Author Archives: Pablo Stafforini

Ear training Anki deck

I have created an Anki deck with sound samples of around 40 of the most widely used chords, in root position.  (This deck is unlikely to be of interest to non-musicians.)  The deck may be found here [archived].

I may add more chords, or chord inversions, in the coming months.

A New Donor Movement Seeks to Put Data Ahead of Passion

by Ben Gose

The Chronicle of Philanthropy, November 3, 2013

Sam Bankman-Fried, who will graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the spring, recently aced an internship at a finance company, and he thinks he could make a nice salary putting his math skills to work on stock-trading strategies.

But Mr. Bankman-Fried is even more keen on making the world a better place, and he’s passionate about animal rights. He has considered pursuing work at the Humane League, a charity that focuses on reducing cruelty to farm animals.

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Gamified learning: a list of good resources

The main problem in learning a new skill is maintaining the required motivation and discipline, especially in the early stages.  Gamification deals with this problem better than any of the other approaches I’m familiar with.  Over the past few months, I’ve managed to study maths, languages, coding, Chinese characters, and more on a daily basis, with barely any interruptions.  I accomplished this by simply taking advantage of the many gamified learning resources available online for free.  Here are the sites I have tried and can recommend:

  • Codecademy. For learning computer languages (Ruby, Python, PHP, and others).
  • Duolingo. For learning the major Indo-European languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).
  • Khan Academy. For learning maths. They also teach several other disciplines, but they offer mostly videos with only a few exercises.
  • Memrise. For memorizing stuff, especially vocabulary.  The courses vary in quality; the ones on Mandarin Chinese are excellent.
  • Vocabulary.com.  For memorizing English vocabulary.

Am I missing anything? Please leave your suggestions in the comments section. Thanks!

Summary of The First 20 Hours, by Josh Kaufman

This post summarizes chapters one to three of The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast, by Josh Kaufman. These chapters introduce a number of general principles of rapid skill acquisition and effective learning. The remaining chapters, on yoga, programming, touch typing, go, ukelele and windsurfing, are meant to illustrate how the author applied those principles to learning each of these skills. As one reviewer has pointed out, however, there is “relatively little connection between what [the author] writes about (say) the history and practice of Yoga and the principles expounded in the first few chapters.” For this reason, these chapters are omitted in the summary below.

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Comments now enabled

When I started this blog, I expected to post material–such as bibliographies or recommendations–which I thought people wouldn’t be interested in commenting on.  Since then, I have posted some items which have inspired a few folks to contact me in private.  So I’ve now decided to enable comments.

How to transcribe recordings

Over the past few months, I’ve spent quite some time transcribing talks and conversations by effective altruists, and have in the process gained some experience from which I think others might benefit.  The instructions below were originally written for a friend.

You may transcribe the recording yourself, or you may pay other people to do the transcribing.

Doing it yourself

Though I’ve never calculated how long it takes me to transcribe a conversation of a given duration, it is generally estimated that it takes five hours of work to transcribe an hour of audio.  With only a few exceptions, these days I only transcribe myself conversations that contain confidential information, since the costs of paying someone else are comparatively low (see below).  Here’s how I do it:

  1. Download and install Foobar2000.
  2. On the menu, go to Library > Configuration, and click on Keyboard Shortcuts, then on Add new.
  3. On the ‘Filter list by’ search box, enter ‘Back by 1 second’, and click on that option (under [main] > Playback > Seek).
  4. On the ‘Key’ field, press Shift+Ctrl+Win+Left arrow.
  5. Tick the ‘Global hotkey’ box.
  6. Repeat steps 3-5, entering ‘Play or pause’ on the search box and Shift+Ctrl+Win+Right arrow on the ‘Key’ field.  Remember to tick the ‘Global hotkey’ box.
  7. Start the recording you want to transcribe.
  8. Now you can keep Foobar2000 minimized, and focus solely on the document where you are typing the transcription.  You can play or pause the recording by pressing Shift+Ctrl+Win+Right arrow, and rewind the recording by one second by pressing Shift+Ctrl+Win+Left arrow.

Paying others to do it for you

“In some countries, there are people whose job it is to waste their own time for people who can afford to pay not to waste their own.” (Robert Levine, The Power of Persuasion, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003, p. 74.)

Satvik Beri first drew my attention to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where one can hire workers to transcribe audio recordings for about USD 0.30 per minute.  This blog post provides detailed instructions on how to do it.  Alternatively, you can use specialized sites like Rev, which charge about USD 1 per minute.  I have no experience with Rev, and strongly recommend trying mTurk before exploring other, more expensive options.

The best resources on becoming more productive

Of all the resources on productivity that I’m familiar with, these are the ones I’ve found most useful.  If you think I’m missing something, please let me know.

The resources are listed in rough descending order of usefulness. I recommend going through these resources one at a time, starting from the first one, and proceeding to the next one only after you have succeeded in implementing at least the most valuable bits of advice.

Anki deck and Google Form for The Feeling Good Handbook, by David Burns

I have created a public Anki deck [archived] including “cognitive distortions”, “ten ways to untwist your thinking”, and “ways to challenge automatic thoughts”, from David Burns’s The Feeling Good Handbook. I have also created a Google Form based on Burns’s “Daily Mood Log“. If you suffer from anxiety, depression or some related mood disorder, this may help.

Summary of ‘Time management’, by Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch’s lecture on time management is, in my opinion, the best presentation on productivity techniques ever recorded. I have watched the talk at least half a dozen times, I learned something new and important on each occasion. The summary below leaves out the funny jokes and engaging stories, focusing exclusively on the actionable bits of advice.

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