Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
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Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
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Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#2I can assure you, books work
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#3Shameless plug: I'm building https://python.cards to learn Python with spaced repetition. I've uploaded some videos on Youtube of the process of distilling the information from the Python docs into flashcards, and have plans on trying out LLMs to help in this process.
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#4When I studied Physics, I could sometimes take hours to digest a single page of a textbook or my lecture notes - providing that it was a good textbook.
It’s not enough to just understand what is written. You have to understand why it is like described. Why it can’t be different - or could it? You need to build an intuition for both the physics and the math describing it.
You have to push until it clicks.
It’s hard work.
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#5Spaced repetition is underrated. I still remember a lot from my cards despite not having studied them for years
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#6Spaced repetition is underrated. I still remember a lot from my cards despite not having studied them for years
I had the opposite experience. If something's easy to remember, I don't need Anki. If something's hard to remember (I really struggle with birthdays, for example), even Anki doesn't help! The cards all end up as "leech" and Anki stops showing them to me. (I found this behaviour amusing, since the whole point of using Anki is to help me learn things that are difficult to remember!)
They say if a card is ending up as a leech, it's a "problem" card and you should somehow improve it. But I'm not sure how to improve this: Side A: name. Side B: birthday. (Cards are also shown reversed.)
Arguably I could add some kind of mnemonics, or learn the Mnemonic Major System for remembering numbers. (On that note, does anyone have specific advice for remembering birthdays? The Dutch among you will say "hang a birthday calendar in your toilet", which was probably the correct solution all along...)
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#7When I studied Physics, I could sometimes take hours to digest a single page of a textbook or my lecture notes - providing that it was a good textbook. It’s not enough to just understand what is written. You have to understand why it is like described. Why it can’t be different - or could it? You need to build an intuition for both the physics and the math describing it. You have to push until it clicks. It’s hard wo…
Yes. This is the same for both math and programming. These skills take a lot of practice to develop. It’s like playing a musical instrument: you won’t learn how to do it if all you do is read the book.
What’s strange to me is how people seem to resist this fact. Like it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it. But for math and physics at least they seem to think it’s somehow different? That they ought to be able to solve the problems just by picking up a pencil? And when they don’t get a decent grade on the exam they look over at the person who got 100 and say “that’s why! I can’t do it because I’m not a genius like they are!”
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#8[dead]
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#9When I studied Physics, I could sometimes take hours to digest a single page of a textbook or my lecture notes - providing that it was a good textbook. It’s not enough to just understand what is written. You have to understand why it is like described. Why it can’t be different - or could it? You need to build an intuition for both the physics and the math describing it. You have to push until it clicks. It’s hard wo…
When learning new programming concepts, I would often have to learn them 5 or 10 times before they clicked. Once they clicked, they seemed completely obvious, and I couldn't imagine what it's like to not understand it.
Two mathematicians are discussing a theorem. The first mathematician says that the theorem is trivial. He then proceeds with two hours of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is indeed trivial.
Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
#10The director of the Australian Society for Medical Research has a nice TEDx talk about all aspects of learning here: https://youtu.be/kKvK2foOTJM?si=RF479ogKABAtcCUE