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Over 10 years! I am extremely impressed with your dedication. You must've spent maybe 20,000 hours listening to audiobooks, which is kind of astonishing. I woul

Over 10 years! I am extremely impressed with your dedication. You must've spent maybe 20,000 hours listening to audiobooks, which is kind of astonishing. I would almost be more impressed if you emerged from such a regimen without being a subject matter expert. In my experience, trying to assess the effects of a medication or technique on yourself is an exercise in frustration. Although you can do legitimate double-blind experiments on yourself, it's usually impossible to properly control the variables which can affect the outcome (diet, exercise, sleep, work, stress, relationships, etc. all have an impact). So, I'm a big fan of the "assume it works because the studies say it should" approach that you describe. It's not clean or certain but it's eminently practical, and it has the fringe benefit of giving you a lot of opportunities to benefit from placebo :)

winfred 12y ago
Thanks, you're one of the few that gets the implications of what I am doing and why I am doing it in this way. One of the problems I ran into while studying is the decay of the information. It takes quite some time to store all this information (and even more if you try to do some hypothesizing or brain storming with multiple aspects of the information), that by the time I had a decent amount of knowledge, I started noticing that parts of it had already gone bad (proven partly or completely false after I read it) and needed maintenance. From my perspective it didn't require much dedication. I like reading, all I had to do is make sure I read almost only non-fiction and that the knowledge maps of the subject fields overlap enough so I can get maximal understanding on the first reading. It's just an entertaining puzzle that doesn't have a predetermined outcome.
- TrevorJ 12y ago
  Regarding information decay, have you looked into spaced repetition? If not, I strongly suggest it, it's an effective approach to this very problem. Also, the memory palace can be very useful.

winfred 12y ago

Thanks, you're one of the few that gets the implications of what I am doing and why I am doing it in this way. One of the problems I ran into while studying is the decay of the information. It takes quite some time to store all this information (and even more if you try to do some hypothesizing or brain storming with multiple aspects of the information), that by the time I had a decent amount of knowledge, I started noticing that parts of it had already gone bad (proven partly or completely false after I read it) and needed maintenance. From my perspective it didn't require much dedication. I like reading, all I had to do is make sure I read almost only non-fiction and that the knowledge maps of the subject fields overlap enough so I can get maximal understanding on the first reading. It's just an entertaining puzzle that doesn't have a predetermined outcome.

TrevorJ 12y ago
Regarding information decay, have you looked into spaced repetition? If not, I strongly suggest it, it's an effective approach to this very problem. Also, the memory palace can be very useful.