Spaced repetition • Hacker News Board

Re: Spaced repetition

#91

Post by ionforce » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 10:21 AM UTC

yermierc wrote: post #24

Afforess wrote: post #2

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not rec…

I can completely relate to that frustration. I came from an engineering background before I went to medical school and I struggled a lot with the different styles of learning (applied principles at MIT vs. knowledge acquisition in med school). The biggest mistake you can make is think that your ability to remember is just an innate ability instead of a skill that can be cultivated. The problem with spaced repetition…

> a new type of spaced repetition that deviates significantly from the deterministic algorithms

Could you go into more detail about this?

Re: Spaced repetition

#92

Post by gerlv » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 10:36 AM UTC

I've tried using Anki but found it too confusing. Most features are overkill for what I needed, plus I always forgot to revise.

Earlier this year I build a side project to tackle this problem. I've added email notifications, made interface really simple. Only left what it is - spaced repetition app - Endue (https://endue.me/). After a month of using it, I actually implemented an add-on - Telegram bot, EndueBot (https://telegram.me/EndueBot).

Telegram Bot is super useful as you can revise without leaving Telegram and most of my cards don't require audio or images, it's text mainly. It only takes few minutes a day.

I've been using it for the last 6-7 months, and it helps me with dev cards. For example, if I'm doing a project and need to google some error or explanation on config option or whatever, I add a card after I find an answer. So next time you have this problem instead of googling you just recall it from your head.

There is Messenger version in progress, I should finish it later this month.

Would love some feedback on it.

Re: Spaced repetition

#93

Post by vidarh » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 11:31 AM UTC

berntb wrote: post #45

Afforess wrote: post #2

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not rec…

My model for notes is converging on Org Mode. But... With a review process every day and every week, GTD-style. I see this need from my notes over the last couple of years from the job. Not usable for documentation (as I had planned) or helpful for other people. I read about a guy at MIT(?) that could be mobile with a relevant setup years ago. It should be simpler now than it was for Mann et al. Just use an eyeglasse…

> But... With a review process every day and every week, GTD-style. I see this need from my notes over the last couple of years from the job. Not usable for documentation (as I had planned) or helpful for other people.

I've resorted to a big folder of paper for this very reason. I really want to do it all electronically, but my experience is for my own part I'm too likely to go off and start jotting notes in some random file somewhere, or test a new tool, and the notes end up sitting there, not getting referenced because I forget all the places I've made notes.

I've started looking at a computer screen as a window into a space that is otherwise largely hidden. The problem is there can be clutter everywhere you're not looking, and things get forgotten, or lost, unless they're regularly reviewed.

Paper solves that for me by being physically there, cluttering up my desk if I don't organise them, or in my notebook, making it easy do review and distill. Even when there's a lot of them, the physical bulk of it creates an implicit reminder to flick through it and see if its still relevant. Whatever is not still relevant goes in an archive for scanning.

Things that requires too much writing for me to want to do it on paper I still do electronically, but I'll make a paper note of it: e.g. it may be referenced from my list of projects.

I still hope to find an electronic setup that I can stick to consistently, but I think for that to work for me, I'd need to e.g. be able to dedicate a large enough workspace to be able to set aside a separate screen to keep my notes up and physically visible all the time (even if just as an icon on the desktop), or find another way of keeping them "physically there" in the same way.

Re: Spaced repetition

#94

Post by ktRolster » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 11:33 AM UTC

srssays wrote: post #69

ktRolster wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I've worked on this for a while. I've written several different memory programs, for helping to review and memorize things. I have some thoughts that may help you feel better: In the end, spaced repetition is not what causes people to memorize things. You can review an object over and over and over......50…

Spaced repetition software is designed to maximise absolute throughput. That is, maximise the quantity items-remembered/year. The way it does this is to open a firehose at your memory. If the information is simple and well presented, then ideally about 90-95% of it will stick. If you want to retain 1000s of items (like a foreign language) and can accept some amount of loss, then spaced repetition is effective. But it…

But it's not designed to increase the relative chance that any individual item will be remembered.

You're talking about what it was designed to do, I'm hypothesizing about what it's actually doing.

Re: Spaced repetition

#95

Post by berntb » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 1:35 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #93

berntb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My model for notes is converging on Org Mode. But... With a review process every day and every week, GTD-style. I see this need from my notes over the last couple of years from the job. Not usable for documentation (as I had planned) or helpful for other people. I read about a guy at MIT(?) that could be mobile with a relevant setup years ago. It should be simpler now than it was for Mann et al. Just use an eyeglasse…

> But... With a review process every day and every week, GTD-style. I see this need from my notes over the last couple of years from the job. Not usable for documentation (as I had planned) or helpful for other people. I've resorted to a big folder of paper for this very reason. I really want to do it all electronically, but my experience is for my own part I'm too likely to go off and start jotting notes in some ran…

I keep all notes in Org Mode, stored in a simple and shallow hierarchy in my Dropbox. (~/Dropbox/orgs/w for job notes. Etc.)

Since I have Emacs open anyway, the notes are just a few chars away.

(The best feature with Org Mode is that after I learned it, the note taking doesn't take much attention; it is transparent for cognitive load in a way that only a Pilot G-TEC-C4 + paper ever was for me. I only think about what I want to add, not how to do it. Ymmv.)

My main problem is to access those notes from phone/ipad/etc. I started https://github.com/berntb/attorg but got lost in the GUI/UX.

Re: Spaced repetition

#96

Post by pbhjpbhj » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #76

Afforess wrote: post #2

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not rec…

Looking at Twitter, a lot of those daily thoughts should be circling the drain.

But vacri, none of our minds create such worthless inanities! Historians will pore over our thoughts enchanted as if by beautiful snowflakes.

;o)

Re: Spaced repetition

#97

Post by pitt1980 » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 2:49 PM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #2

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not rec…

I'll just throw this here

I've tried to make a point of commenting more and more on news articles and discussion boards

not because the world really needs to hear my thoughts

but it seems like a useful way of capturing my still fairly rough thoughts about whatever I just read (with the nice bonus that sometimes the rest of the universe comes along and tells you what's wrong with your thought, or how to improve your thoughts)

its a way to ever so slightly embed my ideas in my head

(having typed that out, the thought occurs to me that maybe I should occasionally make anki flashcards out of comments that seem especially worth remembering)

------- -------

writing stuff down, it used to bother me that I'd have ideas, and then by the time I tried to turn them into writing, the elegance of the idea had seemed to evaporate

or that the mechanical process of writing it down had distracted me from improving my idea

I've come to think that that's not really good way to think about it

that if I can't satisfactorily write down my idea, it needed improving anyways

Re: Spaced repetition

#98

Post by htk » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

When growing up, rote learning was one of my main gripes with school. Spaced repetition is rote learning with controlled (instead of brute) force.

With time I started to respect memorization for certain kinds of information, to the point of using it on my own vocabulary learning app[1], which is one of the few cases where memorization seems justifiable, but one still has to put the information to use, otherwise the info will be lost.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1126547471

Re: Spaced repetition

#99

Post by pitt1980 » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

summarite wrote: post #29

skybrian wrote: post #16

I've dabbled with this and I find the hardest part is deciding what's important enough to memorize. Most rarely needed facts can be looked up as needed. Commonly used information will get enough practice naturally without spaced repetition. You have to decide what's important even though you don't practice it naturally. The obvious exception is learning a language. And if you're in school then this is decided for you…

There is an amazing slightly older longform article on the creator of supermemo (the original spaced repetition software, although the concept of course comes from a German psychology pioneer of a few centuries ago (Helmholtz i think?)). The guy throws his whole life in the software, eg every news article, email, ... Is just processed with cloze scripts (= "fill the [...]") And his aim is to remember everything. The…

https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/ pretty sure that's the article you're referencing

Re: Spaced repetition

#100

Post by michaelcampbell » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 4:33 PM UTC

executesorder66 wrote: post #84

michaelcampbell wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. It's not. At least, not at the expense of other things. Memorization is but one piece. The book "Make it Stick" goes into this and a lot of other techniques that blend together, but SRS is not the whole of it by a long ways.

Would you mind telling me what those other techniques are? Have you used them, and how well have they worked for you?

I'm trying, and I have no basis to back this up, so value this what you are paying for it... =)

A couple of the techniques are:

* Mix things up. Doing "learning" in an all of one thing, then all of another, is less helpful than mixing up topics. Baseball players that practice hitting 20 fastballs, then 20 sliders, etc. do less well OVERALL than one where the pitcher randomly picks a type of pitch one after another.

* Learn in different ways, or using different answers. If you're learning to sight read music, read the measures backwards. Or down one side and up the other. When you're memorizing words, come up with a different sentence to use the word in, each time. Come up with a word that rhymes with the correct word. Describe a picture that would characterize the word/concept. Sing the word in a song.

* Synthesize, synthesize, synthesize. (overlapping the previous point) - when coming up with an answer to a question, consider different questions that have the same answer. What things are LIKE this answer? What things are different? Picture yourself using this word/concept in some setting. (Things I like to do are picturing myself in my house. Or outside. Or in the winter, or naked, or with a famous person (perhaps also naked).) The point is to create imagery associated with the thing you're learning.

A lot of this boils down to getting at the memory through many different neural pathways. SRS is just a way to strengthen ONE of those ways, which is important, but ideally you want to use many. One strong rope holding you from falling down a cliff is good. Many, possibly even weaker ones, can be much better.