Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by dotnet00 » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

cinntaile wrote: post #14

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…

The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not. The reward is built-in. This is a bit harder for maths/physics once you're past the trivial stuff and most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.

>The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not

The feedback is only fast if you're already skilled. It's pretty common for new students to have no proper sense of what sounds good (particularly since it's familiar to them), such that they struggle to figure out what they need to improve. Similar to digital artists flipping the image often to make it easier to identify issues by making the image somewhat unfamiliar to them, forcing their brain to actually look at the image rather than just using its previous idealized mental representation of what the image looked like.

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

#122

Post by chowells » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

AlexErrant wrote: post #105

dotnet00 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember this having been my experience with teaching myself to code as a kid. All I remember is initial endless frustration from having to re-read tutorials and documentation and still not understanding anything. Then at some point I can't remember, everything clicked into place and I can't understand why I didn't understand it before. Once I had those basics down, I haven't had that kind of struggle. I went throu…

> keep working and at some point it'll just click for you Haha, monads still haven't clicked for me despite knowing F# and Clojure pretty well. I think of them as "functors that you can flatten" (and functors are "things you can `map` over", and `map` is "a structure-preserving transformation"). I know monads syntactically , but not intuitively . Despite this I still manage to work with monads pretty well - sometimes…

Ah, so you understand monads. The trick is that someone told you they're a big important deal. They aren't. They're useful, so they get used. But there's no great insight or revelation waiting for you. You've already got it.

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

#123

Post by ryloric » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

> Books don't work

Stupidest title I've seen in some time. Maybe there's some additional context I'm missing.

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

#124

Post by montefischer » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #36

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 t…

What is your favorite alternative medium?

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

#125

Post by montefischer » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

AlexErrant wrote: post #26

Ulgh why didn't the blog link to "Why books donʼt work" https://andymatuschak.org/books/ 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 b…

A far more practical idea is to internalize the practice of 'metacognition' so you can apply it to the vast corpus of books that already exist.

It is also interesting to consider previous attempts to wrap a cognitive model around the physical medium of the book, like the monastic 'lectio divina' of the middle ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina

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

#126

Post by dkjaudyeqooe » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

dilawar wrote: post #65

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #32

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…

> 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 I found it to be very effective though time consuming. Even if you don't figure out the solution, when you read other solution later, everything just clicks.

I like to think about it when I'm doing something else that doesn't require thinking. You also have to let it percolate. It kind of reflects the focused/diffused thinking modes of actual learning.

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

#127

Post by dkjaudyeqooe » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #58

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #32

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…

Towards your first point, I love interacting with LLMs (ignoring all the issues about confabulation etc.) because I can ask it for top down, high level outlines and drill down to the bottom however I please, and ask for multiple paths down as well.

I agree, that's a bright spot which I've just started to get into. It's a real boon for personalised learning. Even mistakes by LLMs are helpful: you know that they're unreliable and you have to stay on your toes, so what they're telling you makes sense. That only benefits actual understanding, rather than rote learning.

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

#128

Post by Asraelite » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

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.

The problem with SRS in my opinion is the inability to do many-to-one mappings. That is, a single question that builds upon your knowledge of already-learned simpler concepts by combining them together into a compound problem.

In the context of language learning this could be a sentence which tests multiple individual vocabulary items and grammatical patterns together. In the context of maths it could be using multiple techniques in sequence to solve a more complex equation.

I think this would bridge the gap between the atomic knowledge that flashcards give you and the more generalized knowledge that applied practice gives you.

AFAIK, no existing SRS is capable of this. I started working on a prototype web app that could do it but I haven't finished it yet. I plan to return to it at some point.

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

#129

Post by esafak » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 7:53 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #99

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.

For me specifically the motivation was that my mother, who is naturally very good with dates and birthdays, would keep telling me "It's your {uncle, grandma, cousin}'s birthday, don't forget!" and I would think to myself, "what kind of bad person am I, that I don't even know my own family's birthdays?" Similarly, I struggle with understanding/remembering the structure of my family tree, at least for the family member…

Don't bother. Do you want your distant relatives to toil away trying to remember where you fit in the family tree? Life is too short for that. Forgive yourself and move on.

I'm bad at it too and my wife is not, so she can figure out my own family tree better than I can; it makes for good party banter.

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

#130

Post by Smaug123 » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 8:02 PM UTC

ryloric wrote: post #123

> Books don't work Stupidest title I've seen in some time. Maybe there's some additional context I'm missing.

The context you appear to be missing is actually the content of the post. It's often the way with articles: they give a title, which is then expanded upon in the main text.