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Wellness Wednesday for January 11, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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It's worth keeping in your mental toolbox because it allows you to restructure information into something more human-readable. This makes it easier to work with for overall knowledge management.

As you've noted, this is most critical for memorization tasks. You'll get the biggest band from your spaced-repetition buck if you're integrating mnemonics into good card design. For example, I'll never have to worry about mixing up the layers of the OSI model because I know to ask people Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away.

And if the fate of the world ever depends on reciting trig ratios I can repel the alien hordes by telling them Oscar Had Another Hit Of Acid.

Outside of exams and party-trick scenarios, there's still value to keeping strictly-curated local cache:

  • Memorizing your ID numbers and emergency contacts saves you a ton of grief if your hand-brain is ever lost/stolen/broken.

  • Memorizing work-related references lets you focus deeper and expands your ability at back-of-the-envelope evaluations.

  • Having bigger pool of disparate ideas to-hand expands the capacity of your unconscious to generate creative insights.

A general knowledge of mnemonic techniques is still useful for information that you don't intend to memorize, such as whatever is going into your note-taking system. Useful notes are, after all, not just a copy of raw information but a record of your understanding for later reference.

So we break things into chunks, turn sets into enumerations, drill down to atomized concepts, find and codify arbitrary connections to what we already know. Everything distilled to down to be maximally useful and readable by Future-You. As a bonus, if turns out this information would be worth memorizing, everything has been pre-encoded and we just need to plug it into our spaced-repetition system for retrieval practice.