bigbluesax

>Ultimately, I abandoned Anki and recently proceeded made my own tool for learning the characters, that is highly configurable and that can change the direction with the change of one config attribute.

You built an entire flashcard app by yourself, but you couldn't figure out how to edit card templates in anki?

Ah who am I kidding, your probably just trying to advertise your app.

Is the concept of someone who usually doesn't eat potatoes getting a bag and spending the next week making some potato dishes really that inconceivable? I don't doubt that this will lead to some waste - I've thrown out more half empty potato bags than I would like to admit - but that's a very negative outlook.

Also how do you choose between negative second order effects? Salting roads creates negative effects for groundwater and plants which are really hard to mitigate. On the other hand the second order effect of people slipping could at least be dealt with on an individual level by putting spikes on your shoes.

I don't even think it's a good strategy for creating elite athletes. Can we really determine someone's "elite potential" by how good they are as a young kid? If one kid has parents who took them skating a couple of times and the other didn't, the first one is going to absolutely destroy the second in a competition, but does that really tell us anything about how they will perform, 10 years down the line at the olympics? Yet we filter out anyone who doesn't conform to this standard.

It's exhausting trying to find these brands. You have to do a ton of research, most of which is sifting through ads and the worst google results you've ever seen. If your already in the space you might be so lucky to already know a good reviewer. You also have to update your knowledge constantly, as lots of brands start to decline in quality once they get popular or change ownership.

That's an interesting way of looking at it, it's not just different from person to person but also from hobby to hobby. For me climbing is mainly about 1, but on reflection I defnitely spend more time talking about competative games than actually playing. I can also think of a few people who have hobbies that focus around 3 and 4.

When I tried bone conducting headphones a couple years back, the audio quality wasn't good enough to really enjoy music, podcasts worked well through.

>If you want to be good at math, piano, chess, sculpture, or whatever you need the talent and then it can be nurtured.

No offense, but you sound like you don't really know anything about these disciplines, or about the science of learning (Peak is a good book to read). Getting a good piano teacher will absolutely accelerate your progress and being talented at piano as a kid is a pretty bad predictor of how good you'll be as an adult. Every outstanding Piano "talent" you see on stage today has been nurtured and nurtured themselves through practice, to hell and back.

For me personally using a translator app just adds an additional layer of awkward to every interaction. Where you have to fiddle with it and the other person might not understand how to interact with it right away. It's not a huge problem, but if your not super confident already, it might be enough to discourage you. When I went to japan, lots of people where very hesitant to use their english. Like they didn't want to embarass themselves. I'd never really experienced that before, everywhere else I had gone to previously, people's drive to communicate was usually a lot stronger than their drive to hide weak language skills.

I studied quite a bit of latin in high school (not in the USA through) and I have to say I'm not overly impressed by the test. It certainly doesn't test for fluency in Latin or Greek, most of the exercises are purely about grammar. The exercises that do require translation skills, don't require any vocabulary either. The sentences themselves are quite long, but latin grammar lends itself to complex run-on-sentences. I think the better students in my class would have done quite well on this test even through latin wasn't one of their main subjects.

The Greek portion seems fairly similar if not a bit easier.

Every single history question is about ancient Rome or Greece. Every single geography question is about the location of rivers. How does this constitute an "exceptional grasp of history and geography across the entire world"?

The maths section does seem to have some difficult parts, we didn't do any proofs in the regular high school curriculum for example. The other math sections just show how much the requirements have shifted, a lot of the exercises in the arithmatic section got replaced by calculators, but I don't see any calculus on this test.

Looking at this, I think today's Harvard students are more educated overall than the ones in 1869. Our priorities just shifted.

Yeah, how dare they use a word which succintly describes the problem with these substances. Also PFAS and Microplastics aren't the same thing at all.

People have been organizing the same on a favours basis for longer than money has existed. I just don't understand how money could possibly qualify as an "unit" here. Now how much someone is willing to spend on something is obviously related to how much they care about it, but to call it the "unit of caring" seems a bit presumptuous.

Through on reflection, I'm not sure what the author is trying to say anyway. He says:

> In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something.

But who exactly is society here, and how do you choose to interpret it's spending? It seems much too vague to really argue about.

Ah, your right. It still doesn't make much sense, if you ask me. I spend way more on cycling than I do on my parents and friends (we don't do large gifts), does this mean I care more about my bike than I do my parents?

Well, it certainly reads like a lesswrong post.

> Economies of trade and professional specialization are not just vaguely good yet unnatural-sounding ideas, they are the only way that anything ever gets done in this world. Money is not pieces of paper, it is the common currency of caring.

Ask your mom how much money she made raising you.

I'm not even opposed to the basic ideas of effective altruism and I agree that giving your money to a cause isn't inherently lesser than giving your time. But why add all of this borderline incoherent babble at the start of the article?