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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

#71

Post by davisoneee »

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…

Give yourself more opportunities to latch onto the card.

Instead of Name -> Birthday, try "X's birthday is in {month}", or "Y's birthday is the {N}th of January" or "Z's birthday is just before {some notable date, like Christmas}" or "A's birthday is just after {B ... someone whos birthday you remember}". e.g. I remember my best friend's wife's birthday because it occurs shortly after mine. I remember a girl who I used to live across from 25 years ago because her birthday was just before mine.

This way, you have multiple different ways of relating to the information. If the related key date is coming up, you can think "oh...Z's birthday is around now"...which should be enough for you to functionally act on it.

Try to avoid the mindset of single cards. If you _really_ want the information, break it down in different ways.

Wrestling with the information in this way is a good way to find patterns and relations to it in the first place (put the information IN your brain well)...then use spaced repetition to practice getting the information OUT of your brain well.

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

#73

Post by zabzonk »

Tainnor wrote: post #69
zabzonk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

working for two uk universities. and this not the only stuff these corrupt people got up to - one had the cheek to photocopy his own (crap) book using free to him university copiers, and then make his students pay for the copies. nothing was done about it, of course.

That's of course deplorable. But it just feels to me that if it happens so regularly, there must be some systemic causes and not just instances of invidual educators being bribed

what other reason can there be for very, very bad authors have new editions of books come out every year and get enforced on students by tenured clowns?

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

#74

Post by chongli »

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.

I’ve tutored many students in math and it’s really common for people to feel the way you do. They’ve had bad experiences at some point or another, whether it’s with teachers or classmates.

There are a lot of different reasons why students feel the way you do and (unfortunately) give up on math. It’s a shame because I believe most of those reasons are specific to the high school setting and from what I’ve seen, students have a much better time if they come back to math later in life and study without that environment.

Interest also plays a role, of course. And not everyone will have the interest to go back and study again, later in life.

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

#76

Post by crazygringo »

rickcarlino wrote: post #42

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.

Nope, you're entirely correct.

It's for vocabulary and terminology mainly, or other simple facts like historical dates, country capitals, etc.

It's irrelevant to conceptual learning, where it may be very difficult to understand something, but once you do you understand it for life.

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

#77

Post by Smaug123 »

I know everyone always just responds to the title, but do read/listen to this one. I think it's Dwarkesh's best episode ever. Dwarkesh always asks great questions, and Matuschak has this amazing knack of interpreting those questions in the most interesting ways, while constantly challenging their assumptions.

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

#78

Post by andymatuschak »

Smaug123 wrote: post #77

I know everyone always just responds to the title, but do read/listen to this one. I think it's Dwarkesh's best episode ever. Dwarkesh always asks great questions, and Matuschak has this amazing knack of interpreting those questions in the most interesting ways, while constantly challenging their assumptions.

Thank you for these very kind comments!

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

#79

Post by fredoliveira »

Smaug123 wrote: post #77

I know everyone always just responds to the title, but do read/listen to this one. I think it's Dwarkesh's best episode ever. Dwarkesh always asks great questions, and Matuschak has this amazing knack of interpreting those questions in the most interesting ways, while constantly challenging their assumptions.

I'm a huge fan of Andy's work and have been for years. Absolutely loved this episode.

If I may suggest another one of Dwarkesh's episodes that I thoroughly enjoyed: his 2 episode interview of Carl Shulman. It is an absolute treat. Completely different subjects, of course, but equally engaging.

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