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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I learn better when I frame learning as Vengeance for losses incurred through ignorance, and you might too, published by chaosmage on October 15, 2022 on LessWrong. THE OBSERVATION My main point is in the title: I have found that when I consciously learn "with a vengeance", aiming to avenge whatever I lost because I have not learnt the thing earlier, I learn markedly better. I feel more motivated to learn, and recall seems clearly better. (I have not formally compared recall before and after, this is subjective judgement but I'm very confident.) I have experimented with this for about 2 weeks. So far the effect does not seem to diminish; if there is any change at all, it is maybe getting slightly stronger. Subjectively, this changes my failures from something to mourn or to be embarrassed about, into "something to be avenged" which is a driving motivation. It feels like I'm owning my mistakes more readily. I acknowledge them more readily and am more comfortable thinking and talking about them. And the learning from them feels something like gleeful, justified or gloating - definitely more powerful and satisfying. I would like some of you to try this, and to report back whether this works for you too, because I have never heard anyone else talk about consciously trying to do this, so it might be new, and it helps me a lot so if it helps others too, it seems potentially extremely useful. THE NARRATIVE I was having a great argument about God with a very good friend who is a sophisticated theologian, and who pointed me to a podcast with the German theologian Siegfried Zimmer. Zimmer was talking about theodicy, the classic problem of theism where an almighty, all-knowing, all-good God seems impossible to square with the pointless suffering we observe. He did not have a satisfactory answer, he did manage to admit that, he did not manage to draw the obvious conclusion, so nothing new there. But in his argument he gave a really interesting reason to discard all the usual theistic answers. He said an answer to suffering is only good if you can say it to someone who is intensely and pointlessly suffering, to his or her face, and find it helps. I was very impressed with this idea and concluded that as an atheist, I did not have an answer that would fulfil this criterion. So I thought about it. What do I say to someone dying in a concentration camp, from the other side of the fence, utterly unable to save them? To a kid dying of cancer? To the grieving parents of victims of a school shooting? Naturally, as you do, I thought back to the Star Trek parody "Galaxy Quest". The single best scene in the movie is this: This scene stands out from the rest of the movie because of its utter sincerity. That is the point: the same character has been saying the same line insincerely for many years and is completely sick of it, but he recognises that in this particular situation it is the best thing he could possibly say: "You shall be avenged." In the concentration camp scenario, if I imagine myself on either side of the fence, I really think that would help. "We can't save you, but we will avenge you." Yeah. That rings good. And I find this easily generalizes into situations where there isn't a human perpetrator to be punished. The project of eradicating Malaria just feels more viscerally awesome when I frame it as the spiteful, relishing, merciless, victorious extermination of the terrible monster that has, by some estimates, killed around 10% of all humans who have ever lived. And it works for small things just as well. I paid too much for an item? I avenge the lost money by buying more carefully next time - and I find I actually do remember to do it next time. I lost time because of a scheduling mistake? I avenge it by scheduling better - and my scheduling improves faster than it used to....