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Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

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Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#101

Post by 4BA9940C »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #54
xkfm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Supermemo article in Wired hooked me. I still remember where I was when I read it and the feeling of reading it. I still use Supermemo daily, and it's one of the programs keeping on Windows. Anki (and every other SRS program I've tried) just doesn't compare as soon as you move beyond a list of flashcards. That said, having used Supermemo for over a decade at this point, the hardest thing about SRS is deciding wh…

Yeah I agree. Anki has a failure mode for me that I eventually accumulate > 5000 flash cards and a review session can take an hour or more. Knowing what to review is really difficult. I'll give Supermemo a shot, I've always heard of it as the gold standard but never tried it.

I'm familiar with that problem, and overcame it by really working at making good cards. Today, I have 6000 cards in my collection, and daily reviews take 15-20 minutes; usually 100-120 cards. (I have been using Anki for a lost time. My collection is almost 10 years old.)

Granted, writing good cards is easy to say and really hard to do. Some specific pointers:

- cards should take less than 10 seconds to answer

- most questions should be 7 words or so

- if your question has multiple clauses, split those up into separate cards

- cloze deletions are great, consider multiple clozes per card

- around 10% of your cards should have images

- good images help a lot, mediocre images make it worse -- when in doubt, don't

- Answer this Question cards should have an opposite Question for this Answer like Jeopardy

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#102

Post by ok_dad »

dls2016 wrote: post #88
ok_dad wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any notes on how you studied? I’m interested in going back to math grad school but forgot everything from undergrad, basically.

Two articles I wrote at the time which hold up surprisingly well: https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2010/12/28/spaced-math-re... https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2011/03/10/space-math-rep... And an example of some of my cards: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z714xpq36nvn3o1/rudin.pdf?dl=0 If I'm being honest, I went overboard. Like I said, I literally memorized entire books. Entering cards into the system was the most d…

Thank you

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#103

Post by 4BA9940C »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #52
snowpiercer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think you actually did well in your exams because you really understood it and not because you blindly memorized it ?

I've picked up a lot of (human) languages over my life, and I've used SRS to great effect (I started on JMemorize, a now defunct Java app.) I have a simple strategy: 1. Read a text 2. Lookup unknown word/grammatical pattern 3. Create a flashcard for it 4. Apply SRS and it works great. I've also tried to use other people's Anki decks and they've never worked particularly well. Personally engaging with the material is…

> I've even considered using it to learn tools like Blender so I can dial in workflows.

I've used it effectively for vim and photoshop.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#104

Post by 4BA9940C »

borroka wrote: post #78
_dain_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You learn that lunch is "almuerzo" in Spanish, but is it learning or just memorization/association? To me the lines are blurred, even at first sight of the word. I think there's a difference. "Almuerzo" -> "al muerzo", I know "al" means "the", from Arabic, I look up the etymology, the "muerzo" is from Latin "morsus", from which we get "morsel" in English. Mnemonic: "the morsel". Then I can guess that the form of the…

It is interesting from a linguistic point of view, no doubt, and I am an amateur etymologist myself, but let's look at reality with honest eyes: apart from a very small group of people, languages are not learnt, and learnt effectively, starting from the etymology up. I know it is almuerzo, I use it 20 times, and it is "mine". I think we should try, and I include myself among those who have an approach to learning tha…

Etymology by itself is not going to be useful. As one more flashcard, another pillar, additional context, they will to deepen your understanding. It is creating more inter-connections between your neurons.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#105

Post by zozbot234 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #54
xkfm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Supermemo article in Wired hooked me. I still remember where I was when I read it and the feeling of reading it. I still use Supermemo daily, and it's one of the programs keeping on Windows. Anki (and every other SRS program I've tried) just doesn't compare as soon as you move beyond a list of flashcards. That said, having used Supermemo for over a decade at this point, the hardest thing about SRS is deciding wh…

Yeah I agree. Anki has a failure mode for me that I eventually accumulate > 5000 flash cards and a review session can take an hour or more. Knowing what to review is really difficult. I'll give Supermemo a shot, I've always heard of it as the gold standard but never tried it.

> Yeah I agree. Anki has a failure mode for me that I eventually accumulate >5000 flash cards and a review session can take an hour or more.

You don't really need to keep up with Anki's review sessions, even a partial session is very effective when you have lots and lots of cards. The tradeoff is that you might not actually maintain 100% recall of all items, but you'll recall most of them, and the scheduling algorithm will space out the items that you do recall even further.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#106

Post by borroka »

shard wrote: post #96
borroka wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting from a linguistic point of view, no doubt, and I am an amateur etymologist myself, but let's look at reality with honest eyes: apart from a very small group of people, languages are not learnt, and learnt effectively, starting from the etymology up. I know it is almuerzo, I use it 20 times, and it is "mine". I think we should try, and I include myself among those who have an approach to learning tha…

This is language dependent. For learning Chinese, recognizing radicals (like waht represents water, and what represents tree) can go a long way in helping recall of both meaning and pronunciation. Then moving on to learning Korean, where Chinese characters make up ~25% of Korean words, recognizing the Chinese character, then recognizing the typical phonetic alterations to Chinese pronunciations, can go a long way in…

I am still skeptical. One thing is to recognize common roots, for example "to live" is "vivere" in Italian and "vivir" in Spanish, another it is to know that they are both coming from the latin verb vīvĕre. It is sufficient to recognize the commonality, without getting to the etymology of the word, which, in practical term, does not help.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#107

Post by zozbot234 »

ren_engineer wrote: post #63
dls2016 wrote: post #17

I was anti-memorization until I went back to graduate school for mathematics. I had forgotten (or never learned) a lot of things needed to pass qualifying exams. At some point I ran across the spaced repetition idea (maybe from the Wired SuperMemo article [0]) and I gave it a try. I ended up using it to memorize large portions of baby Rudin and Munkres' Topology, as well as some algebra and a bunch of qualifying exam…

I'd be really interested to see some research into integrating spaced repetition into our actual education system. Almost everything I see about it is adults learning, I wonder how much we could speed up primary school education considering so much of the "base" stuff needed to advance is rote memorization anyway seems like countries should be investing money in this, potentially trillions in unlocked economic potent…

Given that so much of modern education happens in large-group settings, it seems hard to apply SRS principles to it. A group of students will be a lot farther from 100% recall of all items than any individual student might be, and the items that require review will correspondingly differ.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#108

Post by zozbot234 »

thrown_22 wrote: post #87
orangepurple wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A prioritized queue of stuff to learn may be a better solution than staring at "over 9000" things to review. Such a queue would mean you simply bite off as much as you can chew every day and don't perpetually fall behind, assuming the priority queue has a small degree of randomness and is recomputed daily based on the decay rate of all modeled facts. Do you agree?

It doesn't help. The rate at which you can add new items is the inverse of the review period. What you're effectively doing is increasing the review interval, but you will still run into the fact that the number of items you can remove from the queue is finite. Eventually you will have only interesting items on the end of the queue equal to the number of items you can review. You're now back at square one: you don't…

When you're working on clearing away a backlog, your review periods should get bigger because Anki will give you "credit" for recalling these items longer. So it seems like reviews should be manageable as long as you're not forgetting too much. And Anki will always prioritize the items you're at highest risk of forgetting.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#109

Post by zozbot234 »

allenu wrote: post #48
barking_biscuit wrote: post #26

I mean sure. The trouble is in order to keep the review time per day fixed you need to vary the rate at which you introduce new facts, and as time goes on the interval between when you can afford to introduce new facts will grow to be infinite. The model also doesn't account for how you feel about doing this activity. This includes the pain of not doing reviews for several days and then having to catch up. The probab…

That growing backlog is a big issue with this type of scheduling. I think it's one of those almost "unexpected" side-effects of spaced repetition. I mean, if you did the math up front, you should know generally how busy you're going to be over the next few weeks based on how many cards you're reviewing per day, how many new ones are coming, and how you're scoring with each card, but it's not really something people d…

> I think memorizing a smaller set of facts consistently is better

In general, existing SRS does a very bad job of supporting priority and prerequisites between items. There's no way of saying "learn A, B, C, then learn X, Y, Z once you know the former well enough." This limits the domains where SRS can be applied most effectively to ones with very little structure, such as raw language vocabulary.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#110

Post by zarzavat »

zozbot234 wrote: post #107
ren_engineer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be really interested to see some research into integrating spaced repetition into our actual education system. Almost everything I see about it is adults learning, I wonder how much we could speed up primary school education considering so much of the "base" stuff needed to advance is rote memorization anyway seems like countries should be investing money in this, potentially trillions in unlocked economic potent…

Given that so much of modern education happens in large-group settings, it seems hard to apply SRS principles to it. A group of students will be a lot farther from 100% recall of all items than any individual student might be, and the items that require review will correspondingly differ.

Spaced repetition could replace time currently wasted on homework. As a kid I would have much preferred to sit in front of Anki instead of being laden with hours of homework, and it probably would have done me more good over the long term.
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