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Learn Exponentially

saveall.ai

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Re: Learn Exponentially

#61

Post by AlchemistCamp »

p-christ wrote: post #53
codazoda wrote: post #49

I sometime use a process of capturing stray thoughts, which I do on paper. I’ve considered making an app for it and I had considered showing things back to myself at random intervals. I wonder if I could use this idea to capture things I’ve learned and repeat them back to me at the intervals presented here. It would probably be easy to do and might be an interesting test to see if the schedule benefits me remembering…

This seems like what a spaced repetition app does, is there a difference? For example lots of people use Save All for this exact reason https://saveall.ai/

And orders of magnitude more use Anki: https://apps.ankiweb.net/

I’ve been seeing HN submissions of various quality to extoll the virtues of SRS in an attempt to sell Anki clones or Anki for X for almost 15 years now.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#62

Post by p-christ »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #61
p-christ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like what a spaced repetition app does, is there a difference? For example lots of people use Save All for this exact reason https://saveall.ai/

And orders of magnitude more use Anki: https://apps.ankiweb.net/ I’ve been seeing HN submissions of various quality to extoll the virtues of SRS in an attempt to sell Anki clones or Anki for X for almost 15 years now.

Haha, where would you rank this one in terms of quality?

Re: Learn Exponentially

#63

Post by schainks »

p-christ wrote: post #10
pastram_i wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anki the solution you imagine? https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Or is there a use case that anki doesn’t solve?

Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful unfortunately

They are hit or miss, depending what you're trying to do.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#64

Post by biophysboy »

b3nji wrote: post #44
biophysboy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are referring to "spaced repetition", which is just a method to maximize long-term retention. If you are asked about a concept one day from now, and you successfully recall it, then you are reminded two days from now, and so on.

Thanks, so essentially you set a reminder for you ti sit, and remember what you learned a few days prior?

Basically yes. The exact time isn't so important, as long as the rough interval increases with each success and decreases with each failure.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#65

Post by kzrdude »

Even just the idea of incremental improvements needs spreading more. For some reason I needed to hear it and it was not intuitive to me. (Maybe because I was a quick learner and always picked up stuff fast.)

Get started, practice often, that's the only way to have compounding gains at many activities. Music, hobbies, working with your hands, etc.

The long perspective is very helpful. Don't worry about improving today, but about the long trajectory.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#66

Post by allenu »

anon2020dot00 wrote: post #6

My idea is that there is a market for community-curated spaced repetition decks. Many people want to learn the same things such as a foreign language or a programming language. The difficult part is creating a deck and crafting the answers and questions. Because usually this is a time-consuming process. So if it was a community-effort then it would be a win-win. This is probably not an original idea and if anyone kno…

> This is probably not an original idea and if anyone knows already where to find such decks, that would be cool.

This is something I've wanted to do with my app (Fresh Cards). I ended up defining a simple text file format for the flashcards[1] to help make it easier to share and import cards. You could post flashcards as simple text that someone could drag and drop into the app to import. (Formats like Anki's .apkg file are great, but they don't make it easy to peruse the cards without importing into Anki.)

What's missing in all of this, though, is an actual community where you could search and browse the decks and collaborate to create new ones. Though, if you simply use text files, you could host a deck on github, for instance, and allow people to create pull requests to improve it. I think there's room for creating nicer user experiences to surface decks and encourage sharing, however. (Imagine, for instance, a social media-like feed where you could see new flashcards being created and you could search by tag for your target language.) Anyway, I think this area is ripe for exploration, but the user experience has to be done right to encourage collaboration and sharing of decks.

[1] https://www.freshcardsapp.com/help/tech/index.html#text

Re: Learn Exponentially

#67

Post by allenu »

pastram_i wrote: post #13
p-christ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful unfortunately

I don’t disagree, but from their reply the request is community based. And any community based product is just a good as… well, their community. So how would a different community tool provide better content? What tactics could be used to increase quality?

See my other comment, but I wonder if someone could coordinate an open source deck using github. It would have to use a text-based flashcard deck format, and as with other open source, would require some coordination to curate the deck.

That said, I can see some negatives as I have read that for learning, it's generally better to construct your own flashcards.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#68

Post by Version467 »

motohagiography wrote: post #32

Spaced repetition turns reading into a physical activity with feedback. If you had an activity that required the knowledge you were hoping to acquire, you would learn at the same rate or faster by practice. Most lessons are encoded really poorly. I think spaced repetition is great, but practice at something is better. A hacker is just someone who has practiced learning independently and has become exceptionally good…

I've integrated spaced repetition quite effectively into my daily life and I've found that it's incredibly important to learn how to write good prompts.

The naive approach definitely leads to rote learning of factual trivia, but proper prompts can definitely foster curiosity and understanding. In fact it's often times the process of creating new prompts that reveal a gap in my understanding.

This Article from Andy Matuschak is a very thorough introduction to the art of prompt writing: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

Of course it doesn't mean that practical experience is obsolete, quite the opposite. But spaced repetition works great in conjunction with practice. I'd go so far that it's more effective to do both, than just practical experience.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#69

Post by ac130kz »

Memorization and repetition are not learning or knowledge, these are just important tools for learning. I believe that learning is a sort of compression algorithm. You pass some data through your brain and you try to compress it down to an exponentially smaller subset, from which you should be able to recreate the rest. The way you compress, the selection process and the quality of data, that's learning. The way you decompress, that's knowledge.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#70

Post by rbarragan »

motohagiography wrote: post #32

Spaced repetition turns reading into a physical activity with feedback. If you had an activity that required the knowledge you were hoping to acquire, you would learn at the same rate or faster by practice. Most lessons are encoded really poorly. I think spaced repetition is great, but practice at something is better. A hacker is just someone who has practiced learning independently and has become exceptionally good…

I totally agree with you here. It's personally my best type of learning. The only downside of this approach is the cost. It takes a lot of time compared to other types of learnings, including reading + spaced repetition explained in the article.

Do you have thoughts on the cost or how to optimize that type of learning?

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