David > Recent Status Updates

The just-finished chapter got into some of the things I expected, like methods to get your eyes to track faster or read more words at once with peripheral vision. There are some ideas of how to stop subvocalization that I will try but that is a practice that will probably be hard to eliminate!

While the info so far is not useless, there seems to be little in the way of "speed reading technique" here. It's been stuff like "read the chapter titles first" so you know ahead what type of thing you're reading, or "read one sentence per paragraph" in a first reading to get the main ideas. Certainly ideas that have their place, but they don't seem like ideas that improve raw reading speed much.

Another kind of racism described: Binet created a test of general intelligence as a way to ID students in need of remedial help, specifically noting that the measure could not say anything absolute about the person. The IQ still got extracted to become a weapon against any with low scores (such as the poor of a particular nationality), even used to block immigration from poor-scoring countries!

Not really sure what his point was in some of the explication about Eden and human cruelty, other than to say we have a deep capacity to treat ourselves and others poorly. I must be missing some angle here...

In this part on treating yourself as well as you'd treat another, many statements seem...misogynistic? Cruel? Narrow? Not sure how to describe the whole thing about women being "bitchy" to men.
And there's lots of analysis as to why god did things as they were done, rather than why did the writer of Genesis make things so patriarchal, eg why did god put a snake in Eden vs. why did the Genesis writer?

Another disturbing essay related to our food buying, this time discussing how we try to show ourselves through how and what we buy. "Bliss points" in stores. "Harley bars" where men who struggle to know their emotions might find a community to welcome them (if they have a Harley, I suppose). And 'pasture-fed' chickens that never venture through the tiny door to outside but cost 3x of "normal" chickens because of it.

We finished the section on Whole Foods and just-in-time methods used with grocery employees rather than auto parts. Now on to certification and inspections, the ethical features of groceries, like "organic" and "free range" claims. I shouldn't be surprised, but fraud and bribery seem to be popular methods of getting good results in these areas.

Since I'm here updating about this book anyway, will just say: I haven't been looking at this book for the past few months, using other materials instead. It feels like it overpromised and underdelivered - it was not wrong about having a plan for the first week (or two), but once you get that first song done it becomes pretty general. For a rank beginner, more guidance would be better.

Fixing a typo from Jan 12, just can't see a way to edit it directly:

May be misguided but taking another *shot* at trying to conquer at least the very basics of playing a guitar.

Continuing to feel these are good, serious suggestions, made scary by the realization that we could have gone even further in the direction of tyranny if just one or two key officials had decided to help 'former guy' with the big lie.

Just started, really, on this short book. Through 6 of the 20 things. All are presented with examples from autocratic regimes (e.g. Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, etc.), and all seem applicable to the position of the US in 2020 under our then-president.

Looking at two successful remediation programs.

A chapter on assessing children or adults who could use remediation. Includes info about psychological profiles, at least what type of defenses might be seen (anger, fear, depression, etc). Also includes some evaluation tests to give your child to try to ascertain their actual issues, whether decoding, understanding, etc.

Talking about spelling, in relation to learning to read starting from the most predictable phonemes (eg single syllable, similar sounding variations presented together, rather than randomly mixing things to create confusion!).

Many examples of 'code overlap,' where the same letter(s) are used for multiple sounds, with an explanation that doesn't include any cliche rules that are wrong half the time, etc.

The latest chapter provides an overview of how to go about your first ultralearning project: what to research, options for scheduling, ideas about resources and assessment, etc. And the last couple of pages look at other learning methods and how they might be appropriate for some (or even many) of your knowledge acquisition projects, possibly with ultralearning as an additional strategy.

Basically a "fake it till you make it" exercise with posture--standing erect with shoulders back gives the message to others and, maybe more importantly, to yourself that you are confident and capable. This leads to better opportunities and also to feeling better about oneself in general.

"Beginning reading right" covers the basic things for getting started with the recommended method--what to do in K, 1 & 2, basically, with the sequence of things to introduce, indications of time to spend, and lists of words indicating many specific examples to cover. Interesting aspects includes NOT teaching the letter names and not using capital letters till later.

Just covered ideas for experimentation, focused on van Gogh's painting and his taking up the craft relatively late. E.g. he copied the style and framing of others as practice, painted tons of images for practice, tried extremes like colors and amount of paint, etc. Simular things may be useful for us in whatever we are trying to learn.

Important quote:
"[Y]ou need to hold the firm belief that all children can be taught to read. Clear your mind of notions like 'dyslexia,' 'learning disabilities,' and 'developmental delays.' The research data are overwhelming that these concepts are invalid."

Now we've seen a lot of results from studies. Some methods do get results, but they don't help everyone and they can be expensive. Sometimes the gains do not last.

The method described next seems to resolve such issues, providing results quickly and helping even adult students who may be labeled as dyslexic or learning disabled!

We just got a lot of info about where the brains of kids are at when they are normally expected to start reading. Turns out they don't have a lot of logic skills when they're 6, so a good method is crucial.

Lots of examples from Richard Feynman in this chapter on intuition, challenging the assessment that he was a "magician" by noting many ways that he applied "normal" learning processes, even if he did them in more obsessive ways than most others. He was still very "mortal" in areas outside math and physics. He clearly had some special gifts, but others can likely benefit from his methods.

Finished up the 'new foods' chapter with its focus on Slawsa. Fortunately for entrepreneur Julie, things seem to have turned out well, beating the odds of failure. Clearly there was a LOT of hard work and dedication to the cause, and still it seems like a big part was just luck.

Lots of research presented basically to point to the unlikeliness of various issues being the cause of poor reading; e.g. there is really no evidence for "dyslexia." Haven't yet seen the detail of how it is done, but have the promise that poor readers who lack auditory discrimination can be taught that skill, and then can improve their reading.

We ended up diving more deeply into "The English Alphabet Code," covering in detail how language sounds get encoded as letters or combinations of letters. In particular, (written) letters do not inherently imply sounds - the translation went the other direction, from sounds to written letters.

Much info about Johnson's dictionary of English, which managed to stabilize spelling and pronunciation. The section includes numerous examples of the inconsistencies we know English contains, but we don't notice anymore till they are brought to our attention. E.g. why is 'table' not pronounced 'tabble,' since there are 2 consonants after the 'a'? More traps for young readers!

Finishing the chapter on "measuring bodies," where proposals were made that certain physical characteristics were associated with aberrant behavior. Confusingly, this could imply arguing that someone without those characteristics who commits a serious crime like murder should have a light sentence, because it must have been a one-off event, but heavy sentence for small crime if they had a large jaw (e.g.). Poppycock!

Covering 4 primary retention techniques (to try to avoid filling a leaky bucket). They include overlearning, mnemonics, procedural learning, and spaced repetition.

Still loving this book for some reason. Finding out about getting new products introduced to stores-there are a lot of games played, money paid, bankruptcies sometimes resulting.

The book focuses on entrepreneur Julie and her product Slawsa. Seemed intriguing enough that we looked it up online, ended up order a case of jars! Hope it's good!

Languages with complex collections of sound, like English, really require the use of an alphabet to be written (not pictographs or diphones or other things mentioned).

Finally I think I grasped the point that teaching letters should start from the spoken language sounds and progress to the symbols used to represent them, at least that's superior to teaching letter sounds like 'buh' for b.