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Effective Spaced Repetition

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Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#31

Post by onos »

ekkeke wrote: post #13

Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning. Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion. So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mast…

Could you save “representative problems” to your cards? Eg a particular integral that uses a particular method etc.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#33

Post by cdelsolar »

I am a tournament Scrabble player and the state of the art for studying words is spaced repetition. You quiz on "alphagrams", like ABEISTT, and after a few times you just see BATISTE BISTATE. There are at least 80K words between 2 and 8 letters long though, so it does take many hundreds or thousands of hours to learn them all well. I have very poor studying discipline so I have my own methods of studying that don't use spaced repetition, instead I just study all the words periodically and focus on the harder ones. But I don't know them as well, and for the words I did spaced repetition on more than 15 years ago I can still recall those immediately.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#34

Post by rjh29 »

_dain_ wrote: post #26
robertbob wrote: post #19

Does anyone have any insight into deciding what information should be memorised, and what information it is sufficient to simply store in a searchable digital knowledge base for rapid retrieval when needed? Takes a lot of effort to commit my notes from a book into my head, but a tiny amount of resources to store them on my computer.

Gwern's classic monograph[1] addresses this: >The most difficult task, beyond that of just persisting until the benefits become clear, is deciding what’s valuable enough to add in. In a 3 year period, one can expect to spend “30–40 seconds” on any given item. The long run theoretical predictions are a little hairier. Given a single item, the formula for daily time spent on it is Time = 1⁄500 × nthYear−1.5 + 1⁄30000.…

I have definitely wasted lots of time creating and reviewing cards for words that I never see again (the long tail) or don't strictly need to know. But the feeling of coming across a word that you learned and -knowing- it is amazing. It also helps if you enjoy the process of creating and reviewing cards - tending to your knowledge garden, so to speak.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#36

Post by zetalyrae »

ekkeke wrote: post #13

Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning. Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion. So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mast…

In my own experience using spaced repetition for math: math has both semantic and procedural knowledge. The procedural knowledge comes from doing problems and rewriting proofs. But the semantic knowledge is also important, and you can acquire and retain this through spaced repetition.

I was going to write some rules specifically about math but I might write those as a separate post because they got too long. I think I've benefited specially from memorizing the proofs of theorems, though refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to make each proof small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious process.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#38

Post by Veen »

endisneigh wrote: post #17

spaced repetition is dying for some amazing UX. it doesn't even really make sense for you to make flash cards. ideally they could be contextually created based on what you're viewing, e.g. you read a wikipedia article, it infers what you're reading from scroll position, takes content, makes cards, presents later, etc.

You may be interested in Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen's work on mnemonic media.

- https://andymatuschak.org/

- https://withorbit.com/

- https://numinous.productions/ttft/

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#39

Post by zetalyrae »

hendry wrote: post #37
zetalyrae wrote: post #35

I wrote this. Ask me anything!

I find writing cards / decks the challenge. IIRC the ones you download from Ankiweb are all such low quality! Could you link to some good quality decks for inspiration please?

I write essentially all of my cards. I find that it helps a bit with recall.

Also, people differ in the "density" of cards they need around a given topic. I might need a lot of cards to cover a particular area of a topic in many different ways, while someone who already knows that area needs fewer.

I agree that public decks tend to be terrible. So I don't really know any good ones. For the examples in the post, I tried to keep the wording as close as possible to the flashcards in my own Mochi decks, without adding extraneous detail.

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