This study is from 2015.

Right?

I think it’s exactly a decade later, 2025. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs

Fiber. Fiber helps you feel full, so it is harder to over-eat fruit in comparison with chocolate bars, gummy bears, or even fruit juice.

To frame thought experiments and their limitations, there’s a couple of recommendations.

A fundamental one is Dave Snowden’s Cynefin. It helps you match reality with how you’re thinking about reality. Cynefin helps to appropriately deal with thought experiments like the Raven’s Paradox. Similarly, there are other texts that help you critically frame thought experiments, such as texts on pragmatism, contextual functionalism, and relational frame theory. If I’m to recommend a single book, I’d recommend ACT in Context.

Now, as to thought experiments proper, there’s Daniel Dennet’s Intuition Pumps. That book holds plenty of thought experiments that I like.

I have another recommendation. It is a bit tangential, but maybe you’d be interested in George Lakoff’s framing. Lakoff would argue that frames are at least sometimes exactly the same thing as a thought experiment.

Emily Nagoski’s Burnout has some practical advice, but the single most powerful thing you could be doing right now is mindfulness meditation.

Why? Because burnout usually comes associated with a set of bad experiences that we learn to shut out. That is why we need to re-learn to experience life instead of shutting it out.

How can you do it? I personally like the Healthy Minds app and program, but there are plenty online.

Other tips? Yes. Do Loving-Kindness meditation too. It makes you happy quickly and improves your relationships with people. This, in turn, improves your work.

How am I so sure? Check out Sonja Lyubomirsky’s meta-analyses. In them, she shows that the data overwhelmingly shows that happiness is associated with, temporally precedes, and experimentally induces success in work, relationships, and many other domains of life.

Finally, I’d suggest learning the basics of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Why? Mindfulness will reconnect you with your experience and avoid rumination, but ACT will also ask you to find meaning in your life. Work can be meaningful if you’re not ruminating and you do the necessary values work. I love Hayes’ A Liberated Mind, but, again, there are other resources out there.

I posted a longer response but I think it didn’t get through or something.

Basically, I look at this from the point of view of Cynefin, and Estuarine Mapping. If you look at base and superstructure elements, you can look at them as ACTANTS of the system.

Whether you choose base-superstructure or Cynefin just shows that sometimes we can describe the same phenomena in different ways. And I take this idea from both Mary Midgley and Donna Haraway’s positioned knowledge.

How could we look at social dynamics? One way is Dave Snowden’s Cynefin. From that perspective, complex systems have actors, constructors, and constraints. The three of them are called ACTANTS. How do ACTANTS relate to base and superstructure? Well, each ACTANT of the system could be classified as base or superstructure.

Why am I saying that each ACTANT could be classified as base or superstructure? Because we should be open to the possibility that there are different ways of looking at the same thing in the world. We can look at a mountain from the north, from the south, from the base, or from the peak. Similarly, we can look at social relations as base and superstructure or as complex Cynefin systems (or other points of view!).

How do you know whether to classify ACTANTS into base and superstructure or not? Context. Use the pragmatic criterion: Is it helpful to classify the ACTANTS into base and superstructure in this particular context?

As the other comment says, Anki already changes dynamically so that you study the hard stuff more. Just make sure to mark whether you got the answer and how hard it was to get it.

Now, here’s something that could help you, perhaps more than any multiple choice exam could ever help you with: when studying, make sure to not only blurt the answer but also use elaborative recall. In other words, make an effort to think and do so mindfully (rather than mindlessly).

Why? You learn through effort and through mindfully (and not mindlessly) connecting the new knowledge with what you already know.

You could even structure your elaborative recall through Visible Thinking Routines.

How does that look like?

• You start your study session.
• You get an Anki card.
• You remember this card clearly, and so you say it out loud and then check.
• You get it right. No need for elaborative recall. Better to focus your energy elsewhere.
• You get another Anki card.
• This one’s tough. You’re unsure.
• You say out loud why it could be any of the two answers you think could be right.
• You get the answer and sure enough it was one of the two you thought.
• You decide to do elaborative recall so that you learn this well. To guide your elaborative recall, you decide to use the thinking routine “Connect-Extend-Challenge”.
• So you do elaborative recall through a thinking routine. You do it by talking out loud or writing it out.
• This step may sound silly but make sure to celebrate so that you feel pride and satisfaction for doing something that takes effort (especially if you’re struggling with the habit of studying).
• Then you move on to the next Anki card.