How can we develop transformative tools for thought? • Hacker News Board

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#31

Post by goerz » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:11 AM UTC

reubens wrote: post #23

goerz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key insight that Nielsen is advocating for is to use spaced repetition for concepts , not just facts. Understanding comes first, and then you deliberately try to cement a rich network that understanding in your long term memory. Personally, I’ve found this a revolutionary approach to learning.

As another commenter below notes, a recommendation is to spend one second reviewing each card. Thus, your cards are generally quite simple. This can very easily lead to a patchwork of simple details, but no glue holding them together. I’ve come to believe that the mental effort it takes to understand something should be prioritised over memorisation. If you’re relatively busy and spending a lot of time doing Anki car…

I don't see why cards need to be quite that simple. I generally take about 10-15 seconds for reviewing each card. A lot of my cards are why/how/what questions (typical examples: "Why are bras covariant?"/"How are Green's functions used in solving linear differential equations?"/"What is Q-Learning?") The problem with skipping memorization of concepts after having understood something is that two months later, you'll have forgotten those concepts. So, all that effort will have been in vain. I typically don't create much more than 10 cards a day, or maybe 20 on a day where I'm taking in a lot of information, and I typically have less than 50 cards to review. It's really not a huge time investment - especially if you're "busy".

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#32

Post by kiba » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #30

kiba wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. For example it's possible for you to learn the flashcards for "three" and "one" but not know the word for "two". This is insane way of doing things. You are just refreshing random isolated nodes. Not only does it make it a lot harder to learn (since random out of order information is harder to compress), the knowledge graph you…

> Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach. What do you need to do to “cement understanding and intuition of the unit circle”? The common diagrams shown in high school trigonometry courses – e.g. https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_m... – basically involve only 2 meaningful facts: a rhombus made of two equilateral triangles has a long diagonal with…

I memorized the facts and then was able to figure out the relationships after the fact.

That may be a brute force way of doing it, but it works for me.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#33

Post by nabla9 » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:39 AM UTC

reubens wrote: post #19

As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it’s just a way to avoid the mental effort…

I understand your point but I disagree. Just memorizing does not help, but memorizing definitely increases the ability to gain understanding.

Connections required for understanding start to happen automatically when you start thinking about things you remember. If you don't remember the facts and fine details, your understanding will be shallow. Deep understanding requires going trough the facts and finding connections. Sources outside the head, like books, notes, Wikipedia and Googling can't make the connections. They are dead outside the mind.

Of course, if you are memorizing trivial facts, it does not help.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#34

Post by westoncb » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:41 AM UTC

michael_nielsen wrote: post #24

reubens wrote: post #19

As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it’s just a way to avoid the mental effort…

Glad you like my work. To quote the essay: "these kinds of results should be taken with a grain of salt. The mnemonic medium is in its early days, has many deficiencies, and needs improvement in many ways... is this medium really working? What effect is it actually having on people? ... are there blockers that make this an irredeemably bad or at best mediocre idea? How important a role does memory play in cognition,…

I was curious to read the self-criticism section since I fall into the memory-skeptic camp myself.

And I did in fact find my main concerns referenced there, though my impression is that they weren't taken seriously.

One telltale sign is the condescending tone with which they're referenced:

> Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. ... You'd think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious.

The other signal is the convenient changeup of exemplar subjects, natural language vs. computer programming. In the above, for example, having a "broad conceptual understanding" of French is obviously useless—and yet having a broad conceptual understanding of topics in e.g. Computer Science is extremely useful because:

1) It's part of a map that allows you to jump deeply into related as areas if a demand for that knowledge actually arises. 2) The 'broad conceptual understanding' (if done well) is generally of 'basic principles,' which have an interesting property of being applicable to wide ranges of much more specific subject areas.

> Another common argument against spaced repetition systems is that it's better to rely on natural repetition.

A more fair angle on this argument is that it's better to rely on natural contexts instead of 'repetition'—this is the reason "brain training" apps fail, for instance. (SRS obviously isn't as bad as those, but it still certainly ranks lower than a 'natural context' in regards to imparting skill in that context.)

> For instance, it's no good (but surprisingly common) for someone to memorize lots of details of a programming language they plan to use for just one small project. ... But the truths of the last paragraph also have limits. If you're learning French, ...

This is another sneaky subject change. It's pointed out how using memory systems for learning programming languages is probably non-optimal. But then this next paragraph is supposed to show us the limits of the supposed non-optimality—but it never does, because it switches to talking about a natural language instead, using an argument about lacking interlocutors which is completely inapplicable to the programming languages example.

In any case, there are things about this project that I like very much, but I do still suspect there are subtle flaws in the premise of what this would end up making people better at, and the tone approaches Wolfram-esque levels of grandiosity that makes it hard to take seriously.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#35

Post by sh53 » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:50 AM UTC

Had a feeling it was the quantum country guy from the start, besides focusing on just techniques on the brain and mnemonics we also need to see the various inhibitors, it was earlier posted here in HN https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#36

Post by jacobolus » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:52 AM UTC

kiba wrote: post #32

jacobolus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach. What do you need to do to “cement understanding and intuition of the unit circle”? The common diagrams shown in high school trigonometry courses – e.g. https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_m... – basically involve only 2 meaningful facts: a rhombus made of two equilateral triangles has a long diagonal with…

I memorized the facts and then was able to figure out the relationships after the fact. That may be a brute force way of doing it, but it works for me.

My point is that there’s very little there. People shouldn’t need to go to extensive effort or need a special system or method to learn 2 simple facts. Taking a simple thing and wrapping it in a big pile of obfuscation is a poor way to teach/learn. (That this is taught this way is not the fault of students.)

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#37

Post by chromeaway » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:55 AM UTC

xamuel wrote: post #6

Jun8 wrote: post #5

This is a very interesting subject! 1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes. 2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the…

Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.

In the ancient near east people did not refer to literary works by means of a dedicated title, but by the first line of the composition, which is taken as an indication of origins in an oral tradition, esp. for the earliest works that were written down. When large portions of text have been committed to memory, reciting the first sentence is often enough to trigger a flow, a small but useful "technique" applied by e.g. hiphop lyricists.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#38

Post by jacobolus » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #34

michael_nielsen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you like my work. To quote the essay: "these kinds of results should be taken with a grain of salt. The mnemonic medium is in its early days, has many deficiencies, and needs improvement in many ways... is this medium really working? What effect is it actually having on people? ... are there blockers that make this an irredeemably bad or at best mediocre idea? How important a role does memory play in cognition,…

I was curious to read the self-criticism section since I fall into the memory-skeptic camp myself. And I did in fact find my main concerns referenced there, though my impression is that they weren't taken seriously. One telltale sign is the condescending tone with which they're referenced: > Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable under…

>> Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. ... You'd think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious.

The way people learn French (or any language) is not by memorizing atomized vocabulary definitions on flash cards, but by listening to / reading a large amount of comprehensible input, which is to say, meaningful grammatically correct sentences in their context. Memorizing vocabulary might help some self-studying language students bootstrap enough very basic understanding to make a wider variety of inputs comprehensible, in the absence of a teacher or properly-designed curriculum, but in and of itself does not comprise learning the language.

People who encounter a large amount of appropriate-level language in context do end up with what might be called “intuitive understanding” of language (or maybe “subconscious understanding”; “conceptual” is not a great label, IMO). They know how to recognize and later how to form grammatical sentences because they have been exposed to a wide variety of such sentences. They learn the subtle connotations of words (beyond the definitions offered in an English–French dictionary) by seeing the words used many times in context. Etc.

From what I have read, speaking per se is just not that useful at the earliest stages (at least the first several months) when learning a language.

>> It seems plausible, though needs further study, that the mnemonic medium can help speed up the acquisition of such chunks, and so the acquisition of mastery.

This whole argument basically boils down to speculation.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#39

Post by babesh » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible.

Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human potential.

Re: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

#40

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

babesh wrote: post #39

If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible. Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human…

[deleted]