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Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#11

Post by Tomte »

andai wrote: post #6
pawelduda wrote: post #5

Spaced 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…

Why would you need to learn birthdays (except maybe closest family)? It's maybe the canonical thing to put into a calendar.

"Because I want to" is obviously fine, but it still reminds me of the infamous "capitals of the world" flashcards that spaced repetition practitioners warn against.

Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#12

Post by cinntaile »

andai wrote: post #6
pawelduda wrote: post #5

Spaced 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…

A calendar in your toilet? Go digital and use your phone's built-in calendar.

Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#14

Post by cinntaile »

chongli wrote: post #7
konschubert wrote: post #4

When 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…

The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not. The reward is built-in. This is a bit harder for maths/physics once you're past the trivial stuff and most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.

Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#15

Post by Avicebron »

I typically have a low opinion on rote memorization, I remember years ago at university my roommate swore by his note cards (physical index cards at the time) while I strongly maintained the need to build up intuition around the math and physics I was doing. He was in med school and I was in engineering, but I felt that the memorization while successful at least for him, was limiting in terms of potential innovation.

Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#16

Post by beebeepka »

chongli wrote: post #7
konschubert wrote: post #4

When 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…

Not everything is hard work. Some are smarter (or better equipped) than others. You can spend an eternity teaching me math and still won't be able to accomplish anything. It's almost like different people exist and they have different skill sets and interests.

Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#17

Post by iandanforth »

After watching the studying video I'm surprised there is no direct GPT-4 integration with his tool. There's a clear opportunity for dynamic question generation such that you have notes/cards which can't be memorized but instead ask novel questions around the same point.

Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#19

Post by jonpurdy »

Tomte wrote: post #11
andai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you need to learn birthdays (except maybe closest family)? It's maybe the canonical thing to put into a calendar. "Because I want to" is obviously fine, but it still reminds me of the infamous "capitals of the world" flashcards that spaced repetition practitioners warn against.

It wasn't until I discovered Anki a few years ago that I finally was able to remember my parents' and sisters' birthdays (despite calendar reminders every year).

Why remember something that can be looked up? Latency; it's super useful to have things appear in your brain so you can immediately do something useful with them instead of slowing down and looking something up and potentially losing context.

Re: Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

#20

Post by ThinkBeat »

Books work well and have been the standard for learning many topics for hundreds of years. They have few technical problems, Easy to sell, borrow, give away.

Yes, you can go about reading a book in different ways depending on what and why you are reading and what works for you.

I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days, at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition every year, or at least every couple of years.

There are just about no scientific discoveries in math that requires undergraduate and few matters that require an entirely new edition of graduate books.

I have also heard but never experienced that some books apparently have an online component that is valid only for one person or one semester or possibly one student per semester. If true this is even worse.

I strongly prefer books to videos. A lecture is good to prepare you or to wet your appetite. And to clarify known difficult spots in the book.

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