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

Which is why we built https://www.munkle.it the way we did and focused on speed of review.

I used to not like the feeling that spaced repetition did (it's always in that slightly hard stage) but apparently that's what helps you remember.

Some select disjoint passages:

> Like lectures, books have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation, but the medium does have an implicit model. And like lectures, that model is transmissionism. Sequences of words in sequences of lines in sequences of pages, the form of a book suggests people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. In caricature: “The author describes an idea in words on the page; the reader reads the words; then the reader understands the idea. When the reader reaches the last page, they’ve finished the book.” Of course, most authors don’t believe that people learn things this way, but because the medium makes the assumption invisible, it’s hard to question.

> Readers must learn specific reflective strategies. “What questions should I be asking? How should I summarize what I’m reading?” Readers must run their own feedback loops. “Did I understand that? Should I re-read it? Consult another text?” Readers must understand their own cognition. “What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?”

> These skills fall into a bucket which learning science calls “metacognition.” The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them.Baker, L. (1989). Metacognition, comprehension monitoring, and the adult reader. Educational Psychology Review, 1(1), 3–38. Worse, even if readers know how to do all these things, the process is quite taxing. Readers must juggle both the content of the book and also all these meta-questions. People particularly struggle to multitask like this when the content is unfamiliar.

> My collaborator Michael Nielsen and I made an initial attempt with Quantum Country, a “book” on quantum computation. But reading this “book” doesn’t look like reading any other book. The explanatory text is tightly woven with brief interactive review sessions, meant to exploit the ideas we just introduced. Reading Quantum Country means reading a few minutes of text, then quickly testing your memory about everything you’ve just read, then reading for a few more minutes, or perhaps scrolling back to reread certain details, and so on.

In reality, though, the format of a book itself is probably just more "evolutionarily fit" compared to alternatives. If a device that could record and replay audio was somehow invented prior to the printing press, it seems highly likely to me that we'd live in a audio-based world, not a text one. After all, societies spent thousands of years using only spoken language, with writing as a fairly recent phenomenon.

A more efficient book system, IMO, would incorporate spaced repetition more directly, whether by highlighting the key points at the bottom of each page, or even by deliberately including "reminder" paragraphs throughout the book.