Spaced repetition
gwern.net
Spaced repetition
1–10 of 118 posts
Re: Spaced repetition
#2I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not recall writing down at all. Worse, some of the information has lost context: I wrote it in a certain state of mind, certain emotional state which I no longer have and so the preserved words on paper are missing meaning and appear alien. The situation is so poor that it seems 20% of the material I have recorded has not even been properly preserved from only a month ago.
I find memory endlessly frustrating; we have so many unique thoughts and insights and we are forced to watch them circle the drain. Worse yet, most people aren't even aware this is happening, no internal inventory has been taken to show the poor state of affairs!
The tech community has a fixation on life extension, but I am worried I am not even properly remembering the life I am living right now, nevermind tomorrow.
Re: Spaced repetition
#3I used this at work; while waiting for builds to complete I would use Anki [0] to learn all the names and locations of the countries. It worked pretty well, but it isn't a silver bullet. I retained maybe 50% of the information.
Re: Spaced repetition
#4Spaced repetition is a wonderful tool. I came across it when I started learning languages and have over 5000 cards in my largest Anki deck for words and phrases.
A lot of thought is put into how to use a learners time most effectively. The algorithm designers seem to want to optimize their software so that a student only sees a card they are likely to be on the verge of forgetting. Because of this, uses often fail when they look at a flashcard.
Designing like this seems to ignore spaced repetitions most common failure mode: giving up. I think there is something especially demoralizing about getting questions wrong or being shown you are forgetting something all the time. I think it might even be solved by making the software less efficient but more 'friendly'. For example, giving a student an easier question that they are unlikely to have forgotten to soften the blow of a glut of difficult questions.
Re: Spaced repetition
#5This is the subject I tackled in grad school. It was super interesting, because many people still believe that memorizing stuff is best if you cram for an extended period of time. Showing them that just a few minutes of review at properly spaced intervals leads to better memorization floored most of the participants.
My particular research was the quantify the effects of the variance in follow-up exposure times. I did this research 10 years ago before smartphones were available. The participants had to physically be in a classroom in front of a computer to get the treatment. So in our experiment's case, the effects of variance were non-negligible and needed to be investigated. If smartphones had been around then, we could have tested so many more hypotheses.
Re: Spaced repetition
#6I wrote a program I fancifully called 'Human Unit Tests' to aid me in my studies (learning a diverse set of constants for biophysics). I can very much attest to the effectiveness of spaced repetition.
But, /boy/, do you need to stay on the ball. You can't really afford a cavalier, let's-see attitude with this (given any non-trivial amount of items-to-be-memorized). The review process needs to be as much part of a daily routine as workouts ... Yeah.
On the other hand, there's one reward that doesn't usually get mentioned (as in the fine article re-submitted here[0]): the strengthening of corollary knowledge (or coordinate terms, for the linguistically inclined).
[0] Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809762
Re: Spaced repetition
#7I'm always happy to see new stuff from gwern. If you like his posts as much as I do, you should contribute to his Patreon: http://patreon.com/gwern
Re: Spaced repetition
#8I used this at work; while waiting for builds to complete I would use Anki [0] to learn all the names and locations of the countries. It worked pretty well, but it isn't a silver bullet. I retained maybe 50% of the information. [0] http://ankisrs.net/
What deck(s) do you use? I've been looking for a deck that ideally has one side where there is an image of the country, and I give it the name, and another where there is the name of the country and I click on it in an image, but it's hard to find such a deck.
Re: Spaced repetition
#9Spaced repetition is a wonderful tool. I came across it when I started learning languages and have over 5000 cards in my largest Anki deck for words and phrases. A lot of thought is put into how to use a learners time most effectively. The algorithm designers seem to want to optimize their software so that a student only sees a card they are likely to be on the verge of forgetting. Because of this, uses often fail wh…
Agreed. It doesn't matter how efficient the algorithm is if people get bored and stop using it. At Polly Lingual (https://pollylingu.al) we tried to tune our space-repitition flashcards for this. We aimed for small lessons that move more quickly, with optional follow up for difficult items. For casual learners this doesn't deter them, and for advanced students, they can still go back and see where they need improvement or just simply do the lessons again.
Re: Spaced repetition
#10I used this at work; while waiting for builds to complete I would use Anki [0] to learn all the names and locations of the countries. It worked pretty well, but it isn't a silver bullet. I retained maybe 50% of the information. [0] http://ankisrs.net/
What deck(s) do you use? I've been looking for a deck that ideally has one side where there is an image of the country, and I give it the name, and another where there is the name of the country and I click on it in an image, but it's hard to find such a deck.
TinyCards from DuoLingo has that feature.