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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

#41

Post by Tainnor »

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.

Why are spaced repetition "practitioners" warning against that?

I have a "Roman Emperors" Anki deck. It serves absolutely no purpose except making me feel good about it, but it works well (except maybe for the final few emperors, those tend to be leeches).

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

#42

Post by rickcarlino »

I've used spaced repetition to memorize nearly 5,000 words over the last 15 years, but I struggle to apply spaced repetition outside of key/value pair memorization.

It seems that SRS is best used for "know what" rather than "know how".

I am curious if anyone has applied spaced repetition to memorization of things other than terminology and how they did it.

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

#44

Post by beebeepka »

Tainnor wrote: post #33
beebeepka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else.

Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.

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

#45

Post by AlexErrant »

dsgnr wrote: post #25
Avicebron wrote: post #15

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.

Yeah med students seem to be unique in the amount of stuff they need to remember, at least in terms of users Ive worked with. The amount of things medical students need to memorize to pass their USMLE exams is insane. I designed and built a learning tool at a startup for med students using picture mnenomics and spaced repetition quizzing that seriously helped those students and lead to the startup being acquired.

The ability to link image-metaphors/mnemonics to concepts is something that really should spread to other (non-medical) domains.

An example of a picture mnemonic for others: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/202...

Article: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/usc-dornsife-alumnus-r...

If you're comfortable saying, did your startup/acquirer have any interest in developing products for other domains?

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

#46

Post by Tomte »

Tainnor wrote: post #41
Tomte wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are spaced repetition "practitioners" warning against that? I have a "Roman Emperors" Anki deck. It serves absolutely no purpose except making me feel good about it, but it works well (except maybe for the final few emperors, those tend to be leeches).

If you're truly interested in Roman Emperors, that's fine, of course. The warning is more about "I just started spaced repetition, I need cards quick, so let's do capitals, US states, and other random trivia".

I admit birthdays of acquaintances don't quite fit under "random trivia", but I'll still maintain that learning random birthdays seems useless, when the calendar works so well.

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

#47

Post by Syzygies »

pawelduda wrote: post #5

Spaced repetition is underrated. I still remember a lot from my cards despite not having studied them for years

Pimsleur is my favorite system for learning foreign languages, based on spaced repetition.

I'm a casual tourist, who likes to pick up some rudimentary language skills before travel. There are many of us; we understand the importance of smiling at our hosts and getting the words out while more formal learners are stalled in self-induced aphasia.

For us, the design of spaced-repetition systems misses a crucial point: We don't care about measurable process while stockpiling some language skills before a trip, and we certainly don't have time to sit around studying once we're on a trip. The goal is to ingest as much content as we can, in some form that sticks, to recall more flexibly as we struggle to speak in-country.

For this purpose, memorizing a radio play as if one is an actor is more effective than spaced repetition. For example, just the Pimsleur dialogs, edited from audio files one owns. The words are there, slow to access but quicker than opening up a phrase book. Within a week traveling, one's mind reorganizes access to the language one actually uses.

The dig on learning a radio play is one doesn't know the words out of sequence. Yeah, that's why one can learn them so efficiently. For those of us of a certain age, it's the "next song on the album" effect. What did Knuth say about premature optimization? Learn the words one actually needs out of sequence, on the ground, in use.

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

#48

Post by Tainnor »

beebeepka wrote: post #44
Tainnor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else. Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.

I apologise if I have caused any offense, because that wasn't my intent.

I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.

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

#49

Post by justanotherjoe »

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…

I wish they'd always explain 'the initial seed' first. What was the initial thought or idea, that, when pursued and expanded on, resulted in the concept that im trying to learn right now?

That sort of initial seed would give me so much information...

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

#50

Post by zabzonk »

Tainnor wrote: post #34
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 -…

it happens in the uk as well as the us - university lecturers are bribed by the publishers.
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