Maysam Emadi - Quantum Country interview - 2019-11-19

Maysam Emadi Quantum Country interview 2019 11 19 - YouTube

Maysam’s been using QC since June. Has 2 months retention in QCVC, almost 2 months in search. Has 1 month in teleportation. 31 review sessions. https://quantum.country/debug/userJourney?email=maysamemadi@gmail.com

Highlights

• Maysam’s a PhD particle physicist who’s curious about QC in a background sense. There isn’t anything in particular he plans to do with it, but he likes talking about it with colleagues.
• He’s a big Anki user, and he really appreciates that we’ve written the cards for him: he views that as a huge time sink.
• He believes that the spaced repetition review helps him pick up new concepts more deeply. He’s experienced this most acutely in conversations with peers—now he can really use topics he’s read about, instead of just feeling a vague sense that he’d read something about this.
  • He feels he could explain the concepts he’s studied in this way to others.
• He didn’t have much emotional reaction to the new progress mechanics, but he’s only done one session with them, so he’s sort of been dropped in the middle of them. I don’t make too much of that.

Raw notes

• PhD in particle physics
  • Has Mike + Ike
  • Has an interest in learning about QC, close to his research
  • Is doing data science now
• Adopted Anki via ALTM.
  • Is using it to help him read textbooks and papers
  • Uses it regularly, thinks it’s really effective
  • Finds he’s able to discuss new concepts with the team better
  • Hard to say if it’s a big difference relative to others
  • Feels serendipitous: comes up in conversation, he can use it as opposed to “I vaguely remember something about this but I don’t have time to look it up now…”
• What do you think about us making the questions?
  • “That’s the best feature of Quantum Country”
  • Making questions really slows down progress
  • “I don’t need to think about ‘what do I ankify here?’”
• Because he’s experienced, some of the questions in QCVC feel unnecessary
• About the exponential progress curve:
  • The old progress thing was hard to follow
  • Not a big emotional reaction to the curve
• “I know that if I’m struggling to remember the answer that’s the best time to answer the question”
  • (knows this because of ALTM)
  • Clearly this is a story we need to get people telling themselves.
• Wishes Mike + Ike were converted to this medium.
  • “This seems to be a very fun and efficient way of learning about it.”
• “The more topics of my interest presented in this way, the better”
  • “It makes learning them easier for me. These are fields I’m really curious about. I want to maybe do side-projects and think deeply about the fundamentals.”
  • e.g. wishes he could have this for genomics
• Could you explain teleportation and its implications?
  • Yes, and he recently had such a conversation!
  • “I really liked some of the more high-level questions in this article.” (e.g. that all outcomes are equal probability) “The fact that that’s one of the cards is really valuable.”
• While reading…
  • “I sort of looked forward to those sections. They acted as checkpoints.”
  • Helps with reading across multiple sessions.
• Uses Linguist to learn German.
  • Spaced repetition for vocal.