speed reading is a necessary skill for any serious attempt at a good life. like touch typing.

speed reading skills include:

• rapid serial visual presentation
• listening to sped up audio, including with text-to-speech
• effective skimming and searching
• speed reading paper books (optional for most people, who can get ebooks of most stuff they read)
• being able to keep up. being able to understand and retain what you read at higher speeds

(yeah there's a couple exceptions like blind people. not many.)

reading is a huge part of learning. if you read twice as fast then you can read twice as much stuff. then you can learn way more.

if you don't learn this stuff, you're basically just going to have a worse life. you'll spend more time per book. you'll lose time. not learning to read fast is basically just throwing away part of your life (unless you don't read much, which is a different way of throwing your life away).

another skill any reasonable person trying to have a good life would learn is how to use google search well. lots of people suck at finding stuff with google (like they choose search terms poorly and misjudge which search results to click on) and don't realize it and don't do anything to get better. another common way people use google badly is they search the wrong thing and then start clicking links instead of recognizing the got the wrong results and doing a new search immediately.

you want to learn philosophy? except maybe not really.

i bet you couldn't even learn super smash bros melee. that's a challenge.

if you can't learn smash bros, i doubt you'll ever learn philosophy.

if you managed to learn smash, you would have used various methods of learning successfully. you could then re-use some of them for learning philosophy.

if you learned smash, you would have dealt with details. you would have done precise thinking successfully. you could use that for philosophy.

but maybe it's too hard for you. playing smash well requires being able to research information online, understand it, and apply it.

playing smash well requires patience at appropriate times.

playing smash well requires effective practice. you have to practice in such a way you get better.

playing smash well requires succeeding at things you were bad at initially. you will be very bad at lots of the game initially. you'll have to change that.

playing smash well requires asking questions productively.

playing smash well involves running into players who are better than you, and seeing really plainly and clearly they are better than you. no excuses, no denials, you're outclassed. and it involves watching games from top players and learning from them and aspiring to be better.

playing smash well requires learning to do some thinking and situation-handling quickly.

playing smash well requires learning new terminology and physics. the terminology is easier than in biology or philosophy. the physics is much easier than the real physics.

playing smash well requires persistence and effort.

playing smash well requires strategy. you have to think about strategies well and implement them.

playing smash well requires good use of testing. is something a good idea? test it out. you can test out lots of your ideas and see how it goes. to make progress you'll need to choose useful tests, and learn from the results. smash allows doing lots of tests quickly, so if you fail at first, you can try again cheaply.

playing smash well requires discussing smash in a productive way.

playing smash well requires objectivity. biases don't win games. myths you tell yourself (like strategy X or character Y is really great – when actually they aren't) don't win games.

playing smash well requires initiative. no one will hand you smash skills. you have to pursue them.

learning smash requires creative practice techniques. play some slow paced games. play some games where you focus on doing one or two things right and autopilot the rest.

learning smash requires developing some autopilot strategies that you can perform with little attention. but you need to be able to turn them on and off. and you need to be able to make changes to them as you get better.

learning smash requires forming habits but then dropping or improving them as you make progress.

learning smash involves making mistakes and and then fixing it and not making those mistakes anymore.

learning smash involves making many tiny improvements which add up to big progress overall.

learning smash requires judging ideas on their merits, not by how fancy the writing is. there's lots of good ideas about smash that are written casually. here's an example written by a player (MaNg0) who some consider to be the best ever: "My summary for this matchup is..Shielding is your best frienD!!!This match is all about spacing! U gotta like run to them shield but space it.. then fair out of shield..Not much really to say about this match... BEtter Spacing and PATIENCE Wins .."

learning smash requires learning from criticism. if you never seek out criticism, you'll get stuck. if you dislike criticism instead of appreciating it, you'll get stuck. if you don't understand what to do with criticism, you'll get stuck.

if you don't have the initiative, persistence and ability-to-learn to play smash well, you'll never get far with philosophy (which requires far more of those skills).

if you think smash is too much work as a step forward, you'll never get competent at philosophy, which is far more work.

if you're too busy for smash, you'll never get competent at philosophy, which takes far more time.

if you don't want people to see your smash mistakes, and want to learn it all alone in private, you will fail at both smash and philosophy.

if you silently ignore this, you will fail at philosophy.

Smash is available on Windows and Mac for online play.

I've noticed most people move on from fights in a way I find weird. Like they'll just seem to forget about it, and act like it never happened, without solving the problem. Others don't do this.

I had an idea about the difference in perspective.

Most people fight in an emotional way. Once the emotion fades, the issue is usually done for them. Sometimes the issue is unignorable and they can't do that, but they can ignore a lot, even if it's very unreasonable and self-destructive.

By contrast, I think some people look at problems more logically. So e.g. sleeping, or relaxing with the TV for 2 hours, doesn't change it.

This can lead to conflict. One person can no longer be emotional and want to act like a problem never happened. They don't want to revive bad emotions by focusing on that problem. And the other person can logically see the problem still exists and want to try to cooperatively solve it.