41–50 of 124 posts
Downside for AI potential as a whole, framed broadly: We don't seem to be good enough yet at identifying what friction is functional and what we should strive to automate/eliminate.
When they asked me how I was doing it I explained that I'm there to learn understand the topic and I don't give a damn about the test. So I just let my curiosity lead the way, it causes me to ask questions in and out of class, email the professor about them, do my own research and experiments. Despite not letting the test be my guide, this prepared me for the test anyhow.
I'm glad they work for some people, but flashcards to me seem like they provide a shallow kind of understanding. I don't want to remember the equation, I want to be able to derive it in a pinch, and flash cards don't give me that.
The best advice I've ever read about flash cards is if you are dreading to review, because you are forgetting your cards or they are too complicated, you are writing cards wrong. Learning is supposed to be fun! Also, Common Core should ship Anki decks. I seriously think so many problems with education stem from students not realizing that memorizing is actually very easy with FSRS, and thus struggling and hating lear…
I feel like...that's terrible advice? Voluntary retrieval (the memory "mode" of flashcards), even for simple pairs, is perceived as highly effortful by almost everyone, on a similar tier to doing mental math. It's incredibly efficient for learning, and achieving your goals quickly can be very rewarding, but I don't think "learning flashcards should be fun!" is a reasonable expectation for the vast majority of people.
I use Anki to learn French, Chess openings/tactics/techniques, to unscramble letters for scrabble, for Pub Trivia... The options are kind of limitless. As a mid-30s guy who has well passed the neuroplasticity of his teen years, it's a godsend for me. To echo the author's thoughts though, I can't prove empirically that I learn more effectively using Anki (or spaced repetition) than other methods... Only anecdotally. I…
Practicing your retrieval is actually one of the best ways to retain knowledge of something. Flashcard programs like Anki are really great because it identifies where you need more work and drills you on your weak points -- it feels awkward working constantly on your weak points, but you get quantifiably better results with the flashcard method it uses. Some people criticize flashcards as optimizing for rote memoriza…
My sense is the same as the authors that LLMs + an Anki-like -> mediocrity. But I feel like there ought to be such potential there! Even just things as simple as rewording the same question a bunch of equivalent ways to avoid recognizing the sentence structure... Downside for AI potential as a whole, framed broadly: We don't seem to be good enough yet at identifying what friction is functional and what we should stri…
I predict that things will be 'good' within the next 5 years, but your intuition is correct (and the SOTA models are often producing worse prompts than older models).
The best advice I've ever read about flash cards is if you are dreading to review, because you are forgetting your cards or they are too complicated, you are writing cards wrong. Learning is supposed to be fun! Also, Common Core should ship Anki decks. I seriously think so many problems with education stem from students not realizing that memorizing is actually very easy with FSRS, and thus struggling and hating lear…
I feel like...that's terrible advice? Voluntary retrieval (the memory "mode" of flashcards), even for simple pairs, is perceived as highly effortful by almost everyone, on a similar tier to doing mental math. It's incredibly efficient for learning, and achieving your goals quickly can be very rewarding, but I don't think "learning flashcards should be fun!" is a reasonable expectation for the vast majority of people.
I once took a psychology course with my girlfriend at the time. She and her pals would be up all night studying with flashcards. I'd just walk into class, learn about it, never study, and get A's on the tests. When they asked me how I was doing it I explained that I'm there to learn understand the topic and I don't give a damn about the test. So I just let my curiosity lead the way, it causes me to ask questions in a…
I also know that in math courses, there’s certain formulas with similar names I simply need to remember because deriving them on a test would be too time consuming. Or I could imagine in chemistry there’s various special cases that you’d want to be able to recite on a test.
I’ve never tried it for language learning but people talk highly of it, so there’s definitely some truth in their utility there.
I think the trick is flash cards are fantastic supplementally with other studying strategies.
I once took a psychology course with my girlfriend at the time. She and her pals would be up all night studying with flashcards. I'd just walk into class, learn about it, never study, and get A's on the tests. When they asked me how I was doing it I explained that I'm there to learn understand the topic and I don't give a damn about the test. So I just let my curiosity lead the way, it causes me to ask questions in a…
I once took a psychology course with my girlfriend at the time. She and her pals would be up all night studying with flashcards. I'd just walk into class, learn about it, never study, and get A's on the tests. When they asked me how I was doing it I explained that I'm there to learn understand the topic and I don't give a damn about the test. So I just let my curiosity lead the way, it causes me to ask questions in a…
[1] I feel like Anki offers diminishing returns once you get past N3. Advanced words usually have subtle nuances that you can only really pick up through rich context, like in a full paragraph or a TV scene. Native-speaking kids can understand complex words in context because they have a deep grasp of a smaller, simpler vocabulary. That’s why I’m focusing on mastering high-frequency, simple words first to build a learning flywheel. I'm hoping this will eventually let me pick up new words naturally through reading and listening, just like a native kid does.