Max Görlitz

• Max Görlitz 4 Dec 2020 10:54 UTC

  4 points

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  on: MaxG’s Shortform

  Hey there, I was just wondering if there are any fellow EAs who are using SuperMemo?

  Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS) have generally become more popular over the last years. As a medical student, I have personally read tons of stuff about effective learning and how to win the fight against forgetting. I have probably spent hundreds of hours with Anki, which might be more familiar to people.

  For a few months now, I’ve been trying out SuperMemo (https://​​supermemopedia.com/​​wiki/​​SuperMemo). Especially with the feature of Incremental Reading, I feel like many people in the EA community could benefit from using it.

  Main features:

  • allows you to remember facts with the best Spaced Repetition Algorithm I know of

  • read hundreds of articles/​papers “at the same time” by making incremental progress on each one

  • have all your reading sorted by priority and connected in a knowledge tree structure

  Furthermore it can potentially be used for things like boosting creativity and incremental writing

  The biggest hurdle to overcome when starting SuperMemo is the learning curve. For a beginner, it can be a bit unintuitive and many people initially dislike the UI.

  Luckily, the community seems to be growing pretty well right now and there is more and more high quality information online (see https://​​supermemo.wiki/​​learn/​​#/​​). There are even people who can help you get started and offer 1on1 teaching.

  I’m just wondering if any of you have heard about SuperMemo or maybe have personal experience?

  What links here?

  • What We Owe The Fu­ture: a Flash­card-based Summary by Florence (12 Sep 2022 12:24 UTC; 31 points)

• Max Görlitz 14 Dec 2020 10:39 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: MaxG’s Shortform

  Hi Aaron, great question.
  Let’s get the obvious out of the way: For people who are still in university, in study-intensive subjects, it’s a great advantage to use a Spaced Repetition System like SuperMemo. To me it feels empowering not to have to worry about forgetting. It’s a common experience to feel very frustrated to study so much for an exam, only to forget most of it afterwards. This doesn’t happen to me anymore, because I just know the algorithm will take care and as long as I do my daily repitions, my knowledge will get transfered into long-term memory.

  Another obvious use case is learning languages. An SRS can greatly help you to learn a language much faster and this seems to be the most common usage.

  One not so obvious advantage is about creativity/​innovation. In my understanding, creativity has a lot to do with connecting ideas from different fields, ones you wouldn’t initially notice as being related to each other. Imagine you study two different domains, e.g. Biology and Economics. Actively remembering important information from both of those might result in two at first glance disparate ideas appearing in your mind in close succession. This is what leads to creativity, you making the connection between those. This is less likely to happen if you store your information mostly externally, e.g. in Evernote.

  To answer your question more straightforward: So far, I have found it most useful for studying medicine in University and learning French/​Spanish.

• Max Görlitz 22 Dec 2020 10:37 UTC

  7 points

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  on: I made a video on en­g­ineered pandemics

  Hi! Just watched the video and I think it’s super well produced, good job.

  I was surprised how you managed to summarise a lot of the knowledge I already had on this topic in under 15 minutes.

  Furthermore, I have talked to lots of people who mentioned that EA seems underrepresented in video format. YouTube seems like a good opportunity here that could be used more. Regarding this, I think this is valuable work. Also I like that you didn’t give it the Effective Altruism “stamp”. There should be more discussion on when it’s appropriate to publicly advertise EA as a concept and when it’s better to just introduce a topic we’re concerned about without explicitely relating it to EA. This is related to the idea of external movement building:

• Max Görlitz 22 Dec 2020 13:27 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Jeroen Willems’s comment on: I made a video on en­g­ineered pandemics

  Good thinking! Attention spans are short enough these days so 15min seems plenty :)

[Feed­back Re­quest] The com­pound in­ter­est of sav­ing lives

• Max Görlitz 22 Dec 2020 20:50 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: The com­pound in­ter­est of sav­ing lives

  Hey Max, thank you for the links! I guess now I have some quality reading material over the holidays :)

• Max Görlitz 22 Dec 2020 20:56 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: The com­pound in­ter­est of sav­ing lives

  I like the framing of “optimum population trajectory”, that’s an idea I haven’t encountered before. Thanks!

• Max Görlitz 27 Mar 2021 11:59 UTC

  5 points

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  on: MaxG’s Shortform

  An idea about AI in medicine:

  Fecal microbiota transplants have been gaining prominence as we discover that many diseases seem to have a relation with the gut microbiome. There seems to be therapeutic potential for certain gut infections, inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and functional gastrointestinal disorders.

  What if you could use new high-throughput sequencing techniques like Nanopore to figure out what kinds of bacteria constitute the microbiome of tens of thousands of people?

  Combine this with tons of computational power and the latest machine learning algorithms to find relationships between certain illnesses and symptoms and those people’s microbiome. Maybe this would allow finding the perfect fecal transplant donor to reverse the relevant symptoms.

• Max Görlitz 29 Mar 2021 12:58 UTC

  1 point

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  on: MaxG’s Shortform

  Does anybody have examples of pre-registered self experiments or thoughts about the usefulness of self experiments?

  I am only aware of Alexey Guzey’s experiment on sleep.

  Recently I have become quite interested in improving my running with heart rate training and read a lot about the related physiology. I would like to try out Zone 2 Training by using heart rate as a proxy and experiment with this in a structured way.

• Max Görlitz 2 Apr 2021 10:14 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Tristan Cook’s comment on: MaxG’s Shortform

  Cool! I knew gwern but wasn’t aware of his experiments, thank you.

• Max Görlitz 10 Apr 2021 6:51 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Quadratic Pay­ments: A Primer (Vi­talik Bu­terin, 2019)

  Hi! I really liked this post and think there should be more discussions about these algorithms on here. I just wanted to point out what he writes in the penultimate paragraph:

  One particular cause dear to me personally is what I call “entrepreneurial public goods”: public goods that in the present only a few people believe are important but in the future many more people will value. In the 19th century, contributing to abolition of slavery may have been one example; in the 21st century I can’t give examples that will satisfy every reader because it’s the nature of these goods that their importance will only become common knowledge later down the road, but I would point to life extension and AI risk research as two possible examples.

  What he says here is almost the same as what we mean when we talk about the search for “Cause X”. In this lingo, cause X is a public good which is currently underfunded.

  Maybe a mechanism like quadratic funding could even help us with allocating funds to researchers working on niche topics? An example could be insect suffering: Suppose that many people think that there is some chance that insect suffering might be a big deal, but very few people care deeply about it (I guess insects are hard to relate to because they are so different from us).

  It would cost very little to all those people who think there is a small chance of importance, because initially the funding is cheap. Yet due to the nature of the algorithm, research into insect suffering would receive a strong subsidy.

  Am I getting this right?

• Max Görlitz 10 Apr 2021 9:11 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: Quadratic Pay­ments: A Primer (Vi­talik Bu­terin, 2019)

  Cool! This website looks good as well but I haven’t tried it yet: quadraticvote.co

• Max Görlitz 13 May 2021 18:33 UTC

  6 points

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  on: AMA: Tim Fer­riss, Michael Pol­lan, and Dr. Matthew W. John­son on psychedelics re­search and philanthropy

  Hi! Thanks for doing this. I read How To Change Your Mind a few years ago and quite enjoyed it, which lead me to following this space since then. A few questions come to mind right now but I’ll post them separately. Feel free to answer what is interesting and ignore what seems less important.

  First off: How do you see the regulatory environment around psychedelics changing in the next decade? IIRC from this podcast with Rick Doblin, it looks like MDMA could be decriminalized in the US in the next years and psilocybin might follow a few years after that. Is this correct?

• Max Görlitz 13 May 2021 18:37 UTC

  22 points

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  on: AMA: Tim Fer­riss, Michael Pol­lan, and Dr. Matthew W. John­son on psychedelics re­search and philanthropy

  How much evidence is there for microdosing having an effect significantly larger than placebo? From this conversation with James Fadiman I got the impression that it is more underwhelming than I thought.

• Max Görlitz 13 May 2021 18:38 UTC

  31 points

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  on: AMA: Tim Fer­riss, Michael Pol­lan, and Dr. Matthew W. John­son on psychedelics re­search and philanthropy

  What is the best case against psychedelics being an important area?

• Max Görlitz 13 May 2021 18:45 UTC

  15 points

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  on: AMA: Tim Fer­riss, Michael Pol­lan, and Dr. Matthew W. John­son on psychedelics re­search and philanthropy

  How do you feel about people flying to e.g. Jamaica and going on psilocybin retreats? Is this a net positive or could it be a problem for changing the image of psychedelics towards a legal medicine?

• Max Görlitz 13 May 2021 18:49 UTC

  29 points

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  on: AMA: Tim Fer­riss, Michael Pol­lan, and Dr. Matthew W. John­son on psychedelics re­search and philanthropy

  How could psychedelics-assisted therapy be scaled up? Isn’t this super hard because you need at least two trained professionals on multiple lengthy occasions? Where will those people come from?

• Max Görlitz 13 May 2021 18:54 UTC

  3 points

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  on: AMA: Tim Fer­riss, Michael Pol­lan, and Dr. Matthew W. John­son on psychedelics re­search and philanthropy

  What is especially neglected but promising within psychedelic science?

• Max Görlitz 23 Aug 2021 7:09 UTC

  4 points

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  on: “The Precipice” by Toby Ord flash­cards now live :)

  Thanks for sharing Alex.

  I am also a big fan of Anki and SuperMemo and have spent hundreds of hours using both. Issa Rice already put up some great links to Master How To Learn and SuperMemo Guru under your previous post. I also wanted to point to the SuperMemo community wiki. Incremental reading in SuperMemo has been really useful to me and I think lots of people could benefit from it, but it is harder to get into. The community over there is really helpful. Also if anyone has questions about it, feel free to message me. I have also thought about writing up my thoughts regarding effective learning with those programs but haven’t gotten around to doing so. Partly also because there are already some decent resources, although I would agree that none are close to optimum yet.

• Max Görlitz 16 Nov 2021 10:58 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Sleep: effec­tive ways to im­prove it

  Thanks for writing this up, this is a good list. I used to struggle with getting to sleep for years, taking 1-2 hours to fall asleep on most days. To everybody with sleep problems, I want to encourage you to experiment with some of the above mentioned interventions. It is possible to improve your sleep. I have tried most of the things on this list and have had great success.

  Just as an anecdotal data point:

  One of the problems I had specifically was just going to bed way too late because I didn’t get tired earlier than midnight. Being a night-owl isn’t a problem per se, but honestly the world is more tailored to benefit early-risers. It sucks to have to cut short on your sleep because you have a mandatory Uni course at 08:00.

  For a few months I have been taking this 300mcg melatonin every day exactly at 17:00 after reading this article. It reliably makes me tired at 22:00-23:00 and I fall asleep astoundingly quickly if I go to bed in that time range. Something interesting I noticed is that when I go to bed later than that time, e.g. at 02:00, my tiredness is gone again and I find it much harder to fall asleep. Not sure if this is just placebo. Keep in mind that this will vary from person to person and my experience is probably different from yours. Also I do at least 5 other things to sleep better so there are many confounders and I don’t know how much to attribute to using melatonin. Just experiment and see what works for you.

  (I’m not a doctor and this is not medical advice)