Brass Tacks

Memoria 2025 was a one-day, ~120-person unconference/festival on spaced repetition, incremental reading, and memory systems, held at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA, on September 22, 2025, and organized by Saul Munn and Raj Thimmiah.

For the purposes of this transcript, some high-pitched clicking sounds have been removed.

[Note: this piece is still very much a draft, but (a) I thought it might be useful enough to the occasional person that it was worth posting, and more proximately, (b) I needed to post something for a blog-a-thon I was hosting.

(this is geared toward events of size 50-5000, and probably a lot less useful for e.g. a casual gathering with 5-10 friends than e.g. a 100-person weekend conference.) do before anything else: goals, date, and venue. why figure out goals, pick a date, and…

Epistemic status: splitting hairs.

You were (probably) linked here from some advice.

Alex Lawsen used a great metaphor on the 80k After Hours podcast: [1] A few notes on the quotes: (1) The quotes are slightly out of order — I’ve rearranged them to make a bit more sense, but I’m pretty confident that this still represents Alex’s views fai…

when i come across good quotes, i write them down. the below are those i collected between my last quotes post and the day i published this — november 19, 2023 through august 5, 2024.

This is a cross-post of a piece I wrote for the Manifold Substack; here's a link to the original post.

This post is not titled “Things You Should Do,” because these aren’t (necessarily) things you should do.

Let’s say you’re a billionaire.

Hello!

0.

0: Navigation I’m aiming for a reader who knows what “prediction markets” and “adverse selection” are, who likes the first and not the second, and who enjoys systems that have neatly aligned incentives.

when i come across good quotes, i write them down. the below are those i collected between october 2022 and november 2023.

of all the things that you do, what do you think you do best?

Edit 4/1/2024: I no longer use this deck.

Multiple-choice test scores are meant to reflect a student’s knowledge.

ask chatgpt google it, see if someone else has already solved the problem if it’s something a research paper might have solved, try asking elicit set a 5-minute timer, and think about the problem for 5 minutes. don’t think for 1-2 mins then go do the dish…