I think they just enjoy memorizing things. Roughly the equivalent of meeting someone who runs 10 miles a day. They enjoy it and it has some benefit to their life as well, even though they are probably far past the point of diminishing returns.
More precisely, enjoys memorizing things but isn't good at it. Professonal quizzers can absorb huge amounts of information but typically don't use flashcards. OP is grinding thousands of cards a day to get to the same level - worthy of respect!
> Professonal quizzers can absorb huge amounts of information but typically don't use flashcards.
Professional quizzers almost all use flashcards. Jeopardy! people definitely do. The range of questions that you can ask in a general knowledge quiz are surprisingly limited. You're not going beyond a surface-level overview on anything. Do a ton of general knowledge flashcards for a year and you'll annihilate people at pub quizzes.
I suppose you could just read encyclopedias over and over again, and books of lists.
Ken Jennings doesn't! I am speculating though so I'll defer to your knowledge here. I was trying to say, for some people it comes naturally. I doubt the majority of quizzers are doing 300k reviews a year.
Reminds me of that guy who "mastered the NYT Crossword" by flashcarding questions/clues. I also learned to do the Saturday consistently - just by doing the crossword every day for a while. You don't always need flashcards.
Can you elaborate on this? I watch an unhealthy amount of University Challenge and I assumed that the vast majority of contestants would use flash cards as a trivia retention tool. Most people I've met who need to rely on large amounts of accurate but relatively dispersed knowledge (law students, say, or specific historical professions) use flash cards in one way or another. It surprises me greatly that 'professional quizzers' wouldn't. Perhaps _some_ of them wouldn't - I'm sure as with anything there are some who are preternaturally excellent.
Well, it stands to reason that people who don't need to do flashcards have a competitive advantage and are more likely to become professional quizzers. They might use flashcards in addition, but I get the sense most of them just absorb trivia like a sponge.
I highly doubt professional or even amateur quizzers wouldn't use flashcards. Especially armed with a SRS algo, it would be the most efficient way to learn to quickly recall the type of info needed for quiz bowls
Roger Craig famously used Anki and was one of the top jeopardy players for a while, and I believe he got some push back from the likes of Jennings and others who thought flash cards were cheap and the only right way to do trivia is "naturally", by just reading a bunch of random shit all the time.
I read the author's attempt to explain why memorization is important, and found myself unconvinced. Of all the things we consider to be "intelligence", memorization of facts seems like one of the least valuable in the Internet-era. That said, I am open to hear some counter-arguments (pro-memorization).
Of course, if you simply enjoy the process of memorizing facts, then no explanation is needed - it is entertainment for you, and comes with a benefit, like enjoying exercising. Otherwise, it does not seem like a remotely optimally productive way to achieve mastery in any field I am aware of, other than being a student who will be tested on fact memorization.
Memorization focuses on the set of things you want to recall, but don't use often enough to naturally remember.
This is most peritent for language learning because you need to 'bootstrap' a large set of words and grammar, and you can't use all of them often enough to put them in long-term memory (at first).
Aside from foreign languages, I also use flashcards for English - more difficult words that show up rarely enough that I can't remember their definitions - and country flags.
For general learning too, if you need to keep looking something up over and over but can't seem to remember it, flashcards will bootstrap that into your brain and make future learning smoother. Obviously Internet/AI can help - but LLMs can't explain 100% of a topic in their reply, they always assume some level of abstraction, and the higher-level it is the faster you can absorb a topic.
I think the key part here is the bootstrapping phase. You may not use a specific English word every week, but maybe you use it every 2-3 months. SRS is great for getting information to these different thresholds!
See my other comments here for some of my motivations, but also:
Even in the Internet age, getting the latency from "fast" to "effectively zero" has a lot of value for staying in flow, synethesizing information, etc. Your memory is the ultra-low-latency fact retrieval system you always have. No, you definitely don't want to use it for everything, but it definitely does complement modern tools in important ways.
Yep. There are plenty of activities, skills, hobbies, whatever, where being able to remember something in the moment is very helpful. Sometimes it’s an edge case, maybe it’s a safety thing. You just want to remember whatever it is.
Or, hell, just for conversations, I’d love to better remember insightful things I read about and then promptly forgot.
The UK is extremely litigious in regards to libel. Her lying would be an act of public libel against the crown prosecutor. She went on TV to talk about it. It's been well covered in everything from the IB Times to The Sun to the Daily Mail (as linked above), as well as fully televised on Piers Morgan. Naturally the team you obviously root for can just refuse to cover any prosecutions which are embarrassing for them and you can simply smugly say "well it's not in any source I trust so it didn't happen."
At this point, assertions such as these are a form of ad hominem fallacy against half of society. You are discrediting the multitude of sources who have covered this story because of the nature of the speaker while no hardline liberal outlets have covered this story at all and presented a counterargument. If you want to have an alternative narrative, you need to link a major outlet showing her to be a liar. The case has been presented to the public. You don't like the people presenting the case. That doesn't invalidate the case. You must, at this point, present a member of your team making a reasonable, evidenced based deconstruction of her claims. The fact that there isn't any coverage from your side at all of this incredibly well televised and written embarrassment for the legitimacy of crown prosecutors speaks volumes.
At this point, assertions such as these are a form of ad hominem fallacy against half of society. You are discrediting the multitude of sources who have covered this story because of the nature of the speaker while no hardline liberal outlets have covered this story at all and presented a counterargument. If you want to have an alternative narrative, you need to link a major outlet showing her to be a liar. The case has been presented to the public. You don't like the people presenting the case. That doesn't invalidate the case. You must, at this point, present a member of your team making a reasonable, evidenced based deconstruction of her claims. The fact that there isn't any coverage from your side at all of this incredibly well televised and written embarrassment for the legitimacy of crown prosecutors speaks volumes.
The UK is extremely litigious in regards to libel. Her lying would be an act of public libel against the crown prosecutor. She went on TV to talk about it. It's been well covered in everything from the IB Times to The Sun to the Daily Mail (as linked above), as well as fully televised on Piers Morgan. Naturally the team you obviously root for can just refuse to cover any prosecutions which are embarrassing for them and you can simply smugly say "well it's not in any source I personally recognize as valid so it didn't happen."
You can explain it away all you want. Those sources are garbage. They pay for stories, don't confirm sources, or do anything else required of journalism. I get you may be GenZ and have been fed garbage soup your whole life about how "all news bad", but fyi there are still some publications with journalistic standards. You might as well add the National Enquirer from the US. Your sources are such sensationalist rags that they were selling attention long before the internet.
It's not ad-hominem it's ad-practices. For all you know every single one of those articles is based on the same half-baked rumor.
Firstly, IB Times is one of the biggest news sources in existence. They own Newsweek. They do not pay for stories, and they do confirm sources, as they are an institutional capitalized outlet operating out of the UK (the friendliest jurisdiction for libel litigation in the world) that does not want to be sued out of existence. They are not a politicized outlet and generally swing left-wing, in contrast to some of the other sources.
All the sources you claim have standards repeated corporate-state lies during COVID (I know this because they all did). They have zero integrity, they are just mouthpieces for a government that would cover up its lies and never have accountability. I am not GenZ and your assertion that this is a generational issue is another form of ad hominem attack, showing your own personal willingness to dismiss speakers on the basis of perceived identity, as well as fraudulently attribute their speech to groups that you perceive as intellectually lesser. Regardless, it is her word and the case records against the UK government. The latter has been caught lying countless times and is immune from prosecution for doing so, while she and the publications in question can be held accountable for any false claims. Ergo, they have skin in the game, they are taking the risk, and the government is not, and you should assume that she is telling the truth as the incentives are aligned with her to do so.
No bigotry at all. It has nothing to do with his ethnicity. Just that the guy and his followers are notably biased, and they are open about it. Sorry you misunderstood as bigotry my pointing out the clear bias of the owners and your incorrect attribution of ownership. Look at the content section of your original link about IBT. The rag is clearly not run on sound journalistic practices.
Nope. It's about him being vocally biased and claiming his purpose in media is specific to an agenda. That agenda is specifically not journalism. So yeah... Really doesn't have anything to do with the motives you are falsely attributing to me. Might want to read your own sources before you start flinging accusations.
You can try to twist my words however you want, but it seems your usual targets are much more easily manipulated. Sorry buddy.
That is false. There are still decent outlets dedicated to journalism. Yeah, besos and buddies are fkn once reputable journalistic sources. But there are still independent outlets focused on journalistic integrity.
Saying 'it saves life' might sound less dramatic. Using a corporate windows machine certianly feels like self harming, and if I was at a low ebb, it could potentially be fatal.
It probably doesn't save lives, except maybe in some extreme scenarios. But it does save life. Time, the most precious resource, even more precious than money.
It also didn't always work. At no point did the MacBook boot nearly as instantly as an iPad. That said, Jobs' obsession with UX was a powerful driving force and your point stands.
Probably both. Apple Silicon macbooks seem to never actually sleep, they just switch to the energy efficient cores, similar to how iPhones / iPads never truly sleep either. You can tell by leaving e.g. a while loop in zsh running and printing the date + sleep, and when you reopen the lid you'll see quite a few iterations actually completed.
My main problem with liquid glass is it's slow, and the trade off is... a worse user experience in literally every conceivable way? Wow, okay, not a very good deal.
Granted, most downgrades in things like legibility or density are very slight. But they're still downgrades. Downgrading is only worth it if you get something out of it.
You can simply not upgrade to Tahoe and iOS 26. I didn't upgrade and am simply waiting for the next version which will hopefully ditch liquid glass. If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.
> If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.
i felt the same with the ui/ux changes with big sur, and funny enough, when trying the older os after while i realized i was (mostly) fine with look of the new os... the bugs on the other hand... they just seem to pile up with each release...
Easy listening implies that there’s not much of anything there. Nothing surprising or unique about the song or the performance. No insightful message and nothing worth reflecting on after.
I don’t think the alternative is “difficult” for its own sake. Rather, those who would use the term as a pejorative are likely seeking new experiences and viewpoints in their music and get bored by same old diatonic melodies over plain inoffensive grooves. Novelty is a source of dopamine for some.
A lot of jazz music is difficult to the untrained ear, and I have distinct memories of hearing albums that I now feel are too conservative but in my youth thought they were too chaotic. I now understand that it was never difficult from the performer’s perspective - just high level musicians playing the music they hear. I wish everyone could hear jazz just once through the ears of a jazz musician.
I think that playing any kind of live music requires a bit of a two-way accommodation between the needs of the audience and of the musicians. I don't think it needs to be difficult per se, but there needs to be something in it for the musicians.
This might sound self centered, which is a frequent stereotype leveled against jazz musicians, but on the other hand, why bother? There are other things we could be doing with our time. And I don't think that playing "difficult" music is incompatible with delivering a high quality performance, which is always my mission.
I think it’s worth distinguishing “difficult to perform” and “difficult to listen to”. Something like hard rock or metal with lots of flashy solos can be technically impressive, but it’s not difficult to “get” -- when done properly it just gets you in the gut.
The accusation usually levelled at cutting-edge jazz (fairly or unfairly) is that it’s so niche that it is difficult to get; that it’s left behind any pretence at being popular music. Many listeners would even go further and sneer “they’re just playing notes at random!” or “you’re just pretending to like it!”
I do wonder whether good-sounding, easy-to-get music is purely a matter of fashion (being just different enough to be interesting, but conventional enough to be accessible), or if to some degree there’s another axis of skill/difficulty in great pop music, of making it catchy and universal.
I think that since at least from the time jazz began to mature, like maybe in the 1940s, there has been a back-and-forth between crowd-pleasing and dance-able music, and more exploratory and artistic music. The Stan Kenton Orchestra traveled with two separate "books," one for dance gigs and another for concerts. Ellington's material, of which there was a lot, is quite imaginative.
To me that's OK. When jazz ceased to be responsible for forming the backbone of popular music, it triggered a more experimental period, including some ventures that were pretty far out, such as free jazz and free improv. Jazz also experienced a shift in focus -- not uncontroversially -- by becoming an object of academic study.
I think we're in a period right now when bands are seeking more audience friendly material. Now, the big-band I play in is in some sense "enthusiast" music. We have a small but loyal audience of people who happen to like this kind of stuff.
But in another of my bands, two of the players are actively composing new material, and it's arguably listen-able by any standards. Maybe we're in a third era, where we're free from responsibility for making popular music, but also free from responsibility for establishing the stature of jazz as a "serious" art form, and can return to the business of pleasing ourselves and our audiences.
IME it's basically synonymous with "muzak" and "smooth jazz", the kind of bland and mediocre background atmosphere inflicted on mall shoppers (often substituted with the same handful of mindless holiday tunes this time of year).
>Using "easy listening" as a pejorative has always baffled me. Why does music need to be difficult?
Yes, I agree with you, it shouldn't and doesn't need to be.
But some things like music be it Jazz or something else isn't always just matter of listening but way of self establishment, way of life living or pursuing life, way how they seeing themselves and communicate themselves to others. I'm not in to this or studying this or anything else, but it's known behaviour model and you find studies if you like to read about it more.
Right, some Jazz aficionados tend to be like hipsters. Who despise and keep unorthodox anything but their likes would grok. A way of self establishment and having reason to keep themselves different. At least a bit better than others. I'm not claiming everybody are, but I certainly have met few of those quick to classify someone things they like.
I find my self like more West Coast Jazz bands and artists performances older I get. And if I'm not completely wrong it might be a more common trend their share has increased over the past ten or so years playing in radio stations too at least where I live.
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