Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 538 posts

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#111

Post by maximus-decimus »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #53
bearjaws wrote: post #6

Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now. Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern. A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you…

Spaced repetition is time-optimised , but it isn't self-discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation. If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or, failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and failure. I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burnin…

I don't understand, wouldn't it be worse for motivation to take longer to achieve the same results?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#113

Post by Smaug123 »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #59

[flagged]

You're free to choose not to memorise things, but please don't be an arsehole about people who do want to do so for whatever reason. Having said that, you seem to misunderstand the point of spaced repetition, which is that you don't memorise the same thing over and over again; instead, you memorise it enough times to learn it, and not many more.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#115

Post by kevinmchugh »

kwakubiney wrote: post #91
kevinmchugh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an anki deck built from the jeopardy archive with 400,000 questions, so I'm studying trivia that way. I enjoy trivia.

I would love to get my hands on this, please share if you can :)

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1348564164

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#116

Post by chongli »

chjj wrote: post #71
petesergeant wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing really wrong with it And a gigantic amount right with it. This is a strange comment because it shrugs off something that has been transformative and hugely useful to a lot of people because it doesn’t fix all conceivable problems.

I don't think it's a strange comment. He's mostly right (and so are you, but I think you're talking past each other). There's nothing wrong with SRS, and I agree with you that it's basically like cheat codes for memorization, but there is a limit to what most people can do. i.e. most people do tend to drop off. I remember reading some stats from WaniKani (Japanese SRS app) a while back... WaniKani has 60 "levels" to…

Learning a language as a hobby is tough. If you don't need the language to communicate and survive in your environment then you have essentially zero real motivation to learn it.

The problem with spaced repetition systems is that it doesn't supply that extra motivation. You're still just memorizing things in a vacuum. If you truly want to learn a language you need to use it to communicate. That means making friends, travelling, reading books, and consuming other media in that language.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#117

Post by hshshshshsh »

Smaug123 wrote: post #113
hshshshshsh wrote: post #59

[flagged]

You're free to choose not to memorise things, but please don't be an arsehole about people who do want to do so for whatever reason. Having said that, you seem to misunderstand the point of spaced repetition, which is that you don't memorise the same thing over and over again; instead, you memorise it enough times to learn it, and not many more.

[flagged]

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#118

Post by barrell »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #53
bearjaws wrote: post #6

Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now. Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern. A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you…

Spaced repetition is time-optimised , but it isn't self-discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation. If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or, failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and failure. I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burnin…

I would say the implementations are time optimized, over the others. I’m building a language learning application, and have put in a lot of effort to make sure that the Spaced Repeition is motivation-optimized.

It’s centered around your performance and review times, to make sure you aren’t struggling to much; no due dates to avoid Anki slogs; gamified with some internal mechanics; dopaminergically influenced with aspects of randomness.

Spaced Repetition is just an equation (SM2 is laughable simple), but a lot of applications just slap a UI on it and call it a day, but that’s not the only way to use it!

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#119

Post by pm215 »

felipeerias wrote: post #75
cenamus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but what's clunky about it? All buttons in reach of your thumb on the mobile app and usable keybindings on desktop? Is there not enough useless whitespace around every button?

I have been trying to use Anki for years. Every time it is the same story: I keep it up for a few months until I miss a couple days, then due cards accumulate far beyond what can be reasonably managed, and I end up spending more time trying to fix the app than actually learning anything.

This is an area where I feel like there's scope for improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail. But most people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a huge number of reviews which is pretty discouraging to even start, you probably get more of them wrong than usual, so you likely do fewer reviews than you normally would, and the situation tends to get worse instead of better.

An SRS system which took more account of the human failings of the user might:

- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months

- let you tell it "I'm going to be on holiday in a month's time" and have it figure out what to do with reviews and new items to minimise disruption

- when you do come back after a break, pick the most useful reviews to offer the user up to the daily limit (e.g. something whose review interval is six months can wait a few more days, something the user added very recently and has seen only once could be put back into the "new items" bucket to relearn later, so if the user is only going to do 100 of their 300 due cards, other cards are more important to review today)

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#120

Post by barrell »

InkCanon wrote: post #95
bearjaws wrote: post #6

Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now. Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern. A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you…

There's some UX problems of SRS (that I'm working on) that makes it high friction 1) Time taken to create cards 2) Need for self marking 3) Creates a one to one mapping of prompt-answer 4) If you're an autodidact, you have to teach yourself first (alternatively called understanding, scaffolding, etc) More fundamentally, SRS isn't a superpower because it's just very specific to creating a direct prompt retrieval. Gene…

Where do we find more about what you’re working on? :)
Post reply on HN