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slipangle.org

Supermemo and Mastermind

Great Wired article about never forgetting anything:

The failure of SuperMemo to transform learning uncannily repeats the earlier failures of cognitive psychology to influence teachers and students. Our capacity to learn is amazingly large. But optimal learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.
This part's great too:
... I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life. It is a severe prescription.

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Elsewhere, some great info from Eben Pagan's blog on getting a MasterMind together:
We humans are programmed by everything that happens around us. We tend to be MOST programmed by what we see, hear, and experience others doing.

Not what we read, not what we think, not what we feel. We’re influenced by the OTHERS around us. We literally become those that we surround ourselves with.

Want to know how much a person makes per year? Find their five closest friends and average their incomes. That’s the answer.
I'm not quite sure whether to recommend Eben Pagan's site or not. If you Google him, you'll find out he's behind some Double Your Dating site under the name of David DeAngelo, and he's probably just a guy who's figured out a few ways to make a buck off folks on the internet. Picking up chicks and becoming a better person are natural enough desires, but I doubt a guy's motivation if he's hawking both things.