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Mark McDonald's avatar

This post was awesome! I want to read more posts about people's important life lessons. In ordinary conversation, we don't usually ask the question "what's the most important thing you could tell me that you think could improve my life?"... but we definitely should! I even wrote a post about this phenomenon, along with my own life lessons.

https://open.substack.com/pub/markmcdonaldthoughts/p/anti-elephant-communication

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Shaeda's avatar

Here from Reddit. Great read.

Point 8: Agreed. Also known as 'Tacit Knowledge', and there is definitely no shortcut to this it seems. However, I'd probably preface it with determining beforehand whether or not one necessarily 'needs' to achieve such depths on x topic.

Point 21 you could take even further! This isn't really even an 'opinion', this is a fundamental finding consistently in cognitive science research: free-recall is far (far) harder than recognition, but produces far more effective improvements in learning. This is something, for example, studying with flashcards will reveal very quickly, whereas the student who simply rereads or highlights etc will *feel* and *think* that they are learning, but are not. What you're describing may also be known as "The Feynman Technique"

Re point 22: Aha. This took me back to some poker days. Some professionals will mimic something like this at the table to try and obtain true 'randomness' without bias. I.e., if they feel they should do x 50% of the time, they, for example, would find the nearest clock and would go off whether the second-hand is on the left or right hand side. Smart, as it removes any subconscious bias.

This was a great read. So much so that I had Gemini take a look at it, which you might find interesting and may make for a future blog: https://g.co/gemini/share/7b0e46771c9d

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