> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.

The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.

[1] https://colab.research.google.com/github/open-spaced-repetit...

The former interpretation's popularisation does unfortunately seem to be the outcome of it being embedded within the epistemic ecologies of language learning and medical school, two situations where Anki is almost inevitable if one is to succeed, but also where its unique power of meaning making is most neglected. As he writes in "Building a better memory system" [1], targeting the audience of the creative expert seems to be where the most tractability in expanding and improving a mnemonic practice lies. I hope such progress continues in the vein of current open-source and community-oriented advancements such as FSRS - the best feature of which is making switching from SuperMemo all the more obvious ;)

[1] https://michaelnotebook.com/bbms/index.html

They suffer from being too easy to get wrong and too hard to get right, as well as your brain often just recognising the pattern of the words in the text rather than the information itself.

If you want to make good cards in general, you need to think more in terms of building up a detailed corpus. Interlink cards, establish key concepts in a field, focus on relations between atomic units rather than individual atomic or non-atomic units. In addition, include images to serve as useful stimulation for the visual cortex. The only real advantage I can see to clozes is a marginal speed increase.

It's also worth noting that I notice some people will often conflate, usually accidentally, holding strong opinions (politically or otherwise) with not being exposed to a wide enough range of opinions/not being educated enough.

In addition to this, people will often hold a series of political views out of ideological consistency, rather than tribalism, a factor which strangely is minimised in the discourse surrounding it.

I find that, as long as you're with reasonably politically aware adults, you can have positive conversations as long as you are both aware of your moral bases and discuss in good faith.

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A comparison can be made to other positions which may be a tad extreme here, but I think it's arguably appropriate. If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room. However, even if attempts are made to persuade said people with logical arguments, often they will continue to hold such beliefs to the same strength or even stronger than before.

Is it appropriate to silence people for holding specific views? No. But ultimately some compromise has to be made. A decent solution may be the use of a debate section, but I'm sure better ones exist.

I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.

Whilst there isn't inherently incorrect or morally wrong about detransitioning in itself, often when brought up it can lead a person to an idea which is incorrect - essentially applying the anecdotal evidence of a Reddit thread to all situations.

Thus, moderators of subreddits (and administrators, although I think that whilst it is bad when they do so, it isn't as common as many would believe) feel conflicted on the matter. Should they allow the discussion to continue, almost guaranteeing that somebody is going to form misconceptions from the thread? Or should they shut it down, stifling free speech but at the same time reducing the level of overall animosity towards minorities in the community, and preventing people from forming misconceptions?

Ultimately, I think that it should always really come down on the side of free speech, as long as they aren't being blatantly hostile. However, in my opinion, if we really want to have a positive "marketplace of ideas", as some describe it, we really need to educate people from a young age on logical reasoning, cognitive biases and argumentative fallacies the same way we would teach history, geography or the arts. Whilst I think that's unlikely to happen in our current political climate, given that keeping people uneducated is a very effective way to make them vote for those who make the most compelling surface-level arguments, it seems to be the only good solution for the conflict laid out above.

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