If I’m looking up at the clouds, or at a distant mountain range, then everything is far away (the ground could be cut off from my field-of-view)—but it doesn’t trigger the sensations of fear-of-heights, right? Also, I think blind people can be scared of heights?

Another possible fear-of-heights story just occurred to me—I added to the post in a footnote, along with why I don’t believe it.

From when I've talked with people from industry, they don't seem at all interested in tracking per-employee performance (e.g. Google isn't running RCTs on their engineers to increase their coding performance, and estimates for how long projects will take are not tracked & scored). 

FWIW Joel Spolsky suggests that people managing software engineers should have detailed schedules, and says big companies have up-to-date schedules, and built a tool to leverage historical data for better schedules. At my old R&D firm, people would frequently make schedules and budgets for projects, and would be held to account if their estimates were bad, and I got a strong impression that seasoned employees tended to get better at making accurate schedules and budgets over time. (A seasoned employee suggested to me a rule-of-thumb for novices, that I should earnestly try to make an accurate schedule, then go through the draft replacing the word “days” with “weeks”, and “weeks” with “months”, etc.) (Of course it’s possible for firms to not be structured such that people get fast and frequent feedback on the accuracy of their schedules and penalties for doing a bad job, in which case they probably won’t get better over time.)

I guess what’s missing is (1) systemizing scheduling so that it’s not a bunch of heuristics in individual people’s heads (might not be possible), (2) intervening on employee workflows etc. (e.g. A/B testing) and seeing how that impacts productivity.

Practice testing

IIUC the final “learning” was assessed via a test. So you could rephrase this as, “if you do the exact thing X, you’re liable to get better at doing X”, where here X=“take a test on topic Y”. (OK, it generalized “from simple recall to short answer inference tests” but that’s really not that different.)

I'm also a little bit surprised that keywords and mnemonics don't work (since they are used very often by competitive mnemonists)

I invent mnemonics all the time, but normal people still need spaced-repetition or similar to memorize the mnemonic. The mnemonics are easier to remember (that’s the point) but “easier” ≠ effortless.

As another point, I think a theme that repeatedly comes up is that people are much better at learning things when there’s an emotional edge to them—for example:

• It’s easier to remember things if you’ve previously brought them up in an argument with someone else.
• It’s easier to remember things if you’ve previously gotten them wrong in public and felt embarrassed.
• It’s easier to remember things if you’re really invested in and excited by a big project and figuring this thing out will unblock the project.

This general principle makes obvious sense from an evolutionary perspective (it’s worth remembering a lion attack, but it’s not worth remembering every moment of a long uneventful walk), and I think it’s also pretty well understood neuroscientifically (physiological arousal → more norepinephrine, dopamine, and/or acetylcholine → higher learning rates … something like that).

As another point, I’m not sure there’s any difference between “far transfer” and “deep understanding”. Thus, the interventions that you said were helpful for far transfer seem to be identical to the interventions that would lead to deep understanding / familiarity / facility with thinking about some set of ideas. See my comment here.

Yeah some of my to-do items are of the form "skim X". Inside the "card" I might have a few words about how I originally came across X and what I'm hoping to get out of skimming it.

It just refers to the fact that there are columns that you drag items between. I don't even really know how a "proper" kanban works.

If a new task occurs to me in the middle of something else, I'll temporarily put it in a left (high-priority) column, just so I don't forget it, and then later when I'm at my computer and have a moment to look at it, I might decide to drag it to a right (low-priority) column instead of doing it.

Such an unambitious, narrowly-scoped topic area?? There may be infinitely many parallel universes in which we can acausally improve life … you’re giving up $99.\overline{9}\%$ of the value at stake before even starting :)

I always thought of $-{\sum }_{x\in \text{microstates}}P\left(x\right)\log P\left(x\right)$ as the exact / “real” definition of entropy, and $\log \left(\text{number of microstates}\right)$ as the specialization of that “exact” formula to the case where each microstate is equally probable (a case which is rarely exactly true but often a good approximation). So I found it a bit funny that you only mention the second formula, not the first. I guess you were keeping it simple? Or do you not share that perspective?

I just looked up “many minds” and it’s a little bit like what I wrote here, but described differently in ways that I think I don’t like. (It’s possible that Wikipedia is not doing it justice, or that I’m misunderstanding it.) I think minds are what brains do, and I think brains are macroscopic systems that follow the laws of quantum mechanics just like everything else in the universe.

What property distinguished a universe where "Harry found himself in a tails branch" and a universe where "Harry found himself in a heads branch"?

Those both happen in the same universe. Those Harry's both exist. Maybe you should put aside many-worlds and just think about Parfit’s teletransportation paradox. I think you’re assuming that “thread of subjective experience” is a coherent concept that satisfies all the intuitive properties that we feel like it should have, and I think that the teletransportation paradox is a good illustration that it’s not coherent at all, or at the very least, we should be extraordinarily cautious when making claims about the properties of this alleged thing you call a “thread of subjective experience” or “thread of consciousness”. (See also other Parfit thought experiments along the same lines.)

I don’t like the idea where we talk about what will happen to Harry, as if that has to have a unique answer. Instead I’d rather talk about Harry-moments, where there’s a Harry at a particular time doing particular things and full of memories of what happened in the past. Then there are future Harry-moments. We can go backwards in time from a Harry-moment to a unique (at any given time) past Harry-moment corresponding to it—after all, we can inspect the memories in future-Harry-moment’s head about what past-Harry was doing at that time (assuming there were no weird brain surgeries etc). But we can’t uniquely go in the forward direction: Who’s to say that multiple future-Harry-moments can’t hold true memories of the very same past-Harry-moment?

Here I am, right now, a Steve-moment. I have a lot of direct and indirect evidence of quantum interactions that have happened in the past or are happening right now, as imprinted on my memories, surroundings, and so on. And if you a priori picked some possible property of those interactions that (according to the Born rule) has 1-in-a-googol probability to occur in general, then I would be delighted to bet my life’s savings that this property is not true of my current observations and memories. Obviously that doesn’t mean that it’s literally impossible.

I wrote “flipping an unbiased coin” so that’s 50/50.

there's some preferred future "I" out of many who is defined not only by observations he receives, but also by being a preferred continuation of subjective experience defined by an unknown mechanism

I disagree with this part—if Harry does the quantum equivalent of flipping an unbiased coin, then there’s a branch of the universe’s wavefunction in which Harry sees heads and says “gee, isn’t it interesting that I see heads and not tails, I wonder how that works, hmm why did my thread of subjective experience carry me into the heads branch?”, and there’s also a branch of the universe’s wavefunction in which Harry sees tails and says “gee, isn’t it interesting that I see tails and not heads, I wonder how that works, hmm why did my thread of subjective experience carry me into the tails branch?”. I don’t think either of these Harrys is “preferred”.

I don’t think there’s any extra “complexity penalty” associated with the previous paragraph: the previous paragraph is (I claim) just a straightforward description of what would happen if the universe and everything in it (including Harry) always follows the Schrodinger equation—see Quantum Mechanics In Your Face for details.

I think we deeply disagree about the nature of consciousness, but that’s a whole can of worms that I really don’t want to get into in this comment thread.

doesn't strike me as "feeling more natural"

Maybe you’re just going for rhetorical flourish, but my specific suggestion with the words “feels more natural” in the context of my comment was: the axiom “I will find myself in a branch of amplitude approaching 0 with probability approaching 0” “feels more natural” than the axiom “I will find myself in a branch of amplitude c with probability $|c{|}^2$”. That particular sentence was not a comparison of many-worlds with non-many-worlds, but rather a comparison of two ways to formulate many-worlds. So I think your position is that you find neither of those to “feel natural”.

Quantum Mechanics In Your Face talk by Sidney Coleman, starting slide 17 near the end. The basic idea is to try to operationalize how someone might test the Born rule—they take a bunch of quantum measurements, one after another, and they subject their data to a bunch of randomness tests and so on, and then they eventually declare “Born rule seems true” or “Born rule seems false” after analyzing the data. And you can show that the branches in which this person declares “Born rule seems false” have collective amplitude approaching zero, in the limit as their test procedure gets better and better (i.e. as they take more and more measurements).