Sam Moyer - Quantum Country interview - 2019-07-08

“Star-like” user

Synthesis and highlights

This guy’s in an interesting spot. He found the essay interesting, so he scrolled past the review sets for a while without registering. Then he was finally persuaded that they seemed useful, so he registered… but then he didn’t realize that he was “supposed” to go back and answer all the earlier questions! He’s been diligently reviewing with only 1/4 of the questions, and he was really surprised to learn that he was “missing” much of the material! Fun edge case for us to deal with—probably more people are in this boat, but we’re disproportionately unlikely to talk to them.

Raw notes

  • In Washington DC
    • MBA student at U of Maryland
  • How’d he find it?
    • Twitter… not sure where
  • Why’d he read it?
    • tech consultant for the US Navy
    • “I try to help the Navy get innovative ideas in”
    • working on a telecom-related sensor now involving quantum computing (for a lab in San Diego)
    • hadn’t studied qm or qc before, is a humanities major
    • spent a month doing 3blue1brown linear algebra to support the qcvc reading
    • wishes there were a similar link to resources for classical computing
      • e.g. kind of knew what a bit or a logic gate was, but didn’t grasp the implications
  • First impressions
    • explanations about pedagogy really resonated
    • “This is a really cool tool, and I’m really on board with this as an experiment. I just wanted to do it from that point of view.”
    • “One thing I really liked was that the way it was written was really welcoming.”
    • at first skipped the questions
    • “I’m not going to enter my email address on this random web site”
    • “compared to the amount of reading there is, the questions are very quick”
    • thought he’d collected all the questions but hadn’t!
  • Sense of progress?
    • “repetition makes me remember: I remember that damn Einstein quote now, word for word!”
    • was somewhat confused by the review intervals, but isn’t perturbed by not understanding
  • didn’t notice the levels on the cards
  • noticed the graph, and interpreted it as “I’m on track”, feeling some sense of progress
    • “If I follow this, then I know this.”
  • it would be great to vary the wording of the questions if possible
  • Will add all questions to Sam’s account

Prep notes

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Last updated 2023-07-13.