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Hey there!

It's Sunday, which means that it's time for an email packed with some great content, just for you.

What I've Made for You

Here are my book notes:

Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli.

He provides a beautiful explanation of various theories and concepts. Loved the book. The first few chapters brings you up to speed; from the beginning, and all the way to quantum.

Primer on Learning

I've taken some notes on learning recently. I wanted to share them here. They're related to a project that I'm working on. Hope you enjoy.

• If you do not understand what you're trying to learn fundamentally, you won't understand it when you're trying to learn it.

• Never memorize what you do not understand. You might be able to bang out the words, but you won't understand why you bang out those words in that order. "Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form." — Charlie Munger

• Start with the basics first. You won't understand quantum gravity if you do not understand atoms.

• When formulating knowledge that you want to understand and remember, aim for simplicity. Simplicity is much easier to remember. Your brain won't have to navigate through all kinds of paths (neural networks = tangle of paths, in a way) just to get to the answer.

  • This also makes spaced-repetition easy. Students often make the mistake of having one big, broad, complex, and wordy formulation in question form of some knowledge they want to retain. This doesn't work. Break it down as much as possible. Answer one question at a time.

  • Remember the Software Design principle: A method does one thing. Do short questions and short answers. It should be as short as possible.

  • Remember the Einstein quote... "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."

• (spaced repetition) If it's hard to make simple questions, you can formulate sentences where you have to fill in the gaps. This can be done with images as well, where you delete a part of it and try to remember what you deleted.

• Images are great for learning. Our visual processing power is much greater than our verbal processing power. Same goes for memory.

• Use mnemonic techniques like mind maps, for example. They can help you remember things.

• It is insanely hard to remember a list of randomly ordered elements. Like countries in the EU. It's better to use enumerations, wherein the list is ordered. But still very hard. So avoid trying to remember a set of things.

  • A way to learn enumerations: Using 'fill-in-the-blank' questions and 'Which x does the y begin / end with?'

• When formulating a question that you want to remember the answer to, wording is important. Make it short and simple.

• One of the most effective ways of enhancing memories is to provide them with a link to your personal life.

• Illustrate your items with examples that evoke emotional states (shocking, vivid, etc), then you're more likely to remember it.

• (spaced repetition) Supply context such that, if terms overlap in a subject, that you can differentiate and give the right answer.

• There's too many things to learn in life, so we have to prioritize. Prioritize learning from the sources which you learn from best. Extract exactly what you need, memorize and understand that.

WisdomReminder comes alive!

As you may have read from the previous newsletters, I have been working on automating reminders of passages and quotes that I've read.

I managed to automate that on Twitter, too. So now, everyone can take part.

If you want to give WisdomReminder a look, click here:

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"I have lived a long life and had many troubles, most of which never happened." — Mark Twain

To your success. Regards,

Christian Bager Bach Houmann