*Incremental Reading as a Tool for Improved Learning and Research*
What is incremental reading?
(Note, I’m talking about incremental reading as it is implemented in SuperMemo, not as in Anki’s plugin, polar, or dendro)
Summary: allows for acquiring vast amounts of information efficiently
Many people are already familiar with spaced repetition, which is a good way for memorizing things for long-term recall.
The problem with just using spaced repetition is that it makes memorizing things easy but it doesn’t give you a good system for learning things before memorizing them. If you want to go through say, a hundred articles from the original sequences it would be extremely tedious to memorize the important parts in Anki, for example.
Incremental reading fixes this issue by making it easy to:
1. collect all the information you want to learn in one place (electronic material at least)
2. prioritize what you have collected (when you have limited time, prioritizing is helpful for spending time on most important material)
3. Process and break down what you’ve prioritized (focusing on the parts of material that actually matter)
4. retain what you’ve processed (with spaced repetition, but a much better algorithm than anki)
How does this apply to EA?
Summary: improves creative/problem solving abilities significantly
If you want to be an expert, regardless of field, knowledge plays a large role. The problem with acquiring knowledge sufficient to be an expert is that at some point you may end up forgetting at the same rate you’re learning new things. Traditionally, the way most experts overcome this is by slowly amassing experience over years.
Incremental reading allows for linear knowledge acquisition which enables you to become an expert much more quickly than through traditional learning. For anyone in EA doing academic research, incremental reading could substantially improve their abilities.
Conservatively, I would expect an improvement of 20% in knowledge acquisition rate and problem solving ability in a proficient user over 10 years. Though multiples higher than that wouldn’t surprise me.
Much of that comes from incremental reading enabling users to generalize more effectively. If you work as a psychologist, while you might remember some of the things you read about other subjects, you would end up knowing the most about the things you apply a lot and forget the things you don’t. Incremental reading makes it practical to remember things from other subjects even if you won’t use them daily. The associative power of knowledge means that by having familiarity with other subjects your ability to solve problems improves. There are few problems whose solutions lie in a single realm alone.
What would I present on?
What incremental reading entails and what benefits you end up with from using it, to allow people to decide if it could be worth learning for them.
If I have time, I could go into a brief primer on what makes learning pleasurable which ties into what makes (at least for me) incremental reading the best learning method there is.
re: your second bullet point, I volunteered for door-knocking, and none of the other volunteers I knew/met (which was basically all of them) were either asked to come doorknock or offered travel subsidies by the campaign team. Some volunteers did reach out to their friends to encourage them to come help out (though the campaign didn’t ask people to do this). I would guess that’s what happened with the message your friend got.
That said, I really appreciate how carefully you’re trying to think through this. I wish we saw more in-depth red-teaming and criticism of popular ideas floating around in the community.
Edit: I checked with the campaign and they explicitly said that they didn’t pay for anyones flight nor offer to pay for anyones flight