Polym

In summary:

Curate timeless subjects.
Leverage existing expert material.
Discard low-quality notes.
Diversify how you recall and reason.

That’s how you actually retain what you learn.

#4 Ensure active learning is truly active.

After reviewing flashcards a few times, you end up remembering the wording, not the concept.

Real active learning mixes formats: open-ended prompts, variable phrasing, multiple flashcard versions.

#3 Stop reviewing bad notes.

If your notes read like “They said it was important,” you’re reviewing ambiguity, not knowledge.

Borrow from people who’ve already structured the material clearly.

Premade sets can be found on Quizlet and Polym.

#2 Don’t spend hours making notes.

Note-taking can feel productive, but much of it is duplication.

Universities publish excellent lecture notes for free: MIT, Stanford, and others.

Start there, then refine.

#1 Stop reviewing what doesn’t matter.

Limit reviewing outdated or hyper-specific content (how do you feel about your cross-chain NFT notes these days?).

Instead, curate subjects that will still matter in a decade.

Wikipedia’s outline of knowledge is a good place for inspiration.

Stop forgetting what you learn.

Research indicates a decline in critical thinking, making this the moment to preserve your mind.

Here are 4 ways to improve your learning:

Classical logic demands binary truth values, but fuzzy logic acknowledges gradations. "John is tall" might be 0.8 true for someone 6'2" and 0.3 true for someone 5'8".

Scope ambiguity.

"Every professor teaches some subject" has two readings: each professor teaches at least one subject, or there's one subject every professor teaches.

Scope ambiguity occurs when quantifier order creates multiple interpretations.

Modal logic extends classical logic by adding operators that express necessity, possibility, or impossibility.

Legal language relies on this: “The defendant could have acted differently” (possibility), “The contract must be honored” (necessity), “Evidence cannot be admitted” (impossibility).

They didn’t just ask questions, they changed the way we think.

Universal quantifiers make claims about every member of a domain: "All mammals breathe air" encompasses whales, bats, and humans equally.

Existential quantifiers require only one instance: "Some mammals live underwater" is satisfied by whales alone.

A material conditional is a logical statement of the form “If P then Q,” which is considered false only when P is true and Q is false.

For example, “If I am the Queen of England, then I live in London” counts as true because the premise is false.

“Some politicians are honest" and "Some politicians are not honest" can both be true simultaneously.

Existential quantifiers (“some” in this case) affirm that at least one instance of a property exists, without implying exclusivity.

Validity ensures an argument's conclusion follows logically from its premises, yet validity provides no guarantee of truth.

Soundness requires both logical structure and factual accuracy in the premises themselves.

Example: "All birds can fly, penguins are birds, therefore penguins can fly"

They didn’t just ask questions, they changed the way we think.

Your brain doesn’t record everything—it selects. Here's how it decides what to keep.

Your world isn’t just what you sense

Why do people really buy?

Review key drivers of human behavior.

Thanks, found this interesting: "Portia fimbriata has been observed to perform vibratory behavior for three days until the victim decided to investigate. They time invasions of webs to coincide with light breezes that blur the vibrations that their approach causes". Quite the species!

Every decision, emotion, and reflex can be traced to the intricate design of the brain.

Retain what you learn.

Bayesian statistics simplified