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1 Jan, 5 tweets, 3 min read
🎉 New essay: andymatuschak.org/prompts

This essay catalogues techniques and mental models for writing good spaced repetition prompts—not just to remember stuff but as a method for creating understanding.
I've been working with authors to extend the mnemonic medium beyond Quantum Country, and prompt-writing has been a consistent challenge—even for experienced authors. So I wrote this guide to distill what I've learned through my own practice and my work with @michael_nielsen.
It's a mnemonic essay, exemplifying its own advice by weaving prompts about the content into the text.

But it's very different from Quantum Country. These are fuzzy heuristics, not laws of nature. How does the medium support reading non-technical material? This is an experiment.
This is also the first large use of @withorbit, the platform I've been developing to explore questions around the mnemonic medium, timeful texts, programmable attention, etc.

Interested in writing something with mechanics along these lines? DM me! Image
I developed the material in this essay through many workshops with authors and my patrons (patreon.com/quantumcountry). My hearty thanks to the participants!

Thanks also to @peterhartree, @michael_nielsen, @Ben_Reinhardt, @tayroga, and @cansar for helpful discussion and comments.🙇‍♂️

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More from @andy_matuschak

Andy Matuschak Profile picture
24 Nov 20
I’ve really enjoyed 2020’s flowering of Substack writers, but I also enjoyed this criticism of the medium’s impact on thought: nintil.com/substack-milqu…

One reframing: is there an adjacent model which can support book-depth thought? Or even three-month-essay-depth thought?
I’ve heard the argument that maybe one can support book-writing by writing a weekly newsletter *while* writing a book. Ideally the newsletter might be exhaust from research or book-drafting sessions. I think @antonhowes is trying this! I’d love to see success stories here.
Note that this approach is the opposite of a common practice: write a blog for a few years; get popular; staple posts together into a book. I like some of those books, but they usually seemed just as good as blog posts: they don’t seem to be accessing new depths as books.
Read 6 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
31 Oct 20
When teaching, it feels natural to center on powerful ideas or techniques. But it’s usually better to center on *questions*—ideas and techniques can follow. Ideally, they’re deep, meaningful questions with no “right” answer, an active object for experts in the discipline.
e.g. If you're studying history, details are important, but usually in service of broad, enduring questions like "when and how do individuals make a difference?"

Wiggins & McTighe call these "essential questions" in Understanding by Design, a great text on instructional design.
I love this idea but often forget it when I'm writing or giving a talk. Institutionalized education sets a bad cultural norm: a teacher's supposed to know the answers and tell them to you… not ask impossible questions! Obviously, I don't *believe* this, but it sneakily seeps in.
Read 7 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
29 Oct 20
!! Celebration day for food nerds: new Keller cookbook!

The first French Laundry cookbook (from ’99) was a revelation to me. Cooking through it taught me more than any other resource has. I was shocked how makeable it was in a home kitchen—very few unusual supplies needed.
The follow-up, Under Pressure, included dishes from Per Se. The style was barely recognizable! The dishes now included many modernist techniques and daring flairs. Fascinating to read, but much less suitable for home cooking: the components didn’t generalize very well.
I’m so happy that this book looks like it’s landed somewhere in between. Under Pressure was explicitly centered around technique (sous vide), but this one’s not; and a decade’s passed, so the enthusiasm for whiz-bang modernism has faded a bit.
Read 9 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
18 Oct 20
An unintuitive secret of reading books on computers: reading PDFs with original typesetting is much better than reading ebooks, which treat text like a 4chan shitposter and have impoverished reading software.

But… where to get the PDFs?! A survey & suggestions for future work:
Google Play:
👍 ~smooth workflow; clean pages
👎 PDFs lack text layer, so they're not searchable or selectable; only recent books available in PDF

archive.org:
👍 has many older books Play lacks; includes OCR'd text layer
👎 OCR errors; photo noise; clunkier workflow
Z-Library:
👍 occasionally has clean PDFs for books which others lack
👎 PDFs are often EPUB->PDF conversions (the worst!); more illegal
Read 6 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
18 Oct 20
I've noticed that consciousness recedes when I'm deep in a coding phase, many back-to-back days in flow. My mind narrows to tunnel-vision, fixated on the software and its issues. My sense of self shrinks; non-code ideas cease to arise; I get less curious; writing yields little.
It's an odd feeling: flow is experientially satisfying, but the creeping self-abnegation is worrying. I also notice it takes quite a while to "reset" from this phase, to start hearing myself think again, to feel like less of an automaton.
I don't experience this feeling when I spend many days back-to-back in flow doing other work: developing an idea, writing, designing. I wonder if it's bc those activities are more creative, involve more reflective thought. Or maybe it's that I'm worse at them—so flow's less deep!
Read 7 tweets
Andy Matuschak Profile picture
17 Oct 20
I enjoyed @eriktorenberg's observation that earned authentic respect is an underrated catalyst for the way one's skills, capital, brand, and network can reinforce each other. eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/see-your-car…
I've often misunderstood this b/c respect is not very illegible, and the scale is unlabeled.

e.g. It feels like success when others reliably accept your coffee invites. But that's actually not very high on the scale: better if people proactively think of you in relevant moments.
Part of why this is confusing is that respect *feels* more legible than it is. Proxies like $, media appearances, followers, citations, etc *seem* like they correspond to respect, but very often they don't! Easy to accidentally internalize false lessons about what earns respect.
Read 4 tweets

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