New essay: "Exorcising myself of the Primer"

The Diamond Age's "Primer" has long been edtech's most canonical shared vision. I feel the field is haunted by it. It's wrong in many important ways—but we haven't articulated a better one, so we cling to it. I want to transcend it.

The vision has been so sticky because there's a *lot* that's right about it. In particular, the emphasis on immersion, responsiveness, a sense of assurance, and the emotional experience. andymatuschak.org/primer/

U Chicago offers a four-year discussion based course on “The Great Books”, available online to anyone. I just finished year one, and I’d definitely recommend it! graham.uchicago.edu/programs-cours…

Some notes: It’s really remarkable how much well facilitated discussion improves my understanding. Well-facilitated conversation would often show me quite forcibly how shallowly I’d grasped the text. Others’ understandings were almost always different in interesting and enriching ways.

I'm not sure if I'm part of the intended audience for Anthropic's safety statement, but unfortunately it left me more uneasy than before I'd read it.

Conspicuous in its absence: discussion of incentives. Particularly in light of the rumored $5b raise. (con't) Incentives are a big problem here! The founders, funders, ICs, alumni… the org-as-entity itself. In every case, these entities will face enormous net incentives to accelerate. If the claim is that they’ll *not* do this, despite that, then that claim needs extended justification.

Given the recent surge of interest in AI for education and evocations of The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, it's fun to ask: what are we to make of the Han girls raised by the Primer becoming the Mouse Army, rather than individualistic subversives like Nell? One explanation is given by Dr. X: "We lacked the resources to raise them individually, and so we raised them with books. But the only proper way to raise a child is within a family. The Master could have told us as much, had we listened to his words."

My sight reading practice has been totally transformed by Sheet Music Direct’s subscription service. It’s all-you-can-eat sheet music, a nice addition to IMSLP for modern stuff. Most songs have “easy” arrangements ~around my sight reading level. Tons of new music every night! Also nice to use it in conjunction with RCM’s popular selections list, since it’s helpfully broken into fine-grained grades. Can usually read laterally within any of the volumes mentioned, in addition to the specific pieces. rcmusic-kentico-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/rcm/media/main…

My intuition as an Anki user was that its defaults treat lapses much too aggressively, completely resetting the interval. Years ago, I set it to scale the interval down by ~40% instead.

Some recent long-interval lapses made me curious. Looks like I was wrong. Assuming we want to maintain a retrievability of 85-90%, 1 day really is the appropriate next interval (in aggregate).

For a few recent lapses: I forgot after 4 months; they came up again after 2 months; I forgot again. Not great to find that out after such a long interval.

An analogy to Gall’s law in design: if you want a transformatively powerful environment that applies in many contexts for many people, you probably need to evolve it from an environment which had truly transformative power in some narrow context. A system which seems only modestly powerful—no matter how broadly applicable—probably can’t be evolved in-place into something transformative. The primitive abstraction will need to change. Easier to do that with a highly focused context, much harder if you’ve prematurely scaled.

Was reminded recently of one of my favorite papers on social learning. It centers on a clever lie!

Subjects study some material, then quiz either a peer or a bot about it. They learn much better when they think they're quizzing a peer. Secretly, in both cases, it's a bot! The schtick: after studying the material, the subject is intro'd to a fellow student (confederate!). They play Operation while "waiting their turn"…then the "lesson" occurs—in VR. One condition's told they're teaching the peer they met; the other believes they're teaching a bot.

Not really a Star Wars fan, but Disney’s “Rise of the Resistance” gave me an uncanny feeling of compression: “I bet >100,000 person-hours of creative work went into these ten minutes.” A surreal level of intentional-detail/second in a sensory experience. What else is like this? (100k person-hours is ~75 people full-time for a year, assuming 30hr/week over 44 work-weeks. It wouldn’t surprise me if the real number were closer to 200k for this attraction)

Nice new experiments from Pan et al on effects of studying others' flashcards vs. making and studying one's own. Holding total time constant, they find shifts favoring the latter of d=0.45 and d=0.29, for fact and application flashcards respectively. psyarxiv.com/f5k8p/ It makes sense to hold time constant to see the relative effect directly. If you're gonna study for 20m, is it better to spend more time studying others' cards, or to make your own & study those?

Ofc what really matters is—what will you actually do? The latter's way more effort.

One of the "short-sleeper" gene mutations, hDEC2-P385R, appears to work by "exerting less repressor activity than WT-DEC2, resulting in increased orexin expression." [1]

Very naively: can one emulate this effect through brute orexin supplementation?

[1] ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… Also, I'm confused. If the short-sleeper mutation is really just enhancing arousal/wakefulness through orexin signaling, shouldn't short-sleepers experience the various cognitive deficits associated with short sleeping in the general population?

I really like coffee! The coziness, the tastiness, the ritaul of making it. But I feel jittery if I have a second mug in the morning.

So I subscribed to Swiss Water's decaf coffee program, which will sends me a new single origin decaf coffee each month. Are any good? Reviews: Scale
5: Competitive with my normal coffees (light single-origins from Four Barrel)
4: Not competitive with my normal coffee, but I look forward to it
3: I’d rather drink this than my herbal teas, but not excited
2: Toss-up between this and herbal tea
1: Rather drink herbal tea

Confusion: I rewired myself to focus emotionally on “process over product” in creative work. This has been very very good!

But now I can’t figure out how to celebrate big achievements “safely.” Process-oriented joy feels fragile, easily disrupted by “louder” sources. Thoughts? Current best answer: recast "celebrating" into "lingering, savoring". Not a "reward" which I might grasp toward (fancy meal, big party, trophy) but a space for feeling deeper, cherishing more.

Confused: I really do believe that "slow is fake" much of the time… and also that very important parts of my work get better when I get comfortable moving much more. slowly. "It's contextual"—but are there better heuristics?

(Reflecting on @natfriedman's thoughtful belief list) Maybe one high-order bit is relating to internal pace like riding a multi-gear bike. You have many gears; you're always choosing the one that feels best for the current terrain.

It's hard to discuss this sensibly: a) all-consuming work has also marked times of stunted aliveness and personal growth; b) all-consuming work has been one of the most powerful sources of meaning in my life.

@zebriez depicts the latter well: every.to/p/what-i-miss-… She's gotten tons of negative comments, conflating:

1. Many people burn their 20/30s in a kind of professional self-abnegation. They’re unwittingly consumed by someone else’s will, driven by neurosis, guilt, shame, fear, exploitation. They earnestly regret this in hindsight.

“The Independent Scholar” is a practical and sensitive handbook on para-academia. But what’s most striking is its towering anachronism! It was written in 1993, before Mosaic was available. The internet isn’t mentioned. It’s staggering how much easier things have gotten. A huge part of the book covers challenges of accessing research materials, library privileges, journal subscriptions, etc. I’ve been doing some lit reviews this week. Without leaving my chair, without affiliation, I’ve accessed ~100 papers from ~30 journals across 5 decades.

In retrospect, one of the most striking elements of a "walking conference" format is that it's a routinized way to incite 20-50 hours of long conversation with someone you don't (yet) know well. That's a very unusual social move!

https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1526457638296473601?s=20&t=3xguiExr5wAxddWKBnKCeQ

(Of course, a normal conference could achieve this, too, but the constraint of walking enforces a small group size and conversation over presentation)

Nice survey from @iandrosos and pgbovine on cognitive apprenticeship via expert streaming: pg.ucsd.edu/publications/l…

I like the emphasis on "serendipitous teachable moments": improvised content which wouldn't normally appear in a tutorial but which emulates bits of apprenticeship. eg: Streamers make mistakes. They often view this as embarrassing, apologizing to viewers, but it's valuable to see them think through sol'ns and talk out loud about how they got into a mess. By contrast "screencasts" are often edited to be perfect, sometimes to their detriment.

Game designers have a strong culture of producing serious, insightful talks about their work.

By contrast, such talks seem much rarer from contemporary software designers. Why might that be? Or am I wrong—am I missing some incredible trove? The most persuasive theory for me right now is that software designers are much more likely to be constrained by NDAs in an ongoing fashion, whereas game designers are more or less free to talk once the game is shipped. Is that enough to explain the gap?

Yesterday a friend called, quite frustrated to be very stuck on a project. My impulse was to find ways to unstick him, but I realized: we absolutely have to cultivate the ability to be content while totally stuck! If we're doing interesting work, we'll be stuck most of our lives! (Easier said than done, of course, but it hadn't occurred to me quite so baldly that I should *expect* to be stuck as my default state.)

When people ask where I work, I sometimes describe myself as “feral”. It’s a joke…but also a real aspiration. Good things happen when I try hard to chase my sense of excitement, ignoring impulses to produce legible outcomes. This essay really captures it: palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/qui… .@wolftivy's central argument is that the most meaningful paths—for you and for the world—can’t be planned; you have to uncover them by chasing interesting novelty, without safe knowledge of which paths will succeed or fail. But working a job usually makes that impossible.