay attention to!

Back in the old days, it was very hard to find information. Now it’s too easy to find information. We went from having to meet with people physically, to being able to speak to them over a distance on the phone, to email, to texting, and now you rarely need to speak to the person to ask them a question because we have Wikipedia, YouTube videos, blogs, and Twitter. We are drowning in content. There is lots more signal to be had, and there’s lots more noise, too. Since the signal is always lower in quantity than the noise, if you have good standards for what you should be paying attention to, it’s not distraction, clickbait, and social proof.

Every day that passes the amount of bad content and wrong ideas is created more and faster and more convincingly than good content and right ideas. Since they put less time into building good ideas, they have extra time to figure out how to sell the bad ideas better. Now that’s a tragedy. Those with the best ideas are too busy building them to market them. Marketing of ideas and building of ideas are wildly different, except in one area, the building of marketing / communication / influence ideas. It’s self-referential and amplifying. All the other ideas aren’t.

Don’t focus on the negativity; what you look at affects how you feel. If you grew up around people that are negative and what you learn is negative behaviors, then you end up being negative yourself with a higher likelihood. If you focus only on the negative aspects of the world, that will rub off on you to some degree and you will feel it constantly and disperse it further. At any given moment there’s an infinite amount of good and bad things going on, and the feelings that you will feel and your perception of the world will be what you focus on.

A good shortcut for understanding that by imagining yourself as a crystal, either a cool-looking shard of crystal or crystal figurine that your eyes would accept the light of what you looked at. If you tuned into and looked at a pretty light that was beautiful, say a white light or a blue light, that’s what you would radiate, that’s what you would feel when other people look at you. They would see the light that you are focusing on. If there was some other negative thing going on in the world and that is what you focused on, then that is what you would feel and you wouldn’t just feel it, you would also re-transmit it, radiate it and become that color. Therefore, you become what you focus on and you become good at what you do. You appear to others to be what it is that you focus on and what it is that you do.

Thus, that analogy of the energy of what you look at changing your body, is really well transmitted by the light and crystal analogy. Additionally, when you think about the way that a prism divides a white light into its separate colors and wavelengths, and that if you were to re-combine those colors and wavelengths once again, you would get white light on the other side. That’s balanced. As soon as you remove one of those wavelengths, you no longer are able to recreate white light again, because you’re missing one of the components you need.

The lesson here could be, don’t focus on problems, instead rephrase in a positive light. If you focus on problems, you only get more problems.

Positive Rephrasing is important: Focus on what you don’t want only for a short time. Which do you think is a shorter path to fitness, understanding losing, or understanding winning? Positive phrasing is super important. If you want to be fit, focus on fitness. You’re going to hear this theme a lot. Focus on what you don’t want literally only as long as it takes to invert it, and create the positive understanding and language of what you DO want. Maybe someone tells you to not imagine a giant neon pink elephant right now, drinking some chocolate milk. Did you not imagine it? If you think about not being fat, you’ll actually think about being fat and eating fattening foods. If you take the time to invert it, and you think about being fit, you’ve made your life so very, very much easier, simply by changing the suggestive posturing of the thought. This new stance will affect your decision making process subconsciously, and a percentage of the work (needed to become fit) has already been done for you.

Understanding your perception through senses in important. Not only are you different from how you used to be, your vision changes, your taste changes, but you will become different from how you currently are, too. To explain, for instance, music; there’s something called the Fletcher-Munson curves, which means that your hearing changes entirely based on how loud or not loud a sound is. For instance, it is widely accepted that you should master music with a reference volume of 75 to 85 dB SPL because that’s where hearing is most linear.

Thus, unless you have a calibrated decibel meter with you, it’s very hard to tell just by listening how loud a sound actually is. This means that without you realizing, your hearing itself changes its perception based on how loud or soft a sound is. It wouldn’t be surprising if similar kinds of changes based on brightness existed for your visual perception as well.

As far as knowing what the real world looks like, we’re stuck in a pretty funny spot - we not only have all these glossy perceptions, but our brains also are susceptible to shortcuts that make us more effective some of the time, of being less effective other times. For instance, you always see your nose, it’s always there, but you just never notice it, and the same thing goes for blinking. You never really notice your eyes blinking, even though it’s literally making you blind in both eyes for a brief moment.

Then there are things like infrared, which we can’t see, but machines and animals can. This means that they can actually see temperature. There are even animals that can see polarized light, which helps them hunt, and although undetectable to human eyes without the aid of some device, it helps us recover erased and hidden writing in ancient documents or evidence in crime scenes. Point being, if current you is so different from past you, and current you will hear the different sounds in the same song differently based on whether it’s a little louder or a little less loud, then how the hell could one expect another human being, in their past or present, to detect the real world similarly to how you view it?

You can avoid lots of arguments by just understanding that when you see dark blue and someone else sees purple, it might be they chose to deploy the words differently, or it could be that they really do see the color differently, and are judging it the same, but off a different input value to their brain.

Some individuals know that one of their eyes sees sharper than the others, and know that they each see color slightly differently, perhaps in that one is a more red tint and one is a more blue tint, or as they’d say in the color correcting business, one is warmer and one is cooler. (Right now you are closing each eye and looking at different colors around the room, aren’t you?)

This also applies to people that color calibrate photos, monitors, display devices, movies and films. They adjust their brightness to a reference level, usually 120 cd/m, but as you learned earlier, it’s very hard to know what that light level actually equals to in others’ brains. Some standard, however, is better than no standard. Standards are the language that the world speaks in, that makes interoperability and communication possible. You could say standards are the cooperative language of non-humans.

Thus, know that your perception of the world is probably very different than everyone else’s, sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes for not so good reasons. Therefore, you shouldn’t waste too much time arguing over perception if you can avoid it. You can use some tricks to figure out how a person’s perception actually works, for them. That’s how we build vision correcting lenses for contacts and Seeing Eye glasses. We can look at their eye and make a pretty good guess based on the shape to measure what kind of lens they will need to make their vision better. It’s not always perfect though, so what many people end up doing for better results is testing a whole bunch of different lenses and answering the question, “which is better, this, or this?”

Now even that is a funny experience as well, because once again, people don’t understand the decisions that are being made. Based on how you change the red and green color questions, you will affect your color perception. Because if you’re correcting for astigmatism, you have to choose a middle ground of correction, you can’t perfectly correct both the wavelengths with the same glass. You affect how you see vertical and horizontal lines differently, then on top of all of that, the lens works better when it’s smaller, closer to the eye, and made of a glass that has a higher abbe value. How many people know that their vision correcting glasses made all these tradeoffs, and that they can have better and worse color and contrast perception based on the material and coatings that their lenses have? What a complex world we have created, in attempt to equalize perception as best we can amongst different people. What we think we perceive is so very often not what we actually perceive. It is hard to make good decisions when you have bad data.

If you have your brain set for well-roundedness and you’re able to execute pretty awesomely in all areas, it’s also very likely that you’re not going to be an idiot savant. It’s very likely that it’s going to be harder for you to produce levels of excellence intellectually in a very advanced intellectual field in regards to those people that don’t have the overhead of an honest and good life and a brain that works well socially. Social understanding and social excellence is actually quite advanced.

You can make people think your website is loading faster than it really is by changing its color:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30162328?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Our eyes evolved to sense the natural environment that’s most useful to us, what’s trying to eat us, and what we are trying to eat. This is why we see greens better than blues, and why much of our visual attention is based on movement. Much more of the land we live on and eat from is green. As a matter of fact, we see blue so poorly, they often encode less of it in our videos, and display it using less pixels, because we see it with such lower resolution. Of our 6 to 7 million cones, we’ve got 64% “red” cones, 32% “green” and , only 2% “blue.”

From <http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html>

Different vantage points can give you an edge. Birds move their heads around, to see more of the world, like a sampling rate, and so we have emotions which cause us to move our heads around as well, like blurriness causes us to squint.

(this is spirtual understanding regarding emotional programming, and how you can better influence others.) Why are some color combinations pretty?

We didn’t just evolve physically to see different colors better than others, we also evolved to prefer certain colors in combination with other colors. Some colors look great together, and some look very bad together.

[GRAPHICS OF COLORS]

Vs

If a color combination is only activating one of our three cones, it would make sense for us to respond emotionally and try and change our vantage point to see if we could get more light, or a better perspective on what we were looking at to engage the other cones. In some cases, poisonous creatures have also chosen red and yellow to signify that they are poisonous, and are capable enough to harm or kill you.

There’s a fancy name for colorful warnings in animals:

Aposematism

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism>

Mutants exist!

Interestingly, a very small group of people have 4! (See tetrachromacy)

If you take a look at the color wheel, many of the prettiest combinations are at opposite sides of the color wheel. That’s because they engage more of the eye. We prefer color combinations that are on opposites of each other on the color wheel because they provide maximum contrast, and engage the most color sensing cones in our eyes. The reason our brains naturally care about colors that are on opposite ends of the color spectrum, is because we know that we have the best idea of seeing what’s there because there’s no other contrast that can show an edge because the edges are already shown by the maximum contrast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism

We need more whys. Because if you don’t have a good “why,” you shouldn’t be teaching that shit. If you can’t teach a kid why something is important, it’s actually not important. You should stop teaching it. It’s amazing how little we know, like what’s on the other side of the wall from where you are right now? Does it even matter? How important would it be to acquire that extra bit of knowledge? Well, it depends on your task. Are you tearing down the wall or making a penetration for a wire? Your task at hand is what determines the “Why.”

Smart pays better

http://www.samuelwbennett.com/college-academic-performance-and-future-earnings/

Education

We don’t need smarter losers; we need stupider ass-kickers. We need to trade education for motivation. If it’s true that the world doesn’t have a knowledge problem, it has a doing shit problem, then isn’t it funny that what everyone values is a college education which only makes you smarter, not more effective, not more productive, not hungrier, not with higher standards, just smarter. We don’t need smarter people; we need people that use more of what they already know.

There is an economy of learning, in that you should only learn the minimum you need to learn to get the job done. The things you need to know to get a good thing done is going to be a very small set of all the things you could possibly know. That means that you’re almost always better of restricting what you learn to what you actually need to know for something you’re doing, than you are trying to overlearn and hope that there’s a good collision between what you learned, and what you actually needed to learn. If you knew how many doctors used Google to search for your symptoms, you’d understand that even overtraining doesn’t keep you from still having to learn specifically about the problem currently at hand. Overtraining is the enemy in a fast moving world. You will usually learn much more from applying what you’ve learned in the real world than just reading about it anyway .

Knowing facts doesn’t mean you’re intelligent

Knowing facts doesn’t mean you’re intelligent. What you know, and your ability to use what you know are only loosely related. This means you could learn lots of facts and have no idea what to do with them, or you could be super intelligent, but not know enough about the real world to find any good method to apply that power.

Knowing this is the fuel for your engine. Intelligence is your engine. Just as a real engine compresses and ignites fuel to create motion, heat, and power, so too does your mind smash together ideas to create new and better ideas and actions. Knowledge is what you know. Intelligence is how well you can understand and manipulate what know. You can increase either of them; however, you’ll find that knowledge is greatly easier to increase than intelligence. It’s easier to walk for longer than it is to run faster. You can always walk twice as long, at some point you can’t run twice as fast.

Know thyself. Are you the light or the dark?

Know thyself. Are you the light or the dark? If you can’t get better answers to hard questions than others, then you probably shouldn’t be influencing others. You’re not the light shining in the dark; you’re just more of the dark. If you want to get things right where everyone else gets them wrong, then it’s really handy to know what common things most people screw up so you can avoid those traps yourself. Understanding what you know, and what you do not know, is just as important of knowing anything in the first place.

Knowing what you know

Just smart enough to be dangerous

When you don’t know how complicated the world is, and you present simple solutions for complex problems, you get to discover, the hard way, why those solutions were bad ideas. If you think the world is a simple place, and you understand that simplicity, then you have the contentment that can come with ignorance.

The uncanny valley of true knowledge - If you realize the world is a complicated place, you can become fearful and worried that you don’t understand it well enough, even though you’re better equipped to perform in it than the content and ignorant man. That is the uncanny valley of understanding the world.

Simpler ideas are often more useful – It seems like the smartest people feel obligated to read things that they feel are at the edge of their understanding, so they can feel like they’re growing. The problem is that if you’re one of the smartest people, that shit at the edge of your understanding isn’t really useful to most other people. It’s quite often that people stupider than the smartest are much more useful to the general public, because the shit that they study is within the realm of understanding of the common folk.

Knowledge asymmetry example

At night the person on the dark side of the window can see the other side fine. The person on the brighter side, however, can’t see through. When you’re dealing with noise, the person closer to the loud side can’t hear anything, but the person on the quiet inside can hear just fine. That’s why if you’re in the attic working, no one can hear you, but you can hear everybody. When you’re in the shower, you can’t hear anything but everyone can hear you.

Isn’t it cool that there’s a strong and weak position for light, sound, and actual knowledge? It would be great to always know whether you were on the weak or strong side, before you started making decisions, for instance trading a market, or negotiating sales and purchases, or writing contracts.

Learning tricks

Peak state and staying engaged while learning

Motion is emotion

One of the best events or seminars that you can attend in the world is Anthony Robbins’ “Date with Destiny”. It’s expensive, about five thousand dollars, it happens over approx. five days, and they don’t tell you this when you sign up, but those five days are going to be 16 hour days. Now, you may ask yourself, how on earth do you keep a bunch of rather old, rather plump executives and other types, that have five grand to blow on a seminar a couple times a year, and very specific places that you have to travel to and pay for your accommodation, how do you get those people to stay engaged and learning and happy about the experience for 16 hours? The solution is, depending on how you want to frame it, really, really awesome and amazing, because it works, or rather disappointing, because it’s so goddamn simple that you would think that it shouldn’t work. Basically, the magic is, you stand up, you jump up and down for joy, and are genuinely happy and dance to fancy music and massage the people around you, and do shit that seems totally alien in the muted, static, non-moving world that we’re used to these days.

If you were to look back into when you were younger, when you were a kid, or, if you see kids in the mall; you were running, kids now are running. One is not sure at what age the running stops, but the kids love to run, and climb, and jump, and search, and then sometime between then and when you’re older, that shit dies and we get scared, and we’re like “No, I don’t want to act any different, people might notice me.”

So, does it work? It does, one hundred percent. Do you want to actually do it to demonstrate it? No, because you are not used to doing it, but you’re going to, because in this life you only get the results of that what you will actually do, knowing about things doesn’t matter so much, doing the shit matters much more unless you’re so very lucky to be a coach or someone that can influence the world through mass media. If it’s anything that you or the people that you interact with is actually going to benefit from, it is very, very, very likely that it is something that you’re actually going to need to do, rather than know about.

Chess

Being good at chess has very little value outside of chess. Knowing to cut off escapes before you move in for the kill, leave options open with forks, value tempo and position, know that some things can be sacrificed for position or speed, and realizing that different tools excel at different things. That’s about it, and that is being generous. Those lessons aren’t even obvious, and you might never learn them without just being straight up told them. Learning logic is much, much better than learning chess.

From <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dItUGF8GdTw>

Be careful who you take advice from

It’s funny, if you ever learned neuro-linguistic programming, NLP, one of the cofounders of the system is Richard Bandler, and Richard Bandler has been fat for as long as that system has existed. Richard has been known to be a smoker, and is a bit overweight. Maybe he kicked the smoking, but he has spent a lifetime fat though. To the intelligent person, you have to be careful to take investment advice and life advice from homeless people, and you have to be careful in taking personal development advice from people who are fat and smoke, and have done so for a very long time, yet advertise they have the cures to these very things, and that the cures are fast, painless and take nearly no effort on your part to execute. If that was the case, then why wouldn’t the person or a partner have accidentally cured them of that obviously stupid shit by now?

Every time you see two people disagreeing on TV, if you wait a few years, and revisit the footage, you can probably tell which one of them was a dumb ass and wrong. It would be fun if similar to a justice porn channel, there was a “look how wrong this dumb ass was” channel..

Commencement speeches and final speeches

Commencement speeches are both time-limited and optimized to benefit the listener with actionable useful advice. Final speeches are time-limited and are optimized for speaking about a thing so important it’s the last thing people want.

Votes and picks don’t count, unless they come at a cost

Horse pickers

Pick horses at random, send lots of the predictions, watch when the guy that randomly got 4 picks right in a row sent to him thinks you’re awesome. Otherwise people can vote on all possibilities and look right all the time.

Speed up videos and audio

Try watching videos and audio at 1.5x speed if you can understand that fast. Understanding is all that matters. If you need more time, slow it down.

Learning through history

Liberal arts

Trivium

Grammar Logic rhetoric

Quadrivium

 arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy

Terribly drawn graphs

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/4xq89g/my_local_news_channel_doesnt_know_how_bar_graphs/

http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/

What is knowledge? Know the right things

The usefulness of knowing the difference between intelligence and knowledge is mostly to get you to stop wasting your time and focus on things that matter instead of sitting out thinking you’re smart, while you’re beating your peers at all the wrong things. You know sports better than your friend? You have failed. Are you better at last year’s video game that no one plays anymore? You have failed. You have put thousands of hours into Donkey Kong to be the king of Kong? Congratulations, you’re are the biggest fish in the smallest toilet bowl.

When looking at the mind, one way to understand the difference between Intelligence and knowledge is the way a computer does. You have a CPU that does all the processing, that’s why it’s called the central processing unit. It’s only as useful as your ability to feed it work to process. Knowledge is your memory, your gained wisdom, and much like your computer has long-term and short-term memory (hard drives are long-term and ram is short-term.) A computer with no memory is pretty useless. A very intelligent person deprived of things to learn is equally tragic.

[BLOOM’S REVISED TAXONOMY GRAPHIC]

Mental tactics, don’t waste your consciousness on probability

Modern discoveries are often named after those who popularized an idea. Back when our understanding of the world was much less accurate, some individuals made such great contributions of so many ideas that have never been seen, that you couldn’t name any one thing they came up with as “their name’s law”, because they had a bunch of other great discoveries as well. These days, it is rather rare that more than a couple of laws are named after any given person. This is partly because it’s harder now than ever before to make tons of contributions, for the same reason it’s easier to make a single one, information sharing. Back then if you were working on a hard problem, you might very well be the only person on the planet doing so, for communication was slow and inefficient. Now the same communication that brings you great ideas to build on, is the same communication that creates a leveling effect against your ability to massively produce ideas in series without someone else “stealing your thunder” and making great progress on what you’ve made known.

This is better for the world in a lot of ways. First, we all build on the backs of giants, and so must we offer the improved ideas we build to those that come after us to stand on as well. It’s easier to remember these laws, because they all have unique names. How easy is it to remember the Streisand effect, when you know the story of her trying to remove pictures of her house from the Internet, which angered the Internet, and when the Internet is angry, spreading data is what it does best. Needless to say, what few people would ever care to know about became quite important, for only the fact she wanted it hidden. It’s insanely likely that the idea of drawing unwanted attention to a small thing by trying to hide it and getting caught was well known long before the Barbara Streisand incident, however, it was never so easy to remember previously..

That’s what’s great about a law. Ideas are only as useful to us as we remember that they even exist, and when they should be used. It’s even better if you know how to use them accurately. Knowing is half the battle, they say, and again, knowledge placed into action is considerably more important.

Some of these laws are really interesting. If you hope to add to the world’s understanding of complicated things, you too should hope to phrase an understanding so well, that it becomes a law named after you. This idea of naming things after inventors applies in more places than just ideas.

More at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_eponyms

If paying attention to what works in the world that we live in is an effective strategy for discovering what works, which is tautological, the important educational point there is that by seeing what works for other creatures and in nature, you can kind of extend that discovery into other areas. If you see in the animal kingdom that strength gets chosen a lot more often than weakness, it could be very likely that in your life, and in most other people’s lives, displaying strength pays off a lot better than displaying weakness. The point here is that by understanding some parts of life, no matter what they are, if you’re intelligent, you can usually learn something unexpected about other parts of life, because lots of things in life are related.

Acquisition: How, when, why, where

Mission should not be to get the best of logic

You see all these super smart super logical people that disagree about things. If they disagree about things, that means one of them is wrong, which means that one of those two super genius, super smart, super logical people is horribly wrong. In this case, the other one’s right, or, they’re both wrong. It is possible, though very unlikely, that they have misread the question and they’re both right. Your mission in life shouldn’t be to get the best of logic unless you want to add to the science or teach people logic. If you want to lead a good and wholesome life, you don’t actually need that much. The logic you need isn’t that complicated. It seems like if you go farther into that rabbit hole and farther into the complicating anything that you might learn, you won’t be able to benefit from, because you don’t have the horsepower and the time to properly apply it and know when to apply it.

If you spend all day building tools instead of using tools, you’re a good tool builder. It doesn’t mean that you’re good at using the tools.

Scivive doesn’t want you to believe that getting smarter is the best thing that you can do. You should not believe that understanding logic the best is the best thing you can do. This is evident when looking at the past of all the other human beings that have ever existed, those that you would be most likely to trade places with, if you could be convinced to do so, or those that you respect the most, are almost never the best at the thing that they did. They might be quite good, they might be top ten percent, top two percent, but they’re almost never the best, because to truly be the best at a thing, you’ve got to make a load of sacrifices in other places in your life and endure pain to overly push out in that one singular direction and singular focus.

You probably only see the upside and not all the sacrifice, pain, sleepless nights and lost friendships, because it’s not well marketed to you and no one is making any money selling you that idea.

Your perception of how fun, pleasurable and what you get out of other ways of living than the way that you currently have, is heavily weighted towards it being a lot better than it really is. No one finds profit in telling you the truth that everyone that has done a hard thing that other people have tried and failed. Knowing that being the smartest and the most logical is not your aim, it’s not your goal and that you’ll probably endure a lot of pain from not being well rounded. Both success and failure leave clues. If you attempt the same things that others have tried and failed, you’re also likely to fail. If you do things that winners do, you’re likely to win. Highest and best behavior is hard to measure because best is very subjective. What’s the best color for instance? Judging highest is much easier than judging best. When everyone learns the same shit, it becomes valueless.

We have an entire culture of people going massively in debt to waste their time learning things they can never use. Because the value of knowledge is indirectly proportional to its availability, and since everyone’s learning the same shit, it’s all infinitely valueless. It’s the same reason you can’t make money as a photographer because people do it for free. It’s hard to make money as a musician because people do it for free. If you want to make money in this world, you’ve got to do what other people don’t want to do and can’t do, so they’re willing to up the ante and pay you a little bit more to do it. Learning what everyone else does, thus by definition of value, the least scarce knowledge is therefore the least valuable.

Richard Feynman had a great talk on this in regards to a conversation that he had with his father. They were in the Boy Scouts and they would go off into the mountains and hike alone, and the other boys wanted to come along because his father was such a great person to talk to, learn from and be educated by. He was a well-rounded thinker, and he really valued his alone time with his son and wanted it to be more personal, more of a family thing. While the other kids would go out to the woods and learn what all the birds were called, Richard Feynman’s father said that what that bird is called is the least important thing about the bird. Let’s learn everything else other than what the bird is called, because we could learn what that bird is called in ten or fifteen different languages. After you know the fifteen different names for the bird, you now know nothing about the bird. What does it eat? Why does it make the sounds that it makes? Where does it travel? Is there an altitude that it likes? How long does it live? How educated is it? Can you make it smarter? Everything that is useful to know about the bird is basically outside the set of names that it’s called.

Do what Google can’t. Things you know that you aren’t using, replace with synthesis and higher level understanding. If you want to be a crazy Google, please instead learn to do what Google cannot. Being good at Google is better than memory. Memory tricks are the easiest to teach and learn, unfortunately having a great memory is pretty useless these days. Being good at googling is better than having a great memory. The crappiest pencil is better than the best memory.

There should be a word for not learning about the difference between things and comparing the ratio of the range of variants and the quality that can be obtained if you have extra information, versus the range of time that you can spend learning about making that decision properly. If someone hasn’t invented that concept of that idea, one should. The decision is to whether you should continue to inquire information or not is the range of quality divided by the range of time that it would take to learn to get the quality.

Ultimate Knowledge of a thing sometimes defeats the purpose of the thing

In life, some things need to be kept secret to work. If you go to see a comedy show, they don’t tell you how they design the joke and how the joke has evolved over time, which versions of it didn’t work and which timings of delivery worked, what kind of response you are waiting for from the audience before you go to this thing. If they told you, any of that shit it wouldn’t be funny. Ultimate knowledge of a thing sometimes defeats the purpose of the thing. It’s like watching a film after you’ve studied filmmaking; you can never see films the same again because you are always looking to the motives and intentions of the director. The same is true for watching magicians, the moment you know the secret; you are no longer interested in the trick.

Having just enough knowledge to be dangerous - being a dilettante

Now, you can just use that knowledge to support whatever you were going to support anyway. You should get better sleep because of serotonin reuptake, or aliens, or vibrations, and crystals, and global feeling stuff. It’s literally appeal to ignorance. However, you don’t know you’re ignorant, which makes it a different thing. Knowing enough to be dangerous is how people get electrocuted replacing their blown fuses with aluminum bars, or destroying their computers with registry editor.  

The good news is that people misunderstand most things. How long does it take to brake when you’re going extremely fast on the highway? Or how hard it is to turn a motorcycle when you’re going extremely fast and when you start braking? You can’t turn anymore because it brings the bike upright. You don’t realize those things until you’re already in danger. You don’t realize that you should not be messing around in your electrical panel until you’re already dying. It’s good that the rest of the world isn’t that way. Maybe you take too much Vitamin B, maybe you get a headache or something, but take aspirin. You are now dangerous to yourself if you don’t realize that taking too much aspirin literally kills you. You might be the kind of guy that thinks that there’s not a minimum effective dose, more is always better and doesn’t understand how medicine works or doesn’t understand how the human body works. As a result, now you’re in the hospital, fighting for your life because you had a really bad headache. You thought just a couple more Aspirin would finally kick in, finally cure it. Now you’re dying.

The likelihood that you will benefit from knowing a little bit about a thing and that ending up doing more harm than good is directly proportional to the complexity of the thing that you’re talking about. The more complex and hard to understand that thing is, the more likely you are to mess it up and get harm instead of benefit. Knowing enough to be dangerous really exists in the real world. You can know whether you’re getting more likely to get usefulness or more likely to get pain. Out of a layman’s understanding of a thing, based on the complexity of the thing, you should probably shut up about super complicated things of which you might have saw one episode on the Discovery Channel. This why we have all seen some task or action, quickly followed by the disclaiming warning, “Don’t try this at home, folks”.

Who becomes more fit? The man who fills his days reading books on weightlifting and diet, or the man who reads no such books, but never misses a morning round of pushups, pull-ups and squats? Learning about fitness is not fitness. Learning about dance is not dancing. Learning about success is not success. Unless you are a teacher or author, learning is only as useful as it turns into action.

Different tasks are better learned, or perfected, using different learning methods. One implication here is that there are things that you can learn from doing, (actually going through the motions over and over) and that’s totally useful, but there are some things that you can learn best only through teaching, or being taught.

Know the difference between the method and the reason

Is what you think you want what you really want, or should want? Could you want something better? Know the difference between a means and an end. Don’t confuse means for ends. Means is another word for method, or way. For instance, if you wanted to know what you should eat, most people would be far better off searching for healthy tasty food, instead of “Why am I fat?”

How to widen your understanding

There was a saying regarding your choices what you do with your career in life; it’s called the Helsinki bus station. The theory of the Helsinki bus station is that when you come into this world and learn how to speak and to do things, and specifically, or in this case, if you go to a college, or a high school, that puts you in the bus station. What you find is that all the buses hit all the stops leaving the city, and only after a couple stops have passed and you’re out of the city do you start to get differentiation, where you’re ending up at stops that all the other buses weren’t ending up at. That divergence, just like a tree, a tree has a trunk and then it has a crap load of branches. Those branches quite literally sprout out into space, three dimensionally. Why do they do that? The only reason that branches on a tree behave like this is because that’s where the light is. The light isn’t where you started, because there’s something else already there, absorbing the light, there’s a leaf in the way. Thus, you don’t get any light if you stay there.

The education system is the same way. Perhaps this tree idea is better; Scivive just invented it, right before your eyes.

The tree idea of valuing and staying on the bus long enough to get the hell out of the city so you can start to get variation and find your unique way to benefit this world. Maybe your way isn’t unique, but you punch so much harder that you do the same tasks way better than the other bus riders. Maybe you got off at one of those earlier stops, but you’re doing it better. If you want to actually have a wide and varied background, and a wide and varied understanding and ability to do things, the most poisonous thing you could do is go to the same restricted place, learn the same restricted things from the same restricted people, for the same restricted goals. How do you think that will work out? You’re maximizing your similarity to all those that came before you. How are you supposed to make an impact and a difference if you started the same place, and then made the same decisions? It’s a terrible way to start.

If you’re going to go that route, maybe you stay doing it long enough that you ride the same idea deep enough that you can actually start to make breakthroughs at the very end. Some things work like that, some things don’t. Some things, no one’s working on them. You could be that guy. Maybe synthetic biology’s your thing. Maybe you think bio hacking is your thing. When they were building Apple in a garage, they weren’t in college learning about how to build Apple. The coolest, most profitable things that have affected our lives, a lot of them were not designed at the end of a long bus ride. They were a short bus ride on a path that most people just didn’t take.

Knowledge is knowing what to do, a skill you don’t have to win arguments or teach people. If people aren’t going to act on the information anyway, who cares if they’re right or not? Right and wrong are only as useful as action.

GREAT ACTIONABLE TIPS FOR LEARNING

1) Acquire chunks of knowledge and apply them in different settings.

2) Take breaks to improve your memory and your ability to solve problems.

3) Structure your learning. Map out prerequisites, and start with concepts that you need 80% of the time. Prioritize knowledge that adds genuine, direct value.

4) Learn in differing environments, work with knowledge in differing ways and use multiple senses.

5) Read other’s learning journeys, have mentors, and gain feedback. Work on your ability to be vulnerable in order to do all of this effectively.

6) Leverage your emotions by making information and problems more engaging.

From <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075086> from https://medium.com/life-learning/how-to-acquire-knowledge-6b00bcdb6179#.lxytsdguh

Learning is the most affordable when you are young, and has the most value to multiply over time. It affects your trajectory the most, and your acceleration, and thus your end point is maximally influenced. What good would be learning your times tables on your last day alive?

Delete non-useful (history, astronomy). Insert useful (logic, ethics, mnemonics (not great but better than history)). If the world has changed over 100 years, but the learning about it hasn’t, you’re doing it wrong.

If you’re not rewinding the video, or rereading parts of a book, it’s very likely you’re letting the data and ideas pass right by you, and you’re going to not only miss out on it, but not even know where to find it again when you discover you missed it. Good luck figuring out the spots you zoned out on during an hour long video.

Learning about the real world, how the real world works and what is likely to happen in the real world by having a good ability to recognize patterns and extend them into the future. This is quite similar to knowing the past and learning from it, and thus being more accurate in your predictions. Even more advanced, understanding statistics and being able to come up with an estimate of how likely to be right your prediction is, and what your prediction really means (false positive paradox, Monty Hall problem, prosecutor’s fallacy, etc.). It lets you discover and use a way of thinking that is quite hard to arrive at by other teachings.

What some Scivivors have learned as a matter of discovery and usefulness is that you make much better decisions and are much more aware of what is actually likely to happen in the future when you just make a grid, and fill it on the top and side with all the possible things that could happen. It seems like great discoveries can be made when you skip your brains natural and useful estimations of what is probably going to happen in a situation, and actually manually chart out all the possible outcomes you can think of.

You could consider this the brute forcing of a solution to a problem. It’s funny, sometimes you’ll be tested on your ability to do some fancy math, and you can look at the problem intellectually, guess a number that might be close to a solution for it. Just try sticking in a few answers in that range and discover the solution faster by just trying some different answers that you think might work, than it is to try to purely mathematically systematically use the real algebra that would solve the problem.

This is similar to the statistics learnings in that, if you test positive for a thing, you don’t have any idea how much that means you actually have the thing unless you know two things. First, how good the test is, and here’s the magic. Second, how common is anyone to have what you’re testing for? Then you multiply them. Better test, more likely, more people have it, also more likely. Conversely the less common it is for people to actually have what you are testing for, and the less accurate your test, then the less and less likely you are to actually have what you’ve tested positive for. You must know both things, or you literally can’t know how confident you should be in your test result.

The time value of knowledge can be easy established by trailing indicators. If you know what the future is going to look like a minute before it happens, you can trade it and become nearly infinitely wealthy. If, however, your indication as to the state of world is delayed by a minute, then you’ll constantly lose every trade you make.

A trailing indicator is when you find correlation but you can’t make any money on it. Let’s say you got Google Search Volume, Bitcoin price and you’re using Google Search Volume for the term Bitcoin and tying it to the chart of Bitcoin’s price. You’ll find that when the searches for Bitcoin price go up, the Bitcoin price goes up and vice versa.

Here’s the problem, which one of them comes first? A trailing indicator is something that cannot predict the future, it’s just something that says, hey, the future already happened and therefore you don’t get to make any money on it. Looking at a chart of the taxonomy of ideas is a trailing indicator. It goes, I’m glad that we’ve got these new ideas that you’ve taught, put into and order and made excellent, and now we’re going to analyze those ideas using this framework that can just analyze what already exists between and cannot whatsoever be used to generate anything new.

Sometimes the organization of ideas into a chart will allow you to understand what already exists better, but will confuse you and make impossible the generation of any new thing.

There is a time value of knowledge and knowing when to learn a thing is critical. Some knowledge is optional in the current moment, not just because you don’t need to know it now, but because like options in the real world, you pay for them. If you buy an option and learn something you don’t need to know, you will have paid for that option. If you use the data, the option paid off. If you don’t use the data, you lost the time and effort of learning the depreciating in value knowledge, at the expense of other knowledge you might have been able to act on.

The fallacy that being good at chess makes you good at anything else https://medium.com/message/why-chess-will-destroy-your-mind-78ad1034521f

Learn what you need to know right before you’re going to do it. If you learn something long before you’re going to act on it, the landscape may have changed and you might have to relearn it all again, wasting your time. This is especially true for technical issues, for they are improved so rapidly.

Consensus on who the experts are, by other experts, especially across disciplines

If Tony Robbins and Tim Ferris, along with some other pretty respectable dudes both take time out of their well curated books to speak well of the same other expert, then it’s likely that expert is worth looking into.

The stickied threads in forums and discussion forums in general

The stickied posts in subreddits on right bar

Infographics

Wikis (can be dangerous if you browse too wide or deep, must maintain focus control and choose not to learn lots.)

FAQ’s (some are too bloated.)

RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual)

This is last, because the reason it’s the last bastion of intelligent discussion out there.

Decay of communities over time

Puns, quips, jokes, off-topic posts, trolling, all these things amplify when there’s an audience that rewards them. It’s self-referential, as you get the first troll, he will interact with new trolls, thus trolls beget trolls, and jokes beget jokes.

The places with the densest, most useful information mineable places available

Summaries of the classics, some of this stuff is good.

Summaries of good modern books, a couple good ideas per book at least

Memes: All successful memes have a reason they became successful, like the /pol one regarding “You’re much more likely to die of Y than X, so why are you upset I want you to increase your chances of dying from x?”

Eponymous laws: From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws>

Quotes and parables

Curious people get really smart. By definition, we must learn about the topic in question, and we care about it, so we’ll watch a 2-hour video about the boring topic to everyone else, because to use, we must to fulfill our curiosity. The upside is that you can go deeper than most people, and find happiness easier with this giant world of cool new things. The downside is you can get locked down random paths of depreciating knowledge, or trivia, at the cost of your productivity. There’s an art to knowing when to learn, what to learn, and when to attack.

People love to think that there’s value in things that they don’t understand, which is a useful disbelief, because it amplifies the desire to understand that which you don’t. Curiosity pays great dividends. When you see something, and you don’t understand it, you usually develop a desire to understand it. Not necessarily because you think that there’s great value in understanding it, it may be something stupid and trivial, but because you take pride in understanding things for the sake of understanding them, despite being a waste of time.

Being curious and learning about cool shit, recognizing new patterns and ways things are done, things that can exist and how they can exist in their forms amplifies the speed and quality in which you can generate new forms, styles, beliefs and strategies and recognize or create patterns that other people couldn’t, even if those actual individual things lacked quality. Curiosity is a much better way to waste time, and experimenting and tinkering is a much better way to waste time than say, mindless trance inducing techniques, which destroy consciousness. Or, you know, drugging yourself into a coma.

People sometimes fall afoul over over-assigning important things that they do not understand into pseudo-science, and into pseudo discovery. Just because you don’t understand it, or it seems complicated, doesn’t mean that it is good or right. Just because you read a religious text that is complicated and doesn’t make any sense, because it is poorly written, has no frequently asked questions and has no table of contents, nor was it written in a language that you speak or hasn’t been updated in thousands of years, and has conflicting translations, it may seem important to you precisely because you do not truly understand it, and because it’s become obsolete. Similar to other things that you don’t understand that do actually have value, you are blindly assigning importance to a complicated thing where truthfully, the stuff is not accurate and it will do more harm than good. If you accidentally assign factual truth to fiction, then you will build your world view and your ability to make better, faster, smarter decisions in the future on inaccurate realities that never actually existed. Therefore, you have optimized your world that doesn’t, hasn’t and will never exist.

The best knowledge can’t be read. You must beat it out of the world with your unquenchable thirst. Science and research teaches you things that no one has ever known before in the history in the world. Playing catch up isn’t going to make you rich.

Many great discoveries are made by accident. Many great inventors come out of liberal non-technical arts educations. Lots of people find money lying in the street. Who cares? You can either do what you know leads to an outcome, or mess around and try everything but that, and see what gets you there faster. Try walking home by going every direction but home, and I think you’ll quickly figure out which one works better.

If you can’t find the knowledge you seek, you may need to create and discover it yourself.

General ideas you can try new places

There’s an efficiency of stairs over ramps. You’ll notice that stairs also take more material to construct, and I think that an analogy can be made between how most multicellular living organisms appear to operate with a structure of hard surfaces and polling services, so basically tension.

You have hard things, which basically take no effort at all to resist compression; it’s just their natural form. Then you have tendons and muscles that do the soft pulling stuff. It’s just an interesting concept that in effect, like when you stand up, you’re not really using that much energy, because you’ve got things balanced just right. You’re taking advantage of non-compressing properties of bone. That makes you wonder where else in the world we should see a similar pushing-pulling opposite effect. This could be similarly illustrated by constructing with concrete and rebar, because rebar resists the pulling and concrete resist the pushing.

The use of the word accident to describe scientific breakthroughs and discoveries that happened in a lab while you were looking for a different thing is kind of a waste of the term accident. The term accident that people are used to is an accidental thing that occurred that you weren’t expecting. However, if you’re in a material science lab and you find a new material that does some weird shit, you were in the lab. You put in a couple $100K of equipment, $100K into personnel, $100K of education, you got a half a million dollars sitting there trying to make discoveries, and you just happened to discover something different.

That’s not an accident. If you’re flipping burgers at Burger King, you’re not discovering shit. I think a new word should be invented for the cross pollination, cross-jurisdictional, sideways discovery of something in a discovery palace called a lab.

It’s important to understand the difference between experiments and testers. If you test something, you have a very reasonable expectation of what passing and failing looks like. As a person grading the test you learn very little. If someone gives you a multiple choice test and you do well, the tester learns basically nothing other than how well you did on the test. If you are given a slightly different test, which is much more subjective in its grading, if you are told to write a ten page essay on the most important problem in the world, now the tester is not only going to learn what you have decided to choose as the most important problem in the world, but also might learn something about that which you have written about.

Knowing the difference between a test and an experiment is that it’s a lot easier to learn from experiments, because you aren’t sure of what the range of possible solutions is, and you’re trying to perform learning as your goal. “I’m doing this experiment; I want to see what happens. That’s why it’s an experiment; it’s an attempt to see what happens.” A useful definition of the difference between a test and an experiment is your intention as to whether you’re trying to learn something, or whether you’re just trying to give someone else a great thing that makes a big difference and is separate from your tension. How wide is the possible solution set? When you do an experiment, the range of solutions that you would accept as proper outputs is all of them, assuming you performed a good experiment and didn’t screw it up. When you give a test, the range of solutions that you would be comfortable with receiving are very specific.

The most important thing you can learn from knowing the difference between a test and an experiment is that you’re going to learn a lot more from being open-minded, experimenting and looking for learning and building on discoveries that were unexpected. You’re going to get more out of experiments than you would out of tests. There’s probably little else that you could do to learn less from another party than give them a multiple choice test. How are you going to learn from that? What are you going to learn? Not much.

We have the most powerful knowledge finding tool the world has ever seen instantly and freely available to us. What a great time to be alive! If all the knowledge of the world is nearly free, then how can you secure advantage for yourself over your competitors in this world of limited resources? The answer lies in being able to find better knowledge than they can, faster than they can. Enter Google-fu, defined as “skill in using search engines (especially Google) to quickly find useful information on the Internet.”

Why wouldn’t the most powerful search tool on the planet have some bad ass rarely known functionality?

Work backwards. What unique words will appear on the kind of pages you’re looking for, that AREN’T your keyword? It’s a side channel attack on collisions. This gives you results your main keyword didn’t.

Teach kids how to Google

Search operators are words that can be added to searches to help narrow down the results. Don’t worry about memorizing every operator, because you can also use the Advanced Search page to create these searches.

Note: When you search using operators or punctuation marks, don’t add any spaces between the operator and your search terms. A search for site:nytimes.com will work, but site: nytimes.com won’t.

From <https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operatorsHYPERLINK "https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operators&hl=en&rd=1"&HYPERLINK "https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operators&hl=en&rd=1"hl=enHYPERLINK "https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operators&hl=en&rd=1"&HYPERLINK "https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operators&hl=en&rd=1"rd=1>

Free information everywhere - grab it!

There’s a better way to live. Believe in utility. Believe in Scivival.

You’re lucky enough to be alive in the greatest time that’s ever existed. Free information coming out of your ears, free amplifying tools to make whatever great idea you come up with spread out into the world. Your phone is a super computer, an ultra-connected device. Everything is as good, it’s better than people imagined it would be 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago. It’s better than we thought it would be. We have the least war we’ve ever had, we have the best health we’ve ever had. Because of the best news gathering and news presentation that we’ve ever had, it may sometimes appear as if everything is worse. But it’s not, it’s the best it’s ever been.

Learn things you care about!

It is easier to learn the things you care about, and hard to learn the things you don’t. Elon Musk & rockets (SpaceX) Xx Explain

Importance

Check out how large the memory section is on this Wikipedia page: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_prodigy

If you want retain more memory of what you were reading, or doing, you must retrace your steps, and reopen your tabs, go back through the same steps the best you can remember them. Take a picture of your parking spot, so you can’t forget where you left your car. Put your keys and other important stuff on your shoes, so you are drawn to them automatically when attempting to leave.

Memory and brain contests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_championships_in_mind_sports

Learning

If math doesn’t help language and language doesn’t help math, why don’t we teach first things that amplify everything else? If someone is learning harder than another person, and you asked why, one could say “because I want to be the best.” Or, “I want to be better than that other the competition” or, “I want to feel proud of myself”. Teaching pride, excellence and competition, those things affect everything, you should teach them first. If you don’t get those, if you don’t make people care, well then really, how hard do you think they’re going to work anywhere else? Discipline and motivation are the tides that raise all educational subjects’ ships.

Amplifiers

Amplifiers and chemical stimulants such Caffeine, amphetamines, and the chemicals your own brain can make after meditating or firing an empowering pattern off can amplify your brain abilities.

Habit

Mindset

Internal language

The tricks you use to keep exercising are the same tricks you can use to keep thinking about hard things. “If I can’t, I must” See the structure. Abstract, categorize, chunk, and then act well. There is nothing but the work. Your mind will hit you every few seconds to do the old bad things you used to do, and as you tell your mind otherwise, after a while, it just stops trying to get you to do stupid things. As you starve out the old habit, eventually it just dies.

You only need to master a couple of things here to become great, meaning you surely don’t need to master half of all the possible things to learn. As a matter of fact, you’d probably be much better off only learning a few of these things and excel greatly at them, rather than being relatively bad at all of them. The reason for this is that many of the things here help you personally much more than they help the rest of the world, that you are much better off focusing on the things that benefit the rest of the world much more than they benefit you.

This works because the world can do more than you can. 1000 men can build something amazing, something that try as you might, you could never build alone in your lifetime, or even a thousand lifetimes. The chance that you can greatly influence this world in conjunction with many of your fellow man is at least 100 times greater than the chance that you can achieve the same thing alone. Why? Take a look around you, how many of the things you use, enjoy, see, were made by a single man or woman? Almost nothing was made without the help of others.

How does this relate to the rest of reality that is vastly less tested nor testable? I believe the learning is that you must look for that other magic part that is so hard to miss, you must look for the not thing, you must look for the thing that isn’t there, or is the opposite of the obvious thing. Ask yourself, “What’s the missing part? What should be here that isn’t here?” It’s like a great investigator you might see in a popular television show, movie or book, you could say Sherlock Holmes, Colombo, or Dr. House. They account for the following things lesser detectives never think of: Is my test wrong? Could it be wrong in this case for special reason? Did something intermittent happen here, is the current state of the scene not representative of when the crime occurred, rain, weather, people, full moon, Lighting?

What is the minimum effective dose of teachable knowledge/skill? Input, process, output, ala grammar, logic, rhetoric, trivial fame.

Success leaves clues. The most effective students (and teachers) often have little mental tricks they apply when thinking, some are mnemonic, some are turning ideas into locations, some are pretending new ideas are just like old ideas, and applying the old learnings, etc. Find those powerful commonalities that work best for you.

Stop turning kids into bad versions of Google. We don’t need more bad data storage in human minds; we need more of what the machines can’t do yet, creativity, emotional decision, morality, and love.

If you must make kids bad versions of Google and shove facts into them for lousy storage, then at least teach them mnemonic technique and logic first, Google-fu, so as to amplify all their future efforts. Do not teach the amplifiers last, let those amplifiers pay dividends over time while learning the other stuff. Some are lucky enough to have logic taught to them first before any other math at grade 6, because of an experimental advanced education system. After logic they learn scheme programming. Those frameworks greatly help some individuals, as nesting of ideas and good data processing is super powerful in all the other areas of life.

Better and worse exist, find better, and choose better. Do not be a coward and pretend that worse doesn’t exist.

Summary: teach amplifiers first. Then teach minimum effective commonly useful data processing, then specialize, focus, and become great. Specialization is why we have genders. Dimorphism lets us not over-allocate excellence in a single place at the cost of another place. Great things come from specialists. If the value of skill is in opposite proportion to supply of that skill, then everyone learning the same things by definition means no one will pay for that skill or knowledge. There’s some exclusions to that idea, such as language itself, however the theme of slapping knowledge/skill on a supply/demand curve is a good one. Much of this idea is hammer in

Xx check Peter Thiel’s 0-1. Less 1 to 1 horizontal iteration and more 0 to 1, no one else is working on this thing kind greatness.

What is minimum effective curriculum before specializing?

What is the minimum viable education?

What is the correct execution order of those skills?

For instance, how important is it to teach kids to write essays, when they actually don’t have much useful to say? Maybe you should work much harder on having useful things to say before you learn how to beautifully say them. Imagine that you did the opposite, imagine that you taught effective rhetoric before logic, and now you’ve got better salesmen of bad ideas. That’s worse for the world and the individual, not better. Think of the places in the world where women aren’t allowed to drive cars. How did that terrible situation arise? The answer is great marketing and the spread of terrible ideas..

Which organisms are we most likely to benefit from stealing ideas from? Can we prevent them from going extinct before we get to learn those ideas? Is there a way to capture their ideas, pre-extinction? Even the tools that we now have to change the blueprints of life, we stole from life. For example, bacteria and viruses are currently the source of our most powerful DNA editing tools. We are meat, and animals are meat. The animals of Earth benefit from all kinds of amazing tricks and tools their meat has developed. We could use some of their tools, but if they become extinct, we can’t learn as well from them any longer. Think of how much more we could learn about (and from) dinosaurs, if they weren’t currently extinct.

If you want to take advantage of the millions of years of building with the best tools we’re aware of, real evolution over long time periods, without having to wait for millions of years for the next go round of that thing maybe mutating and evolving again, then you should try to prevent the extinction of the organisms most useful to learn from for our own benefit. The same could be said for studying an organism’s specific feature before it changes and evolves further. (Again, think viruses and bacteria and immunotherapy tactics)

Why test kids when you can put them in the real world via the Internet, and have those kids solve real, currently relatable problems? In this way, you can achieve real world testing by doing, by action. There are all kinds of people out there that have problems that they’d like to have solved, and these useless kids could be the ones to do it. However, if you can’t find a thing in the real world for these kids to use to practice on, then stop teaching it, it’s obvious no one needs it, or you don’t know anyone in the real world, one of the two.

Teaching through story sacrifices bitrate for emotional attachment and depth for stickiness and virility. This might be why viruses have a quite limited payload.

For a religion to succeed, it must actually have a church, a belief structure that tends the heart and the songs and ritual stuff that goes around it, and often sadly the “us vs them” mentality.

Common parts of good stories: Arc, relation, father/son, dark/light, mirror, order, reversal, betrayal, greed, lust, conflict, struggle, what are these common powerful tropes? Which do you like the most? Using us vs them language.

Easy way to learn

If you ever want an easy way to teach kids the importance of geometry, one 18-inch pizza is more pizza than two 12-inch pizzas. Do the math.

Don’t let school interfere with your education

“I never let school interfere with my education” -Mark Twain

Wasting too much time in college

How could any learned man be satisfied to waste away in a college or university building ideas that are going on quite literally in the real world?

Apprenticeships

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989341

Six Arts

“The Six Arts formed the basis of education in ancient Chinese culture.” - Wikipedia

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Arts

Separating kids from parents and giving to state for education e.g. the republic (Plato’s) is at least bad because of this:

“In evolutionary psychology, the Cinderella effect is the alleged higher incidence of different forms of child-abuse and mistreatment by stepparents than by biological parents. It takes its name from the fairy tale character Cinderella. Evolutionary psychologists describe the effect as a remnant of an adaptive reproductive strategy among primates in which males frequently kill the offspring of other males in order to bring their mothers into estrus, and give the male a chance to fertilize her himself. There is both supporting evidence for this theory and criticisms against it.”

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_effect>

Failure of Education system

Essays-section of the book store hides great ideas

It’s rather stupid that much of what you need to be a great person, and to develop correct beliefs and actions in this world, is hidden away in the essays section of the library and the book store. What a stupid way to name an important category of the most in depth thinking. Why are Hitchens and Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Machiavelli, Henry David Thoreau, Will Durant, etc. hidden in this stupid category? This category is literally called something we’re taught to hate as kids.

The failure of the education system (Xx There’s more content like this in the World section)

Kids know their time is being wasted with useless knowledge. Kids know you’re wasting their time; they know they’re never going to use this shit. If you’re too stupid to come up with an example that’s compelling to them when they would use it, then you’re dumber than they are, because you don’t realize that you’re wasting their time. Stop wasting everyone’s time. There’s enough to learn in this world that’s actually useful to learn, teach them that. If you have an hour of math, an hour of history, an hour of home-ed, where’s your hour of motivation? Where’s your hour of visualizing the future? Where’s your hour of finding something to care about? Where’s your hour of planning and dreaming something that spices you up? Where’s your hour of the amplifier and multiplier? Find the only weak link in the chain that will make any of those other six or seven hours of school worthwhile. Teaching people things they will never use or teaching people things that they could use if they cared, is only as useful as the caring. No caring, no using. You need to be amplifying the strong part of the chain, not the weak part. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link..

We have a motivation problem and they don’t teach that in schools

We do not have a knowledge problem. We do not have an education problem. We have a desire, and will, and motivation, and discipline problem. These ideas needs to become a class of their own, they need to have a curriculum and they need to be taught, people need to get degrees in these areas instead of Liberal Arts. You should be able to meet someone not having to go through some esoteric business training class, and not having to go through some religious experience.

Everyone gets these liberal arts degrees and goes to a liberal arts college, and no one knows what liberal arts means. Some claim to know, because they went to college for a while, and they were surrounded by other people that went to colleges. Yet some may end up determining that it was like applying butter to a piece of bread; you liberally apply butter to bread because it tastes good.

It turns out that in reality, in the liberal arts, the word liberal means “free.” They made it a long time ago, say 2,300 to 2,400 years ago, around 300-400 BC. People decided that the trades, such as building and farming and commerce, such as shop keeping and things like that, were for idiots. Those skillsets were the lowest things you could learn. It was also decided that a person with freedom should learn seven awesome things. Then they categorized those seven awesome things into a set of three and a set of four.

The set of three, the trivium (from the Latin for “where three roads meet”) which is also the root of the word “trivialis,” which means “that which is in, or belongs to, the crossroads or public streets; hence, that may be found everywhere, common,” from which comes the recent word “trivia.”

- they didn’t even like these three things. You might understand it as reading, writing, and arithmetic. They understood it as grammar (which is getting data in), logic (manipulating the data), and rhetoric (speaking the data and getting the data back out). They didn’t even look up to that, that badass idea of input-processing-output system. They didn’t even like that. That was where you started, and where you were to end up was the four things that they actually liked.

In the medieval European university, the seven liberal arts were grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) and geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium). These next four, once learned, you’ll have a complete understanding of what the liberal arts are. Notice that they’re not building, they’re not engineering, they’re not business, they’re not medicine, they’re not the things that are the most useful things in the whole world even though some think that they’re the most important.

Multiple choice tests should be destroyed - no more accidental success.

The entire education system was designed around a system that was beneficial a thousand years ago. The world that we live in today is not very like the world that we lived in then. Business, medicine, and the things that people look down upon now, those are the important things. The things that they thought were important, like philosophy - eh, we’ve kind of got most of that stuff figured out. We don’t need more people in that area. If you don’t think that we’ve made diminishing returns in the philosophy area, there’s 200,000 people a day dying right now. What percentage of those people are dying from lack of philosophy? They’re dying because their bodies are falling apart. That’s 200,000 people a day, and one day soon, you will be one of those people. If you don’t want to be a rotting piece of meat, a walking corpse with a short lifespan, less than a blink of an eye geologically, then you should be focused on shit that gets you to stick around a little bit longer. If you find yourself following the suggestions of thousands of years old, dead people, who optimized for a world that they lived in, that is not very like the world that you live in, you are wasting your time.

If you’re taking liberal arts and you don’t understand that the choices, the false choices, the artificially restricted choices that you get to choose from in regards to your curriculum exist because some wrong person has decided that music and philosophy are anywhere near as important as engineering and medicine, then you’re making the wrong choice.

Here are the points to summarize. We understand what the liberal arts are. It’s a judgment call. It’s an artificial restriction of your choices where you think you’re getting a wide, balanced, well-rounded education, when in reality you’re being crippled. You are being taught the least valuable information that you can learn. You are learning things that are the very opposite of useful when it comes to matters of most importance.

We’ve had all types of bubbles in this world. We’ve had bubbles in housing, we’ve had bubbles in stock markets, and now there’s a bubble in the education system. And bubbles - unfortunately, human beings psychologically don’t react well to them. We’re okay with increases in pay, we’re okay with increases in quality of life, but we’re dissatisfied with decreases in pay and decreases in quality of life. It’s called the Keynesian ratcheting effect in economics. Just like a ratchet, turns easily one way, doesn’t turn so easily the other way. When you have a bubble in education because people have forgotten why education exists, education is not supposed to be babysitting at the collegiate level. Education is not supposed to be learning for learning’s sake, and if it ever was, never mind those people. That was a bad decision, a bad design. There’s a better way to live, more important shit to learn. You should believe in utility. You should believe in Scivival.

This is what liberal arts and much of what the education that exists in this world is. It’s learning the names of things and learning that they exist, and never deriving useful value, or getting any type of actual benefit. Learning to learn, for learning’s sake, so that you can say you did, and take a regurgitated test where you vomit facts back on the paper the same way that you learned them in the first place. Then you rapidly forget those facts because you never use it again in the real world. Nothing could be worse. What could be worse than convincing someone that to be a good person in a society, and to be useful in a society, they need to learn things that don’t matter and understand them in a way that’s not useful, only to forget them again shortly thereafter? What could be worse when their life and their consciousness and the supporting of their family and the obtainment of their goals revolve around all of the things that you excluded from their education?

Personal finance, and personal presentation can improve based on the questions you ask of yourself. How to be a good friend? How to be fair to yourself? What does being fair to yourself look like? What does being fair to your friends look like? What does being too easy on others look like? What does losing friends because you didn’t get things signed in writing and then now their own subconscious works against them and they misremember the past? Sometimes it’s financially profitable for them to misremember the past. Our minds are structured in a way that makes it very easy to misremember the past, especially if we gain from such.

If you still think the liberal arts are there to teach you how to learn, you misunderstand why they are there. There is a study of how people learn, there is the ability to major in education, there is the study of where knowledge comes from, there’s a fancy word for it. If you want to learn what is knowable and how we know what is knowable, and perhaps the best ways to learn things, if you think learning things is memorizing things, well then you should study memory, and that should be a course. People who compete in memory competitions could teach such a course. It wouldn’t be surprising if the liberal arts removed that from the ability of the course selection guide, because it’s too damn useful. We need things that are less useful, so that we turn people into losers. They don’t understand they’re losers, because we use proof by complexity.

If Scivive can get you better results for yourself in a shorter time frame than college does, is not the education you get with Scivival worth more money, especially since it is saving you more of your finite time?

If you didn’t take ethics and learn how to be a good friend, how to manage your personal finances, and how to stick up for yourself and how to be fair to yourself, you spent your time the wrong way. Everyone in the entire world knows that those things are vitally important. If you learned the order of the planets from the sun outward instead of those better things, you spent your time the wrong way. You are less effective and less of a good person and a less powerful being now because you deprived yourself. Maybe by accident, maybe through ignorance, you didn’t know you could learn those better things. If you think liberal arts teach you how to learn, that’s called epistemology, and you can go into that and education and the study of learning as a thing. When they’re teaching you music, they’re not teaching you how to learn. When they’re teaching you writing, they’re not teaching you how to use your memory - they’re different things. Don’t fall for the hype, don’t fall for the bullshit. If you want to create super learners, you had best believe that the topics you study won’t look anything like the curriculums that are out there now.

We’ve gone far and wide. In summary, if you think the liberal arts are giving you a clear, unbiased option of learning from all the things that are learnable, you are widely far from the mark. In colleges, you get to choose from a course list. That course list is taught by humans. Those humans teach what they feel they’re capable of teaching and often times with a hell of a lot of guidelines. You could not find a more restrictive, less choice-based, less varied, less structured way to learn a thing on the whole planet. It’s the most organized, the least adventurous, and the least varied. There’s the least number of options available to you.

That’s the opposite of a wide-ranging education.

A wide-ranging education would be you opening an encyclopedia or an atlas and you pointing to a page, and that’s what you’re learning. There you go. You have all the things available to you. Having available to you to learn all the things, that’s actually a wide-ranging education. That’s actually how you might find a passion that other people haven’t that you can profit from. That’s how you can find an excellence; by diving deeper into an area than other people have.

The education system revolves around you not getting to learn a new thing until you learn the last thing. In which case, if you didn’t completely grasp the last thing, you don’t get to learn the next thing. They keep you in that class again and again and again and then and only then when they think you’ll benefit from a harder class that builds upon the lessons learned do you earn the opportunity to learn that new thing.

If all the knowledge is free, then why would you pay for an education? If the knowledge is free, what are you paying for? To waste your time and your money listening to regurgitated facts and methods that you could discover on your own had you found the motivation to do so?

How do you tell who is smart

If you want people to actually learn, know that there are things that the student never uses, and avoid those things while conducting the lesson. Instead, you can make a simple study guide that you expect them to finish, which you can charge for, that they can actually use. So if you are taught to go on Alibaba, buy something you like, stock it at home, sell it, you’ll get rich. That’s one thing. You’ll learn that setting up an account at Alibaba is the first step. Then you need to understand how to log in, find the bestsellers. Next, you’re going and looking in the retail market, you’re seeing what price they sell for, discovering that there’s enough profit. Next, you’re going to place an order and you need to have it shipped the most effective way to your house. Then you’re going to put an ad out. It’s going to have your phone number and you’re actually going to answer it.

Walking you through the steps and actually getting you to do them and holding you to a higher standard is more valuable to you then just knowing a thing exists. Knowing that sales exist is nothing compared to being able to sell. Knowing that dancing exists is nothing compared to being able to dance.

Posting premium content on the web about a thing that can be done well, and displaying some ways to do it may or not may be enough. Getting students into your paid program where, because they’ve paid, they’ll actually follow through the steps with more intent. It wouldn’t take long to discover that if people don’t pay, they don’t follow through, because they’re less invested in the idea from the start. Look at the completion rate for massive online courses versus normal courses. It’s like four times higher for a normal course. Why? Because people paid for it, they see loss, they feel sense of loss and so if you’re in the education business, you should have paid content. You should have free content. You probably should even consider changing the price of your content occasionally, like drug companies do based on who’s buying it.

They charge you money to do it, they take all of your time to do it, and it was all based on a judgment call made up many thousands of years ago as to why these ephemeral, hard to iterate on, hard to get feedback on, way of learning and teaching lessons. When this dynamic was created long ago, individuals and groups found it hard to even choose one way of living over another way of living, let alone teaching how to do so. We know one way of building beats the shit out of another one, because we can measure it.

Isn’t it a little odd that business professionals pay thousands of dollars to go to boot camps to learn could be easily taught in school? (or a webinar) Things like scheduling, goal setting, positive feedback and loops?

Imagine someone with a flabby arm, and they’re having a conversation with it, looking at it and saying to it, “I don’t understand this flabby arm. I want it to be stronger.” Then, you tell it about all the different ways that it can get stronger; about eating protein, about doing curls and chin-ups, and doing pull-ups, and all the things that would help it grow. However, it just sits there and it just doesn’t do anything. No matter how many different things you tell it, it never gets stronger. And that you see, is the reason that education doesn’t work properly. We don’t need more people to be told things. We need the people to do things.

Stop diminishing the meaning of the word “survivor.” It’s not particularly accurate when they call everyone a survivor, such as a divorce survivor - is divorce usually fatal? What’s the point of the word survivor, if you didn’t avoid being killed? Using the word survivor here is over sensationalizing the point. Should there perhaps, exist a new word for a person who has avoided being divorced, as survivors have avoided being killed? Stop breaking the language; because you endure something negative, horrible and terrible, doesn’t make you a survivor, surviving an encounter makes you a survivor, and surviving means avoiding death when the threat of death was imminent. If you got into a fight with a bear, got all your arms and legs ripped off, and still survived, then you’re a survivor. Notice, you still lose the fight pretty bad, however, even in losing, you are a survivor, because you didn’t die, despite the bear’s ability to easily kill you.

If there was no threat of death, it’s the wrong word. Go make a new word for enduring and living with events that are unfortunate. Don’t steal the word survivor from the countless people that actually avoided potentially life ending circumstances. It’s supposed to be a badge of honor, not a badge of sadness. Cancer survivor is a term that’s accurate. “Survivor of the stock market crash,” is the wrong use of the word.

[end of edit 4-26-20]

From <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy> (MISATTRIBUTED, however popularized)

From <https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/56tw05/lpt_if_you_ever_have_to_make_a_decision_between/>

From <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnZc4VpSn1Q>

From <^{https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/5950tm/text_i_just_finished_the_online_coursera_course/>}