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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

#141

Post by deafpolygon »

beebeepka wrote: post #131
chongli wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I bet they said this back in the day when illiteracy was a widespread thing. Some people just weren't "cut out to read".

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

chowells wrote: post #122
AlexErrant wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by bsder »

zabzonk wrote: post #50
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 -…

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

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

I really, really, really wish people would quit repeating this without evidence.

Maybe ... maybe ... this is true for some huge name who can force the adoption of some huge number of textbooks. Maybe.

However, for any random lecturer who teaches an upper level technical class, the maximum level of revenue any seller can expect from that class is probably about $200 x 50 students = $10,000.

Where the hell is the bribe money going to come out of that? By the way, last I checked, the publishers wouldn't even let us keep the sample copy they sent to us. Yeah, they're that cheap.

And do you really think that your technical lecturer/professor or anybody in the publisher is going to risk going taking potentially illegal behavior for $1000?

If your lecturer/professor is that money driven, they would be better off simply not taking an underpaid, overworked position teaching your sorry ass and instead teach the same technical material to professionals who will pay more than your semester tuition for a one-week program.

Now, if you want to talk about the publishers bribing government bureaucrats over high school textbooks, that is an entirely different and completely documented thing.

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

#144

Post by ryloric »

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.

That's called clickbait.

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

#145

Post by AlexErrant »

victorlf wrote: post #133
AlexErrant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

LOL I'll check it out.

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

#146

Post by caskstrength »

Tainnor wrote: post #138
caskstrength wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly! And another person in your class that is interested in painting could become world class in it while you will be struggling to learn basics.

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

#147

Post by rickcarlino »

Asraelite wrote: post #128
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 multip…

From a language learning perspective, I think this is accomplished via memorization of complete sentences. I am building an SRS as a side project where you memorize complete sentences instead of single vocabulary words and your response is graded by an LLM so that you don’t lose points when your answer is not quite correct or differs slightly in prompt meaning. is that what you meant? I have had good luck using this technique for memorization of grammar rather than memorization of vocabulary.

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

#148

Post by LittleFishyChan »

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.

Dude, nice job! I've been using SuperMemo daily since January 2006! I started using it only for Japanese vocabulary words, but after a few years I tried to branch out and start using it for other stuff. It took a while to really wrap my head around using SRS to learn bigger concepts outside of learning languages. To make a long story short, it all comes down to breaking down any concept or idea into single sentence bites that are added to your flashcard collection. Very often complicated concepts require many flashcards, and (to me) THIS is where learning truly happens. Looking at an idea and saying "what makes this idea work?" and making sure those ideas are covered adequately in your flashcard collection. Now as I listen or read something, I'm constantly asking myself "Is this idea covered in my SuperMemo collection?" And if not, I write down single sentences in my Notes app and add them the next morning after I finish my repetitions. (When do you do your reps? First thing in the morning or throughout the day?) I was annoyed when I was going down this path because there were little to no resources for using SRS to learn complex information (Outside of the SuperMemo web site), so a lot of this I had to learn by trial and error. Let me know if you want to chat, so cool to find others that are dedicated enough to go 10+ years with SRS!

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

#149

Post by eviks »

Tainnor wrote: post #137
eviks wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're wrong re the thesis: this discussion is about the limitations of the format the op claimed were "few", and those limitations are what help fail people, you can't ignore it with a "learning is hard" mantra, that's not relevant when the argument is that it's made hardER by the limitations

And of course just dumping your expert knowledge on the page is easier than creating an effective learning experience

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

#150

Post by cvhashim04 »

iandanforth wrote: post #17

After watching the studying video I'm surprised there is no direct GPT-4 integration with his tool. There's a clear opportunity for dynamic question generation such that you have notes/cards which can't be memorized but instead ask novel questions around the same point.

Can you clarify what studying video you mean?
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