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

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

#131

Post by beebeepka » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 8:11 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #74

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.

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, studen…

I did come back to it as an adult. Spent a while doing 2d and 3d graphics. It was much easier as an adult but rendering involves too much of this math stuff and I gave up. Definitely not for equipped to shine as graphics programmer.

Which brings us to my original point - not everyone can do it (well).

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

#132

Post by jackphilson » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

dan-g wrote: post #116

pyjarrett wrote: post #62

The real problem is teaching children that "reading" is merely decoding words off a page, and "listening" is merely hearing the words someone says. The book itself is a way to open the door to learning, not the end point. Reading subject titles first, cross-referencing, and working examples and doing projects help teach and cement ideas. There's techniques like SQ4R [1] for reading, and hugely applicable to general t…

To others wondering about the discrepancy between SQ4R being mentioned in the comment text and the title of the linked source being SQ3R ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R ), it looks like others [1] add an additional R (marked with an asterisk below), for the following: 1. Survey 2. Question 3. Read 4. Recite 5. *Rephrase 6. Review [1] https://www.american.edu/provost/academic-access/sq4r.cfm

are there more accepted alternatives to this, or is this optimal?

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

#133

Post by victorlf » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

AlexErrant wrote: post #107

victorlf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many reasons, most of them hypothesis. For one, the book "The programmer's brain" says that spaced repetition is the best way to learn the syntax, idioms, caveats of a programming language, but it's hard to find a product that offers this. 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…

> the book "The programmer's brain" says that spaced repetition is the best way to learn the syntax, idioms, caveats of a programming language Unfortunately, hard disagree. The best way to learn a Lisp is to write Lisp. You can look at code all you want, but you won't get used to the syntax/parens until you start writing it. Same applies to non-Lisps. > I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Pyt…

You may be interested in rust.cards, which I'm also working on :D

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

#134

Post by Tomte » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

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 -…

I studied CS in Germany and pretty quickly learned not to buy textbooks too fast: lecture was announced with book X as necessary to have.

First lecture the professor holds up book X. "I have taught using this book for years. A few days ago I decided to use book Y (holds it up) going forward."

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

#135

Post by satisfice » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 10:02 PM UTC

I wrote about a more relaxed version of this, some years ago. See Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar.

I wrote it to explain the techniques I use to compete as a technical guy who dropped out of high school.

It’s actually not very hard to compete if you see education as an ongoing process of personal construction, rather than some plug of knowledge that an expert gave you (along with a certificate).

I collect books and papers which I ignore until I have a relevant problem, at which point I go into a process of intensive inquiry similar to that describe in the post.

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

#136

Post by gbacon » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 10:10 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.

I built an Anki deck[0] to prepare for and pass on my first attempt the Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI) initial oral exam, considered by some to be the toughest checkride — although pass rates have been rising in recent years[1].

[0]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1069780390

[1]: https://jasonblair.net/?p=3326

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

#137

Post by Tainnor » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 10:47 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #86

Tainnor wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, books continue to work for a lot of people (including myself). Every time I read a book about a topic, I come away with deeper and more contextual knowledge than if I just piece together scraps of information from badly written blog posts and overly technical documentation - and that's only for programming stuff, for history etc. books tend to be even more valuable. > Hard to bookmark (and find what those are f…

Well, books also continue to fail a lot of people > Not all of these are even true of physical books - people have been bookmarking them and scribbling in the margins for ages. All of that is true for physical books, if you're limited to tiny margins and can't easily find your margin scribbles later, then it's a format fail, you just continue to use the same flawed logic "done for ages = good" > And also, e-books and…

> Well, books also continue to fail a lot of people

Yes, because learning is hard. A book is not a guarantee that you'll learn something - but neither is any other sort of resource.

The thesis of this discussion is that "books don't work" and that's blatantly false. Maybe there's certain people for whom they really "don't work", but as a general statement, it's false.

> Which topic do you think can't benefit from one?

I don't need fancy data visualisation if I read up on the history of the Roman Empire, for example. Or if I want to read Plato. Or to understand axiomatic set theory.

---

I'll just put it differently: if you prefer other kinds of resources and they work for you - great. But to say "books don't work" just means that you artificially limit the things you learn. Writing books is comparatively easy (if you're an expert in the area). Doing fancy interactive experiences etc. requires much more time, skill, knowledge etc. - there's probably 3 to 4 orders of magnitude more stuff that has been written in books than has been made available through other means, so saying "books suck" means just locking yourself out of a lot of stuff.

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

#138

Post by Tainnor » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 10:50 PM UTC

caskstrength wrote: post #109

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…

> Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). Quoted sentence does a lot of heavy lifting in your reasoning. Being intrinsically interested in something is integral part of learning. And, yes, obviously for people who have zero interest in subject it will act as "specific learning disability". I know this because I tend to be interested in programming-related subjects and, consecutively,…

I don't think you can count "zero interest" as being a learning disability. I hated drawing and still do (and other things too), but I could probably still learn the basics of it if, say, my life depended on it.

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

#139

Post by matheusiacono » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 10:54 PM UTC

Smaug123 wrote: post #130

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.

Even books follow this way.

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

#140

Post by Tainnor » Sat, Dec 16, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #134

Tainnor wrote: post #34

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 -…

I studied CS in Germany and pretty quickly learned not to buy textbooks too fast: lecture was announced with book X as necessary to have. First lecture the professor holds up book X. "I have taught using this book for years. A few days ago I decided to use book Y (holds it up) going forward."

TIL, but still: the lecturer changing their book preference at the last minute still seems different than "you have to use edition 15 of this book (which came out 3 months ago) which is exactly the same as all the previous editions, but the exercises are rearranged, so you'll get confused if you use an older edition", which - if I understand it correctly - is what seems to happen sometimes in the US.