51–60 of 154 posts
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…
Most books are very badly written.
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 t…
> 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, ...
Not all of these are even true of physical books - people have been bookmarking them and scribbling in the margins for ages. And also, e-books and PDFs exist, for the people that prefer them.
As for the "tailoring to a specific reader" and "tracking understanding", that's a problem for any learning resource, as people are incredibly varied. Maybe in certain situations, learning resources exist that are extremely adaptable, but I've rarely seen that. In general, for a given topic one should check out different books until one finds one that is well-suited, skip sections that are obvious, consult other sources where one remains confused, do exercises if the book has them, etc.
Books being hard to edit and/or collaborate on could maybe (if it's even true) be a problem for authors, but why does it matter for readers?
The one thing that I do consider true is that you can't do extremely fancy visualisations in a book. But there's no problem with supplementing a book with e.g. a website where you can find interactive visualisations, etc. (also: simply not every topic needs complex interactive visualisations).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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 p…
This isn't helped by how the biotech world stratifies itself into PhDs and non-PhDs
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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.
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.
I don't suggest you should learn Python _only_ with python.cards. I assume every python.cards user will be doing some online course, or working with Python, and my decks will just boost their knowledge of the language.
I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Python is not their main occupation. These people struggle to accumulate knowledge, because they may encounter concepts or APIs only from time to time, and by that time they already forgot.
Also, I want to cover some "unorthodox" topics for which spaced repetition may be specially well suited. For example, I'm building a deck called "A tour of the standard library", where you can learn all the modules that are available, just so you know what is out there, without going deep into it.
Another idea is to have decks to learn all the built-in exceptions by heart, or the nomenclature. I think this helps build a mental model of the width and depth of the language so you can better integrate all the knowledge you find while coding, searching online, or reading code.
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 p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 do…
It typically doesn't look like a fully fleshed out pizza shop, but I distinctly remember explaining an cell scaffold that I had synthesized like a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs to some of the undergraduates I was mentoring..
I never felt that other domains didn't address the natural inclination to use abstraction as a way to convey concepts/processes.
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Don't complain reflexively without looking at the submission. It's >95% text, the whole video transcript.
"Please add" is not a complaint, it's a polite request.
The fact that there's also a video transcript just proves that the [video] label is accurate.