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In Praise of Memorization

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Re: In Praise of Memorization

#41

Post by Buttons840 »

You know those fancy electronic notebooks? They're barely better than actual notebooks. They all seek to emulate the pen and paper experience, they go to great expense and make it a focus of their advertising that they feel like real pen and paper. Why wouldn't I just use pen and paper?

I believe electronic notebooks haven't yet realized their greatest potential, spaced repetition. I want to take my notes in an electronic notebook, then review my notes and extract parts of them to become spaced repetition items. This is something I would happily have a dedicated device for, and would pay $1000+ for such a device, but they don't yet exist.

After taking notes, natural hand made notes, I imagine creating spaced repetition "flashcards" would work like so:

1. Review notes and draw a square around something I would like to memorize; perhaps a fact I have written, or a hand drawn chart or diagram. This square becomes a "flashcard".

2. Optionally, I may hide (by blurring, or pixelating, etc) part of the flashcard.

When the time came for study, these flashcards would be presented to me following a spaced repetition algorithm:

3. Present the flashcard, including all blurring and pixelation.

4. When ready, the user is shown the full unobscured flashcard. The user may also toggle the surrounding page the square was originally extracted from, this gives the user context.

5. The user can then judge how well they remember the flashcard. The user presses a button indicating how well they remembered the flashcard. This feedback goes back into the spaced repetition algorithm.

The important innovation here is that users can easily combine hand-written and hand-drawn notes and a spaced repetition algorithm. In Anki, you can import pictures, but this is burdensome. You can write markdown or LaTeX, but those suck compared to just drawing something by hand. Studies have shown that hand drawn notes aid in memorization. The would has never seen hand drawn notes easily combined with spaced repetition, and I believe it would be better than any other memorizing scheme we've yet encountered.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#42

Post by FearNotDaniel »

jasode wrote: post #32
bambax wrote: post #28

Very much in agreement with the article. The analysis about the current Ukrainian situation is a little bit limited, though, because Russia controls Sevastopol since it annexed Crimea in 2014; it didn't need the current war to control it more. Also, probable typo: > A second example: at the time of the writing of this article, Russia is a month into an invitation into Ukraine. invitation => invasion? I don't think an…

>, because Russia controls Sevastopol since it annexed Crimea in 2014; it didn't need the current war to control it more. Crimea's fresh water supply came from a canal originating in Ukraine. After Russia's annexation, Ukraine retaliated by blocking the water flow with concrete so Crimea was running out of water. Deep link to explanation: https://youtu.be/If61baWF4GE?t=16m27s So it was no surprise that on the 2nd day…

I'm obviously missing some facts about the region, as per the OP's hypothesis, because a naive look at the map suggests that even without Crimea, Russia already has coastline onto the Black Sea between its borders with Ukraine and Georgia... there must be a strong reason in favour of invading another country rather than developing ports on the land they already have, if the goal is simply "control over the Black Sea and trade access to the Mediterranean Sea".

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#43

Post by RugnirViking »

baash05 wrote: post #13

In University I had a prof that gave us 600 facts at the start of the year. All printed and easy to read. Each class we went over a few of them. He said if you mastered 100% you'd get 100% on the exam. He would pick from the lot and that's the exam question. His reasoning was. These are the basics, we were all smart, and we could use the basics to go beyond them. But only if we had them. 20+ years later and I still r…

This is honestly so important. Almost every issue or confusion I have had while studying is because I didn't remember or never learned a fact from "the basics". Over time I like to think I've corrected most of them, but only by finding and saving high-quality references that help me learn them again quickly - although ironically the process of conciously doing that usually means I no longer need the reference!

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#44

Post by isolli »

turboponyy wrote: post #5

I've never regarded memorization highly. Whenever we had to learn the times tables or the squares at school, I would just work them out in my head instead of memorizing them. Of course, I still ended up learning the squares and the times tables by heart, but not because I actively memorized them, but because I just used them so much that I couldn't help but remember them eventually. I'm of the opinion that this leads…

My brain works the same. When it comes geography, I tend to learn and remember a lot about the countries I visit. But empty learning just doesn't work for me.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#45

Post by isolli »

historia_novae wrote: post #11
turboponyy wrote: post #5

I've never regarded memorization highly. Whenever we had to learn the times tables or the squares at school, I would just work them out in my head instead of memorizing them. Of course, I still ended up learning the squares and the times tables by heart, but not because I actively memorized them, but because I just used them so much that I couldn't help but remember them eventually. I'm of the opinion that this leads…

>I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything Did you ever learn another language? It's impossible without memorizing a massive amount of things, especially when the writing system is different than the one one is familiar with. In fact the most famous researcher in vocabulary learning (Paul Nation) states in one of his book that rote learning is one of the most efficient use of…

I draw a distinction between active learning (which takes place when you practice a language) and rote learning. I speak quite a few languages (with varying success) and learned most of my vocabulary from practice (which includes reading). I never thought of learning words as exercising my memory, it's just practice.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#46

Post by scioxo »

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #42
jasode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, because Russia controls Sevastopol since it annexed Crimea in 2014; it didn't need the current war to control it more. Crimea's fresh water supply came from a canal originating in Ukraine. After Russia's annexation, Ukraine retaliated by blocking the water flow with concrete so Crimea was running out of water. Deep link to explanation: https://youtu.be/If61baWF4GE?t=16m27s So it was no surprise that on the 2nd day…

I'm obviously missing some facts about the region, as per the OP's hypothesis, because a naive look at the map suggests that even without Crimea, Russia already has coastline onto the Black Sea between its borders with Ukraine and Georgia... there must be a strong reason in favour of invading another country rather than developing ports on the land they already have, if the goal is simply "control over the Black Sea…

Russia's Black Sea coast is shallow and lacks large, sheltered harbours. It would cost billions and takes decades to build a proper port there.

Russia had actually be leasing the port at Sevastopol from the Ukraine since the fall of the USSR and had their Mediterranean fleet based there even before the invasion in 2014. They had a lot to lose in an anti-Russian Ukrainian government.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#47

Post by RugnirViking »

rasterino wrote: post #26

Understanding that memorization should be key for the reasons laid out in the article, would it be better to forgo note centered workflows such as Zettelkasten or Wiki for flashcard centered workflows such as Anki or Supermemo? What gives the most value? I'm going back and forth between these two workflows and I feel like progressing at a steady rate before getting bogged down, not because I have difficulty with the…

Pick something that works for you and stick with it. There will always be aricles of people talking about what works for them, you shouldn't just drop everything and switch entirely, just incorporate some aspects of their advice that sound good to you.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#49

Post by zozbot234 »

isolli wrote: post #45
historia_novae wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything Did you ever learn another language? It's impossible without memorizing a massive amount of things, especially when the writing system is different than the one one is familiar with. In fact the most famous researcher in vocabulary learning (Paul Nation) states in one of his book that rote learning is one of the most efficient use of…

I draw a distinction between active learning (which takes place when you practice a language) and rote learning. I speak quite a few languages (with varying success) and learned most of my vocabulary from practice (which includes reading). I never thought of learning words as exercising my memory, it's just practice.

Active recall is a key component of successful memorization, which is why the popular system of spaced-repetition flashcards is very much based on it. Actually, even pre-flashcard systems of organized rote learning tend to feature it, e.g. via being asked to recite some short text (the "lesson") word-for-word until it is learned by sheer habit.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#50

Post by nonrandomstring »

Convenience kills.

The Art of Memory by F.A. Yates is still a nice read.

In the article, the engineers admired by the author were intel ops who were stuck in an airgap and had to use their minds. That's a principle I try to use in life - to some extent deliberately making things hard for myself. As with all exercise, what was impossibly hard becomes commonplace.

Part of this discipline is knowing what not to do (yes, attic theory). I never create new accounts on anything or unless I've a clear cost-benefit rationale that makes memorising a new 32 character passphrase worthwhile. That excludes a huge heal of crap that wants you to "sign up" for it.

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