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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

#31

Post by david_allison »

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…

>> (I found this behaviour amusing, since the whole point of using Anki is to help me learn things that are difficult to remember!)

> Eliminating 10% of the most difficult items in a generic material may produce an increase in the speed of learning of up to 300%.

https://super-memory.com/articles/theory.htm

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

#32

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

I find two things help me learn:

A top down description: start with what something is, why it's important, and how it fits in with other things, then an outline of the details, then the finer details and so on. This is almost impossible to find in textbooks or lectures, which for the most part are bottom up.

Trying to figure out the thing without any help, or very little help, at each step of the above. This sounds pointless, but it actually works really well. If I try my best to figure out how something works without knowing anything I end up "priming" my brain for the answer, and end up getting a (relatively) instant understanding. It's like you make a hole that is the rough shape of the answer in your mind and the answer fills the void. Put another way you motivate your brain to wanting to know what it is. The best bit is how far you can get by yourself and the positive feeling that gives you.

This might just be me, I've never met anyone who feels the same way about learning.

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

#33

Post by Tainnor »

beebeepka wrote: post #16
chongli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless you have a specific learning disability, I refuse to believe that you are unteachable. Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). That's fine. Maybe abstract reasoning doesn't come as natural to you as it does to others, that's possible. But we know how plastic the brain is. Given enough time and dedication, you should be able to learn things - certainly not PhD level stuff, but the basics.

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

#34

Post by Tainnor »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #20

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, o…

> 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.

This seems to be a specifically American (or anglo? not sure about the UK/Australia/etc.) thing. I've never heard about this happening in Germany where there are standard textbooks in about every field that people have been using for decades - and in many cases, people just simply go with the lecture and the associated notes instead of a textbook.

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

#35

Post by mr_mitm »

beebeepka wrote: post #16
chongli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are confusing the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient one. The argument was that practicing was necessary to gain a deep understanding of math, not that it was sufficient.

Ironically, this is one of the first things they teach you in college level math (or at least they did in my case).

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

#36

Post by eviks »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #20

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, o…

> have been the standard for learning many topics for hundreds of years

That means very little, history is littered with awful standards used for centuries, there is no magic that translates longevity into greatness

> They have few technical problems

Hard to bookmark (and find what those are for later), hard to search, hard to annotate (and search those later), hard to edit, hard to embed rich/dynamic content, hard to track understanding, hard to adjust content based on that, hard to tailor to a specific reader in general, hard to update layout, hard to collaborate, ...

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

#38

Post by AlexErrant »

victorlf wrote: post #3

Shameless 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.

As someone also building an SRS product, why did you decide on Python as your initial market? I genuinely feel like programming is best learned by _doing_, and thankfully it's pretty easy to practice writing Python. I feel like a better way to learn Python is to introduce a concept/word, and give a playground where the student can play with it.

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

#40

Post by readingnews »

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…

This is the "problem" today that I see in the classroom (I used to teach CS until recently)... learners today do not want to dedicate the time it takes to truly understand. Not all of them, but a LOT of them have the opinion that they just need to get through this damn algorithms class, get the damn piece of paper (diploma) so they can go out and start a job doing "real" programming.

Those students, they do not get FAANG jobs, or make big money. The few that want to understand are much more like the articles description, and they end up five years on far ahead of their peers at work.

Just my $0.02.

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