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Learn Exponentially

saveall.ai

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Re: Learn Exponentially

#71

Post by cobachon »

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#72

Post by p-christ »

cobachon wrote: post #71

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…

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#73

Post by AlchemistCamp »

p-christ wrote: post #62
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha, where would you rank this one in terms of quality?

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#74

Post by CuriouslyC »

motohagiography wrote: post #32

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…

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#75

Post by CuriouslyC »

rbarragan wrote: post #70
motohagiography wrote: post #32

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…

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?

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#76

Post by Buttons840 »

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#77

Post by keeptrying »

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#78

Post by fedeb95 »

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.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#79

Post by fedeb95 »

pkilgore wrote: post #42

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_ l…

Starting from smokey definitions such as "potential", and that learning equals memorising.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#80

Post by p-christ »

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.

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