[HN Gopher] Learn Exponentially ___________________________________________________________________ Learn Exponentially Author : p-christ Score : 164 points Date : 2022-10-09 12:53 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (saveall.ai) (TXT) w3m dump (saveall.ai) | NoraCodes wrote: | This is a neat argument for spaced repetition, which I think is a | great idea and generally works very well. That said, though, I | don't think it's a good idea to conflate knowledge with | intelligence in this context; knowledge is concrete and | measurable, while intelligence is, at best, nebulous and | difficult to measure. | | Knowing things is really important, but I don't think learning | makes you "smart"; it just makes you know more things. | motohagiography wrote: | Spaced repetition turns reading into a physical activity with | feedback. If you had an activity that required the knowledge you | were hoping to acquire, you would learn at the same rate or | faster by practice. Most lessons are encoded really poorly. I | think spaced repetition is great, but practice at something is | better. | | A hacker is just someone who has practiced learning independently | and has become exceptionally good at it. The reason people say | you can't teach the hacker mindset is because without the | underlying drive, there's nothing you can tell anyone. It's like | when teachers who lament students don't care what they say so | long as they get the right grade, it's because those students are | optimizing for approval in a system because that's sufficent for | their limited purposes. The more you profess to them, the more | you reinforce that learning is passive submission to authority. | If you want to make hackers, start with necessity, and technique | will emerge as the artifact of navigating constraints. If you | want to make people smart, challenge them instead of just telling | them things. Hackers aren't defined by knowing more, they're | defined by having physically done more. Spaced repetition as it's | usually presented optimizes for outcomes in an approval | environment that produces people who have been rewarded for | cheating themselves out of knowledge and expereince. | | I would say, want to learn physics? Build mechanisms or make | radios. Number theory? Break cryptosystems. Astronomy and | geometry? Sail at night. Lead? Ride horses. Fluid dynamics? Tune | engines. Statistics? Write a spam filter. Speak a language? Tell | their jokes, etc. Imo, most education is set around meaningless | but scalable exercises of professed skills instead of meaningful | exercises that are more powerful, but don't scale. We've | optimized for scale at the expense of quality. It's the solution | to an inferior problem. | | So sure, learn spaced repetition, but really, find something and | practice it for more joy and better results instead. | teddyh wrote: | " _One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the | light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will | be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And | yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn't about weaving | canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It's about giving a | shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see | nothing contradictory but rather a community of love._ " | | -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, _Citadelle_ , 1948 | CuriouslyC wrote: | So much this. People learn so much better when that knowledge | is functionally applied as part of a goal they want to achieve, | and that also teaches people to be doers who can follow through | with a project. Too bad it take more teacher skill and student | freedom, and it's not good for producing factory drones. | DrewADesign wrote: | Yeah. I've tried to learn a few programming languages without | having a project and it _just. doesn 't. stick._ | | _Ever._ | | Even reading a great O'Reilly book being sure to complete and | understand the examples isn't enough. Without that immediate | practical application, it's no more educational than any | other form of entertainment, and much drier. | Version467 wrote: | I've integrated spaced repetition quite effectively into my | daily life and I've found that it's incredibly important to | learn how to write good prompts. | | The naive approach definitely leads to rote learning of factual | trivia, but proper prompts can definitely foster curiosity and | understanding. In fact it's often times the process of creating | new prompts that reveal a gap in my understanding. | | This Article from Andy Matuschak is a very thorough | introduction to the art of prompt writing: | https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ | | Of course it doesn't mean that practical experience is | obsolete, quite the opposite. But spaced repetition works great | in conjunction with practice. I'd go so far that it's more | effective to do both, than just practical experience. | rbarragan wrote: | I totally agree with you here. It's personally my best type of | learning. The only downside of this approach is the cost. It | takes a lot of time compared to other types of learnings, | including reading + spaced repetition explained in the article. | | Do you have thoughts on the cost or how to optimize that type | of learning? | CuriouslyC wrote: | This stuff could be picked up in internships and | apprenticeships, though in a lot of cases the state of the | art is quite far beyond that, so you'd need to join a | hobbyist club to really get that sort of experience. | Hacker/maker spaces often have outreach events, and builder | fairs are good for reaching out as well. | p-christ wrote: | For sure it's also good to practice things aswell, it doesn't | have to be only one or the other. My understanding and | experience is that if you do 95% practice & 5% spaced | repetition you will be significantly better over the long-term | than doing 100% practice. | bibanez wrote: | This is a good way to think about the subject. Still, education | at a higher level like uni is often good to get a sound | understanding of a subject (more so than optimizing for | grades). | | Also learning a new (natural) language sometimes requires | hammering words or gramatic rules into memory, and having a | good teacher can be much faster than learning on your own by | reading texts. | ianbutler wrote: | As a counter point to this, anecdotally though it may be, | I've never seen anyone come out of a Comp Sci program (and | I've seen a lot now) who was ready to go as an engineer | (sound understanding as you put it) unless they had | significant practical experience through projects of their | own or internships. | | In general: | | A priori knowledge only gets you to the starting line. | Experience carries the rest. And you can only get that | experience by doing yourself, not second hand. | c7b wrote: | In the context of software development, sound understanding | as you'd expect from a uni arguably includes CS concepts like | algorithms and data structures. I find that there is a bit of | a memorization aspect to simply knowing a lot of those and | their properties, advantages, ... It seems like a pretty good | application area for SRS to me, really wishing I'd heard | about it sooner. | cdiamand wrote: | This assumes that the human mind can continue to expand and hold | increasing amounts of information, right? | | Is that something that we know for sure? | p-christ wrote: | Yep! Our long-term memories can store almost the entire | internet as it was in 2016 inside it! | | See here for a reference for that: | https://www.livescience.com/53751-brain-could-store-internet... | | Or this article we wrote also talks about it: | https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering | p-christ wrote: | So there is a theroetical point at which your brain will get | "full" but it would take so much knowledge to do that that | it's basically impossible. | pkilgore wrote: | Anyone else feel like they just read a bunch of assumptions with | no support followed by a chart "proving" an exponential equation | grows faster than a linear one? | | What the heck am I supposed to take away from this? | | This is a half ass theory, not evidence. | | Where's a shred of evidence, on the time scales here, these | "units of information" are retained (under either method). Are | they even relevant compared to a _skill_ like reading that | enables quicker information ingestion across an entire life o and | is applicable across a wider range of problems than _individual | information units you read_?? | p-christ wrote: | What bit do you doubt? | | The core concept that spaced repetition increases rapidly in | effectiveness over time is called the Spacing Effect. There are | many many studies that have investigated and proved it | pkilgore wrote: | "Proved" is not a word used in any physiological research | I've ever been familiar with, at least not with paragraph, if | not pages of qualification. Would you please link me to this | proof? | p-christ wrote: | Agree, I shouldn't have used the word "proved". But there | is a lot of robust evidence for it going back to the 1800s. | Many of the studies are linked to on the wikipedia page | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect | pkilgore wrote: | > It takes you years to get twice as effective at reading | | Evidence? What's the evidence this is a linear growth | process? How many years? At what age? What populations? There | is no rigor here at all. | fedeb95 wrote: | Starting from smokey definitions such as "potential", and that | learning equals memorising. | zacharybk wrote: | Is anyone aware of a commercialized app that enables team | learning through spaced reputation? Say for a support team | learning a new process or skill where the learning can be heavily | curated? | | Thanks in advance. | otras wrote: | I'm glad this post looks at how we can get better at learning -- | it's an interesting area, and I think that meta "how does my | brain work" is important to understand as part of the process. | | I did want to give some feedback, though. I think this post | suffers from too much hand-waving, which is what plagues most | other posts about learning and spaced repetition (excluding | probably just Gwern). For example, it compares flash cards and | reading to just reading, citing the results of the study as a | negative: | | > _This is however a very slow process. One study implies that in | the best case it takes adults 10 years of reading 1 hour a day to | get twice as effective at reading. Even if this is technically | learning exponentially, the improvement rate is so slow that the | process is indistinguishable from a linear one._ | | ... | | > _We said in the best case it takes adults 10 years to get twice | as effective reading. With spaced repetition it takes only days | for your time to get twice as effective. These growth rates are | completely different._ | | Maybe the rate of change of effectiveness of the reading is slow, | but does that matter if you're accumulating knowledge from all of | that reading, especially as it builds off of prior knowledge? I | also don't think it's a 1:1 comparison to contrast these. It only | takes days to get twice as effective at reading with spaced | repetition? Or at learning? If it's the latter, I don't think | that's what the earlier study measured? | | The other thing that jumped out at me is the huge focus on spaced | repetition and memory for learning, which are absolutely helpful, | but there seems to be a lack of what constitutes memorizing | versus understanding (and I'm not sure I see that in the | _Learning is Remembering_ post either). I think about other ways | to build your understanding, like working through problems and | applying the knowledge, that are key to learning. Much of | learning physics is getting your hands dirty in the equations, | and there 's a big difference between knowing a formula and | really understanding it in action. | p-christ wrote: | > It only takes days to get twice as effective at reading with | spaced repetition? Or at learning? If it's the latter, I don't | think that's what the earlier study measured? | | It only takes days for spaced repetition to get twice as | effective, not reading. It takes you years to get twice as | effective at reading. | | > I think about other ways to build your understanding, like | working through problems and applying the knowledge, that are | key to learning. Much of learning physics is getting your hands | dirty in the equations, and there's a big difference between | knowing a formula and really understanding it in action. | | I agree, you should definitely work through problems and apply | your knowledge. The post is arguing that you should do that AND | spend a little bit of time doing spaced repetition, not to only | do spaced repetition and nothing else. | vmoore wrote: | The application of learned concepts is what separates the | brilliant from the average. If the application is simply dumping | your learned concepts onto paper for the purpose of a test, and | then forgetting it all three weeks later then you have missed the | point of learning. If you apply learned concepts in the real | world and also apply the best ideas throughout your life, you | have succeeded in ways many people don't succeed. | b3nji wrote: | I'm confused, when they say a reminder, what do they mean? Also, | when they used books as an example, do they mean read the same | thing 2 days later? | | It would be great if someone could provide an example to an old | dummy like me. | biophysboy wrote: | They are referring to "spaced repetition", which is just a | method to maximize long-term retention. If you are asked about | a concept one day from now, and you successfully recall it, | then you are reminded two days from now, and so on. | b3nji wrote: | Thanks, so essentially you set a reminder for you ti sit, and | remember what you learned a few days prior? | biophysboy wrote: | Basically yes. The exact time isn't so important, as long | as the rough interval increases with each success and | decreases with each failure. | b3nji wrote: | Brill, thanks for the explanation. | p-christ wrote: | Yeah. There is software that organises the reminders for | you aswell e.g. my company Save All does this | https://saveall.ai/ | b3nji wrote: | Excellent, thank you. | p-christ wrote: | We wrote this at Save All (https://saveall.ai/) and want to know | what you think - tell us why it's wrong / right | carapace wrote: | It's a good piece, and excellent as far as it goes. You should | investigate hypnosis. E.g. you can just remember things, w/o | spaced repetition or anything, just transfer a piece of | knowledge directly to long-term memory immediately. The tricky | part is second-order effects. Once you move naturally-autonomic | subsystems into voluntary control you now have responsibility | for them. The result is a kind of change-of-being learning as | contrasted with accumulation-of-facts learning. | p-christ wrote: | Very interesting, how would i learn about something like | that? Is there a resource you'd recommend? | [deleted] | p-christ wrote: | Summary of article: | | The effectiveness of spaced repetition scales exponentially and | much faster than other learning methods. So use spaced repetition | and you'll learn a lot faster in the long-run. | Trex_Egg wrote: | Gwern had also written a long essay describing the same[1]. | | [1]https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition | p-christ wrote: | thanks will check that out | dqpb wrote: | I really like the idea of exponential learning, and was | disappointed to see that this is just an ad for spaced | repetition. | | My opinion is that true exponential learning depends on specific | content in a specific order. | | What we need is the dependency tree of concepts. Does such a | thing exist? Curriculums are kind of a non-rigorous attempt at | this. | redelbee wrote: | I think a better title might be "Memorize Exponentially" because | that seems to be the true gist of the article. | | There are undoubtedly many areas in which memorization is useful. | I tend to use memorization as a second-order tool, in the sense | that it is only useful to memorize once I've learned that | memorization would be necessary. | | I memorize combinations to locks I unlock frequently. I memorize | names of items I sell in my shop so I don't have to look them up | over and over again. | | In school I often memorized equations just long enough to get by. | The few that are still with me are not those I used most | frequently; they are the equations I understood at a visceral | level. Obviously this means I am more conversant in Newtonian | happenings than quantum concerns, so maybe there is a place for | memorization. Or perhaps I lack sufficient experience in the | quantum to really feel the laws that govern the smallest realms. | | Either way the article paints a dull picture of learning. What of | the feeling in the minds and hands of those future carpenters | swinging their first hammer blows? What of the deep learning of | the pianist that happens only after the transition from the first | concerto as audience to the latest as featured virtuoso? | | An exponential increase in the type of "learning" furthered by | spaced repetition might be useful to some. I still prefer the | linear road to understanding. | p-christ wrote: | I understand what you mean but I think you underestimate how | critical memory is for all forms of learning (even creative | work/learning). | | Our working memories have a capacity of 4. This means that we | basically can't understand something if it requires more than 4 | pieces of New knowledge to understand. To understand more | complicated things we need to move some of the knowledge into | our long-term memories. | | We wrote an article on this topic here that i'd love to know | what you think of | | https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering | vector_spaces wrote: | Someone took the time to read your article and give you their | critical impression, and you respond here essentially by | saying that they are wrong and that they should read another | article you wrote to correct their thinking. | | This comes off as condescending and dismissive. It's a poor | way to treat people who have taken the time to engage with | your content, especially if engagement is what you want, | which appears to be the case given your other replies on this | topic. | | Take the time to respond to them directly rather than | pointing them towards more content you've written, even if it | means repeating ideas you've written elsewhere. | | This approach has a number of benefits: | | 1. It has the effect of presenting what you've read elsewhere | inline (most readers won't click that link) | | 2. It gives you an opportunity to revisit and refine your own | thinking, and | | 3. It forces you to think carefully about the criticisms | levied | | And most importantly, it reciprocates the effort they've put | into reading your post and responding to you so that you | don't come off like a jerk. | p-christ wrote: | Sorry, you're right. I was maybe too focused on being | efficient rather than polite. I'll edit my comment | hex9893628af wrote: | This is incorrect. Learning is doing. I know all about all | sorts of things. That doesn't mean I can do many of them. | betwixthewires wrote: | I read that article, and your introduction on learning | quantum mechanics is actually how I learned quantum | mechanics! Or at least, about the known quantum particles in | the standard model and their properties and behavior. | | This is how I learn basically everything. That and practical | application, so I'd learn cooking by cooking but I'd learn | about information theory by just reading for hours at a time | and falling down one hole after another. All this makes me | wonder, where do you get the "you have 4 working memory | slots" thing from? And how would you actually go about | forcing things into long term memory? | aintmeit wrote: | Hey, your username reminds me of the statistical measure called | _p-value_. I hope Save All will help people beat the odds and | cast off the shackles of the power law as it 's applied to the | act of learning. | p-christ wrote: | lol thanks! | p-christ wrote: | what did you think of the article? | aintmeit wrote: | A+ | swyx wrote: | its not just note taking + spaced repetition - you can also | change your slope greatly by learning in public and learning with | peers. | | ive done a lot of thinking on this area and have mocked up a "Big | L" notation for learning curves - shameless plug: | https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation | Buttons840 wrote: | There are a few e-ink note taking devices. They pride themselves | on feeling like paper, but they're far more expensive than a | notebook and offer trade-offs rather than clear advantages. | | For example, is using a text search on an e-ink device better | than knowing "I wrote this down in the first 1/3rd of the | notebook on the page with a coffee stain". Maybe? Maybe not. It's | a trade-off. A physical notebook and an e-notebook both offer | different ways of indexing, searching, and remembering where | things are. One is not clearly superior to the other in this | respect. | | These e-ink devices have left a clear advantage they could claim | unrealized. | | I want an e-ink notepad where I can turn my notes into spaced | repetition. I want to take hand written notes, proven to improve | memory, and then I want to blot out portions of the page and have | those blotted out portions be presented to me by a spaced | repetition algorithm to help me remember my own hand written | notes. | | I'd pay a lot for such a dedicated device. Getting hand written | notes and images into Anki or other spaced repetition programs | sucks. I'd love to just be able to write or draw, with my own | hand, and easily integrate with a spaced repetition algorithm. | This is valuable enough that I'd happily use a dedicated device | just for this purpose. | nyxtom wrote: | Another method I have used in the past is to rewatch content I | used to learn a subject at 3-4x speed. A lot of high quality | content that spans multiple days can be viewed in only a few | hours this way. The key I've learned with this is to do this | across variations of the content you wish to learn and re-learn. | Combine this with audio books at similar speeds and you can | really get through content very quickly. | | When using this method if you are learning something for the | first time or you come across something that peaks your interest, | an exercise or question, pause and take notes, implement the | solution in multiple variations, then continue the video/audio. | belkarx wrote: | What speed do you use the first time around? | nyxtom wrote: | Depends on the content I'm looking at and if there is a lot | of terminology that I'm unfamiliar with. If I find that I am | pausing quite often to take notes then I just slow it down to | 1.5x. | p-christ wrote: | How do you get videos to 3-4x speed? I find most video players | only allow up to 2x speed? | nyxtom wrote: | I've had to use some browser extensions for 3-4x speeds. | Anything that is HTML5 enabled video will be supported by it. | Unfortunately I don't have a solution for anything on the | phone :/ | | The one I use for desktop is | https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed | keeptrying wrote: | This article is about memorizing more effectively not learning. | | To learn, you need to act and have the world give you feedback. | | If you're starting a company, you need to create something and | get feedback on its value and iterate. | SnowHill9902 wrote: | I apologize in advance to the author but this is pretty dumb. | Learning is not remembering all the words in a dictionary or all | entries in an encyclopedia. You learn exponentially by layering | concepts and ideas, one more complex than the previous one, on | top of each other. You advance by understanding more deeply what | you read and actually think for yourself. Wise men recommend to | learn for 1/3 of the time, think for 1/3 and apply your knowledge | to the real world for 1/3. You advance by learning from more | advanced masters and more advanced books on the same topic. | [deleted] | ac130kz wrote: | Memorization and repetition are not learning or knowledge, these | are just important tools for learning. I believe that learning is | a sort of compression algorithm. You pass some data through your | brain and you try to compress it down to an exponentially smaller | subset, from which you should be able to recreate the rest. The | way you compress, the selection process and the quality of data, | that's learning. The way you decompress, that's knowledge. | woojoo666 wrote: | Title is misleading. This isn't learning exponentially. Anybody | who has used a spaced repetition app (like Anki) knows that you | generally learn around the same number of words every day. You're | not going to be learning 10 words in a day and then one week | later, learn 1000 words in a day. | | This article talks about how the reps needed to learn _one_ piece | of information, reduces exponentially over time. You might need 1 | rep per day at the beginning, but only 1 rep per 100 days after a | month. This basically means that if you have a lifespan of 100 | years, spaced repetition means you only need around 10-20 reps to | remember each piece of knowledge for the rest of your life. | | But learning N items will still take 10*N reps. It scales | linearly. A far cry from exponential | anon2020dot00 wrote: | My idea is that there is a market for community-curated spaced | repetition decks. Many people want to learn the same things such | as a foreign language or a programming language. | | The difficult part is creating a deck and crafting the answers | and questions. Because usually this is a time-consuming process. | So if it was a community-effort then it would be a win-win. | | This is probably not an original idea and if anyone knows already | where to find such decks, that would be cool. | allenu wrote: | > This is probably not an original idea and if anyone knows | already where to find such decks, that would be cool. | | This is something I've wanted to do with my app (Fresh Cards). | I ended up defining a simple text file format for the | flashcards[1] to help make it easier to share and import cards. | You could post flashcards as simple text that someone could | drag and drop into the app to import. (Formats like Anki's | .apkg file are great, but they don't make it easy to peruse the | cards without importing into Anki.) | | What's missing in all of this, though, is an actual community | where you could search and browse the decks and collaborate to | create new ones. Though, if you simply use text files, you | could host a deck on github, for instance, and allow people to | create pull requests to improve it. I think there's room for | creating nicer user experiences to surface decks and encourage | sharing, however. (Imagine, for instance, a social media-like | feed where you could see new flashcards being created and you | could search by tag for your target language.) Anyway, I think | this area is ripe for exploration, but the user experience has | to be done right to encourage collaboration and sharing of | decks. | | [1] https://www.freshcardsapp.com/help/tech/index.html#text | CubsFan1060 wrote: | Is this what you are looking for? | https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ | p-christ wrote: | I find the Anki shared decks are basically not high quality | enough. Do you ever use them? Which ones do you use? | chatterhead wrote: | Anki is great; the problem really is the inability for | people to use it on their phone (without paying) and | properly build and maintain decks. | | Would very much like a version control system for Anki | decks so updating cards can be done by the community and | transparently. This would allow people to validate and | properly maintain decks that change with time (like | programming languages / regulatory requirements / operating | standards etc). | pastram_i wrote: | Is anki the solution you imagine? https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Or | is there a use case that anki doesn't solve? | p-christ wrote: | Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful | unfortunately | schainks wrote: | They are hit or miss, depending what you're trying to do. | Qualadore wrote: | They're a lot better than Save All's builtin decks, such as | only including 1,000 of the most frequent words of a | language, and only nouns, and not even including the word's | gender. | | Rarely with these SRS services do you see actual high- | quality decks that outdo public Anki decks, which is a | shame because it would be a great way to add value. | detuneattune wrote: | Instead of there being competing spaced repetition | programs and services, I'd much rather companies just go | down the route of making well-curated, frequently | updating Anki decks and putting them behind a paywall | instead. | | Refold, a company focused on language learning, does | exactly this [0], and having tried their JP1K deck for | Japanese for a while, I can say without any hesitation | that it was shocking just how high quality everything | was. | | It had the full works: Japanese audio, kanji, furigana, | multiple definitions, a custom background, etc. And I | wouldn't be surprised if there were even more changes | since the last time I tried it. | | I recall there being something similar to this for | medical programs, but overall I'd say that this approach | sadly isn't something that a lot of people are focusing | on. | | [0] https://refold.la/decks | AlchemistCamp wrote: | Fluent Forever started with this approach: | https://fluent-forever.com/shop | pastram_i wrote: | I don't disagree, but from their reply the request is | community based. And any community based product is just a | good as... well, their community. | | So how would a different community tool provide better | content? What tactics could be used to increase quality? | p-christ wrote: | (1) We are going to incentivise high quality decks by | allowing people to sell access to their decks | | (2) The main problem we see with Anki public decks is | that the user themselves decides whether they got the | question "right" or not when reviewing the cards. This | lack of a "teacher" means that it is very very difficult | to learn using someone else's cards. | | You basically end up kind of getting something wrong but | then saying it was right anyway. Do that a few times and | your trust & investment in the process goes and you'll | eventually you lose motivation to carry on with the deck. | | Save All decks are different. WE decide whether you got | it right or not, not you. This makes it much easier for | you to learn using someone else's decks | allenu wrote: | See my other comment, but I wonder if someone could | coordinate an open source deck using github. It would | have to use a text-based flashcard deck format, and as | with other open source, would require some coordination | to curate the deck. | | That said, I can see some negatives as I have read that | for learning, it's generally better to construct your own | flashcards. | belkarx wrote: | Another idea: decent, effective decks of cards exist for other | platforms like Quizlet - just figure out how to convert them | (there are apparently some extensions that do this as of now) | p-christ wrote: | I completely agree. We've started building that on Save All and | will be going more in that direction in future. | | The Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful | unfortunately | biophysboy wrote: | I've been using spaced repetition software (Anki) to learn | Japanese. Community decks are really powerful for the basics, | but personal decks are unavoidable later on. | | For language learning, there are flash card generators that | make this a simple one-click process. I think these strike the | right balance of simplicity & flexibility/personalization. Of | course, a tool like this relies on a free database that you can | map concepts onto. But I could see this sort of working with | wikipedia or some documentation. | visarga wrote: | You might get more value from cards you write yourself. You | should do that when you encounter the information. | segh wrote: | https://quantum.country/ teaches quantum computing as essays | with embedded flashcards, as a new "mnemonic medium". I wonder | if there is a market for context plus flashcards. What if books | came with their own spaced repetition decks? | kzrdude wrote: | Even just the idea of incremental improvements needs spreading | more. For some reason I needed to hear it and it was not | intuitive to me. (Maybe because I was a quick learner and always | picked up stuff fast.) | | Get started, practice often, that's the only way to have | compounding gains at many activities. Music, hobbies, working | with your hands, etc. | | The long perspective is very helpful. Don't worry about improving | today, but about the long trajectory. | [deleted] | codazoda wrote: | I sometime use a process of capturing stray thoughts, which I do | on paper. I've considered making an app for it and I had | considered showing things back to myself at random intervals. I | wonder if I could use this idea to capture things I've learned | and repeat them back to me at the intervals presented here. It | would probably be easy to do and might be an interesting test to | see if the schedule benefits me remembering things I learn. | | I even created a little web page for the app, but I've mostly | abandoned the idea due to a lack of interest. | | https://stray.joeldare.com | p-christ wrote: | This seems like what a spaced repetition app does, is there a | difference? | | For example lots of people use Save All for this exact reason | https://saveall.ai/ | AlchemistCamp wrote: | And orders of magnitude more use Anki: | https://apps.ankiweb.net/ | | I've been seeing HN submissions of various quality to extoll | the virtues of SRS in an attempt to sell Anki clones or Anki | for X for almost 15 years now. | p-christ wrote: | Haha, where would you rank this one in terms of quality? | AlchemistCamp wrote: | To be perfectly honest, I flagged it because of the | knowledge gained graph. It's a wild extrapolation. | | For context, I was a big fan of SRS and even contributed | to Anki back in the day! I was really into foreign | language learning, had majored in one language and was | learning another language in a separate language family. | | I built, ran and put my heart into brick and mortar | language immersion school for years. Over time, I | realized both from my learning experiences and those of | my students that SRS fell far short of extensive reading. | | It's tempting to break things down to "units of | information", as you put it your assumptions document. | SRS is great for decontextualized information (e.g., | memorizing all the capital cities in the world), but | that's not really how language works or how the brain | works for most learning tasks. There are higher-level | things your brain picks up, such as collocations, grammar | and shared cultural beliefs. | | Over the short term, SRS can be useful for building a | scaffold to work from, but over the long term, Extensive | Reading crushes it on pretty much every metric, including | raw size of passive and active vocabulary. | rsanek wrote: | Extensive reading sounds compelling. Do you have | recommendations for services that offer such content? In | my own language learning, I have found a few websites | here and there (eg Hola Que Pasa [1]), but nothing that | has a large database with varying levels of competence. | | [1] https://holaquepasa.com/ | AlchemistCamp wrote: | I'd recommend avoiding "services" and going for books, | starting with graded readers. There's a wealth of options | for Spanish learners. | | If you absolutely hate books and want an online resource, | then I'd suggest https://www.lingq.com. It has a lot of | free content and lets you import your own. Their | tech/design chops are meh, but it's run by true language | learning enthusiasts and the founder dogfooded it for at | least half a dozen languages. | copperx wrote: | Is Extensive Reading just that? Reading a lot in general? | Or is it reading a lot on the specific subject that you | want to learn, taking all possible branches? | AlchemistCamp wrote: | It's about both the volume and the type of reading. See | the 2nd page of this paper, under "What is extensive | reading?": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/33453 | 5447_Extensive... | fedeb95 wrote: | IF | | Learn slow and you won't reach your potential. Learn fast and you | might. Learn exponentially and you'll achieve more than anyone | thought you could. | | THEN | | ... | | Else, we don't know. | Silverback_VII wrote: | Still waiting for the incremental reading app like the one in | supermemo 18... I'm more than willing to pay for it! | p-christ wrote: | what's that? | Silverback_VII wrote: | 5min video explaining it: https://youtu.be/DoQoeK53bP8 | | or: https://www.supermemo.com/de/archives1990-2015/help/read | cobachon wrote: | I've paid for Anki on iOS and have gone as far as exporting | flashcards from Emacs/org-mode which I keep in version control. I | normally use it for specific information like runtimes of | algorithms for interviews, rule of thumb numbers for doing | estimations, etc. I also can imagine how medicine students use | flashcards for remembering dozens of muscle or bone names. | | However, I'd be very interested in learning how people use SRS | for remembering information they read on books/articles. Do you | state new concepts as Q/A? Do you save interesting facts, or | things you think might be useful in the future? | | I think this second type of information is not well suited for | flashcards. The article seems to imply it is, though, and I'd | love to be wrong about it. | p-christ wrote: | I use it for both types yeah. I basically try not to ever | forget anything I hear that's useful. | | On Save All you can create cards that are just statements, no | need to turn them into Q&A. So if I hear an interesting fact I | usually just dump it in quickly verbatim. | kwanele70 wrote: | p-christ wrote: | thanks lol | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | I don't see how "reading" is anyone anyone on HN needs advice to | do, all people do nowadays is reading if reading is defined as | getting information from text on a screen. Using a computer is | basically entirely reading. | | Edit: to the article's point spaced repetition to memorize domain | specific facts is useful but it's not exponential like reading | is. | Nuzzerino wrote: | For something allegedly this important, the author could have | invested more time into elaborating, providing more examples, | etc. I'm still skeptical, this is just another rando Medium rant | as far as I'm concerned. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-09 23:00 UTC)