111–120 of 208 posts
Anyone had any experience using spaced repetition for reinforcing math learning?
Not affiliated but 3 months in and I feel my math foundations are finally solidifying into something that will allow me to build into areas previously out of reach
Wozniak estimates that you actually get a maximum of~300,000 based on his decades of data, so it seems the simplified model misses some effect and so converges to the wrong total: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/How_much_knowledge_can_human_bra...
Wow, never heard of SuperMemo and this Wozniak. What an interesting and awesome rabbit hole
Be aware that it's not peer reviewed, and some of the findings take a lot of experimentation if you want to dive deep and reproduce them.
My understanding is that his thoughts on sleep are pretty controversial within the sleep optimization community.
Anyone had any experience using spaced repetition for reinforcing math learning?
Besides LineByLine ( https://linebyline.app ), does anyone have tips on memorizing long texts using spaced repetition?
https://super-memory.com/help/read.htm
Disclaimer: AnkiDroid maintainer
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If an approach is so boring that you don't do it, then what does it matter how effective it might be? Either find a way to make it less boring or switch up the approach. Whatever gets you to keep a habit is what's important. Same with any habit we want to develop. Cooking. Exercise. Language learning. Building software. Meet people.
Because realistically doing your Anki cards should take 10-30 minutes a day, maximum. If you can’t slog through 30 minutes of learning vocabulary/etc. then the thing you’re learning isn’t very important to you. SRS isn’t about doing flash cards for hours on end, it’s about determining the maximum retention rate while doing the minimum amount of work. Even then, personally I don’t find Anki that boring at all. But I m…
i'm not saying spaced repititon is useless - it is a great beginners tool. However you need to move on as soon as possible. once you can use the skill that is better in gereral. Doctors use spaced repition more than most because there are a lot of rare things they will never encounter but mixed in is one rare thing they need to know instantly and they cannot know in advance what that thing is. Almost nothing else is both like that and doesn't allow time to look it up.
note that reading/doing something is itself spaced repititon. It isn't algorithemic but it is still randon spacing of things you need to know and the more you need it the more often it repeats
I have been wondering about this in the context of being ready for work in the age of LLM‘s. What nobody can deny is that they memorize information at a superhuman level, so it might reduce the value of having done that myself. On the other hand, “couldn’t you just google that“has been an erroneous retort to the value of space repetition for decades, during which I’ve gotten a lot of value out of doing. has been a er…
It seems pretty easy to illuminate this question once you consider concrete examples. For example, neither google nor an LLM replaces the utility of building your own vocabulary so that you can express yourself in a foreign language when you're in convo with someone.
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I still remember vividly the day I first heard of SuperMemo and Wozniak, I spent the next ~6 hours reading everything about him and his software. Interesting fact, SuperMemo is written in Pascal.
Yeah, I've been in the same (amazing) rabbit hole, can recommend. Are there any public sources about SM being written in Pascal? TIL
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but: of all the really brilliant people I've ever met, interacted with or learned from, I haven't heard of anyone that used techniques like this. Like, the way they learn things and become brilliant is the exact same way every brilliant person has done it for thousands of years: they read books, they discuss and debate with other brilliant people, they study their subjects and…
I've met a ton of brilliant people at Olympiads who use Anki, and you'll find heavy usage from people who rank #1 in highly competitive exams (JEE Advanced, Cambridge Medicine etc...). I graduated top of my class, and I attribute this to consistent Anki usage
But, of course: there's a subset of truly incredible people who don't need it. I've met some people at 20+ languages, no Anki
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Disclaimer: AnkiDroid maintainer. Did a bit of work on a new website today, so stats are top of mind.
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What you remember becomes part of your thinking and reasoning. So no, why would you google something if it doesn’t come to mind as something relevant.
You can't know it all so choose what is important to know and what you look up.
Except for the regex syntax, and ffmpeg pipelines, I won’t ever dedicate brain-space for those.
So I suppose I contradict myself. Huh. Nuts.
I've done the whole spaced repetition and Anki thing, realized that if it's boring, you won't learn as well, and you won't stick with it in the long term, once you miss a week and suddenly you have 863 reps to get through to catch up. Instead, read stuff you're interested, apply it in your work, learn mostly Just In Time for when you need it. Learn by doing.
Spaced repetition is the cherry on the cake: learn by practicing, but create your own cards along the way, and when reviewing just focus on making a recall effort, not nailing everything. For language, 10-20 mins / day is great, and if you are putting enough effort, 6-8 reps is enough to learn a card with 2 new concepts at ~15secs / rep, which really makes a difference long term. I made a tool[1] with that approach i…