[HN Gopher] Learn Exponentially
___________________________________________________________________
Learn Exponentially
Author : p-christ
Score : 164 points
Date : 2022-10-09 12:53 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (saveall.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (saveall.ai)
| NoraCodes wrote:
| This is a neat argument for spaced repetition, which I think is a
| great idea and generally works very well. That said, though, I
| don't think it's a good idea to conflate knowledge with
| intelligence in this context; knowledge is concrete and
| measurable, while intelligence is, at best, nebulous and
| difficult to measure.
|
| Knowing things is really important, but I don't think learning
| makes you "smart"; it just makes you know more things.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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 at it. The reason people say
| you can't teach the hacker mindset is because without the
| underlying drive, there's nothing you can tell anyone. It's like
| when teachers who lament students don't care what they say so
| long as they get the right grade, it's because those students are
| optimizing for approval in a system because that's sufficent for
| their limited purposes. The more you profess to them, the more
| you reinforce that learning is passive submission to authority.
| If you want to make hackers, start with necessity, and technique
| will emerge as the artifact of navigating constraints. If you
| want to make people smart, challenge them instead of just telling
| them things. Hackers aren't defined by knowing more, they're
| defined by having physically done more. Spaced repetition as it's
| usually presented optimizes for outcomes in an approval
| environment that produces people who have been rewarded for
| cheating themselves out of knowledge and expereince.
|
| I would say, want to learn physics? Build mechanisms or make
| radios. Number theory? Break cryptosystems. Astronomy and
| geometry? Sail at night. Lead? Ride horses. Fluid dynamics? Tune
| engines. Statistics? Write a spam filter. Speak a language? Tell
| their jokes, etc. Imo, most education is set around meaningless
| but scalable exercises of professed skills instead of meaningful
| exercises that are more powerful, but don't scale. We've
| optimized for scale at the expense of quality. It's the solution
| to an inferior problem.
|
| So sure, learn spaced repetition, but really, find something and
| practice it for more joy and better results instead.
| teddyh wrote:
| " _One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the
| light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will
| be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And
| yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn't about weaving
| canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It's about giving a
| shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see
| nothing contradictory but rather a community of love._ "
|
| -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, _Citadelle_ , 1948
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| So much this. People learn so much better when that knowledge
| is functionally applied as part of a goal they want to achieve,
| and that also teaches people to be doers who can follow through
| with a project. Too bad it take more teacher skill and student
| freedom, and it's not good for producing factory drones.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Yeah. I've tried to learn a few programming languages without
| having a project and it _just. doesn 't. stick._
|
| _Ever._
|
| Even reading a great O'Reilly book being sure to complete and
| understand the examples isn't enough. Without that immediate
| practical application, it's no more educational than any
| other form of entertainment, and much drier.
| Version467 wrote:
| 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.
| rbarragan wrote:
| 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?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| This stuff could be picked up in internships and
| apprenticeships, though in a lot of cases the state of the
| art is quite far beyond that, so you'd need to join a
| hobbyist club to really get that sort of experience.
| Hacker/maker spaces often have outreach events, and builder
| fairs are good for reaching out as well.
| p-christ wrote:
| For sure it's also good to practice things aswell, it doesn't
| have to be only one or the other. My understanding and
| experience is that if you do 95% practice & 5% spaced
| repetition you will be significantly better over the long-term
| than doing 100% practice.
| bibanez wrote:
| This is a good way to think about the subject. Still, education
| at a higher level like uni is often good to get a sound
| understanding of a subject (more so than optimizing for
| grades).
|
| Also learning a new (natural) language sometimes requires
| hammering words or gramatic rules into memory, and having a
| good teacher can be much faster than learning on your own by
| reading texts.
| ianbutler wrote:
| As a counter point to this, anecdotally though it may be,
| I've never seen anyone come out of a Comp Sci program (and
| I've seen a lot now) who was ready to go as an engineer
| (sound understanding as you put it) unless they had
| significant practical experience through projects of their
| own or internships.
|
| In general:
|
| A priori knowledge only gets you to the starting line.
| Experience carries the rest. And you can only get that
| experience by doing yourself, not second hand.
| c7b wrote:
| In the context of software development, sound understanding
| as you'd expect from a uni arguably includes CS concepts like
| algorithms and data structures. I find that there is a bit of
| a memorization aspect to simply knowing a lot of those and
| their properties, advantages, ... It seems like a pretty good
| application area for SRS to me, really wishing I'd heard
| about it sooner.
| cdiamand wrote:
| This assumes that the human mind can continue to expand and hold
| increasing amounts of information, right?
|
| Is that something that we know for sure?
| p-christ wrote:
| Yep! Our long-term memories can store almost the entire
| internet as it was in 2016 inside it!
|
| See here for a reference for that:
| https://www.livescience.com/53751-brain-could-store-internet...
|
| Or this article we wrote also talks about it:
| https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
| p-christ wrote:
| So there is a theroetical point at which your brain will get
| "full" but it would take so much knowledge to do that that
| it's basically impossible.
| pkilgore wrote:
| Anyone else feel like they just read a bunch of assumptions with
| no support followed by a chart "proving" an exponential equation
| grows faster than a linear one?
|
| What the heck am I supposed to take away from this?
|
| This is a half ass theory, not evidence.
|
| Where's a shred of evidence, on the time scales here, these
| "units of information" are retained (under either method). Are
| they even relevant compared to a _skill_ like reading that
| enables quicker information ingestion across an entire life o and
| is applicable across a wider range of problems than _individual
| information units you read_??
| p-christ wrote:
| What bit do you doubt?
|
| The core concept that spaced repetition increases rapidly in
| effectiveness over time is called the Spacing Effect. There are
| many many studies that have investigated and proved it
| pkilgore wrote:
| "Proved" is not a word used in any physiological research
| I've ever been familiar with, at least not with paragraph, if
| not pages of qualification. Would you please link me to this
| proof?
| p-christ wrote:
| Agree, I shouldn't have used the word "proved". But there
| is a lot of robust evidence for it going back to the 1800s.
| Many of the studies are linked to on the wikipedia page
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
| pkilgore wrote:
| > It takes you years to get twice as effective at reading
|
| Evidence? What's the evidence this is a linear growth
| process? How many years? At what age? What populations? There
| is no rigor here at all.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| Starting from smokey definitions such as "potential", and that
| learning equals memorising.
| zacharybk wrote:
| Is anyone aware of a commercialized app that enables team
| learning through spaced reputation? Say for a support team
| learning a new process or skill where the learning can be heavily
| curated?
|
| Thanks in advance.
| otras wrote:
| I'm glad this post looks at how we can get better at learning --
| it's an interesting area, and I think that meta "how does my
| brain work" is important to understand as part of the process.
|
| I did want to give some feedback, though. I think this post
| suffers from too much hand-waving, which is what plagues most
| other posts about learning and spaced repetition (excluding
| probably just Gwern). For example, it compares flash cards and
| reading to just reading, citing the results of the study as a
| negative:
|
| > _This is however a very slow process. One study implies that in
| the best case it takes adults 10 years of reading 1 hour a day to
| get twice as effective at reading. Even if this is technically
| learning exponentially, the improvement rate is so slow that the
| process is indistinguishable from a linear one._
|
| ...
|
| > _We said in the best case it takes adults 10 years to get twice
| as effective reading. With spaced repetition it takes only days
| for your time to get twice as effective. These growth rates are
| completely different._
|
| Maybe the rate of change of effectiveness of the reading is slow,
| but does that matter if you're accumulating knowledge from all of
| that reading, especially as it builds off of prior knowledge? I
| also don't think it's a 1:1 comparison to contrast these. It only
| takes days to get twice as effective at reading with spaced
| repetition? Or at learning? If it's the latter, I don't think
| that's what the earlier study measured?
|
| The other thing that jumped out at me is the huge focus on spaced
| repetition and memory for learning, which are absolutely helpful,
| but there seems to be a lack of what constitutes memorizing
| versus understanding (and I'm not sure I see that in the
| _Learning is Remembering_ post either). I think about other ways
| to build your understanding, like working through problems and
| applying the knowledge, that are key to learning. Much of
| learning physics is getting your hands dirty in the equations,
| and there 's a big difference between knowing a formula and
| really understanding it in action.
| p-christ wrote:
| > It only takes days to get twice as effective at reading with
| spaced repetition? Or at learning? If it's the latter, I don't
| think that's what the earlier study measured?
|
| It only takes days for spaced repetition to get twice as
| effective, not reading. It takes you years to get twice as
| effective at reading.
|
| > I think about other ways to build your understanding, like
| working through problems and applying the knowledge, that are
| key to learning. Much of learning physics is getting your hands
| dirty in the equations, and there's a big difference between
| knowing a formula and really understanding it in action.
|
| I agree, you should definitely work through problems and apply
| your knowledge. The post is arguing that you should do that AND
| spend a little bit of time doing spaced repetition, not to only
| do spaced repetition and nothing else.
| vmoore wrote:
| The application of learned concepts is what separates the
| brilliant from the average. If the application is simply dumping
| your learned concepts onto paper for the purpose of a test, and
| then forgetting it all three weeks later then you have missed the
| point of learning. If you apply learned concepts in the real
| world and also apply the best ideas throughout your life, you
| have succeeded in ways many people don't succeed.
| b3nji wrote:
| I'm confused, when they say a reminder, what do they mean? Also,
| when they used books as an example, do they mean read the same
| thing 2 days later?
|
| It would be great if someone could provide an example to an old
| dummy like me.
| biophysboy wrote:
| 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.
| b3nji wrote:
| Thanks, so essentially you set a reminder for you ti sit, and
| remember what you learned a few days prior?
| biophysboy wrote:
| Basically yes. The exact time isn't so important, as long
| as the rough interval increases with each success and
| decreases with each failure.
| b3nji wrote:
| Brill, thanks for the explanation.
| p-christ wrote:
| Yeah. There is software that organises the reminders for
| you aswell e.g. my company Save All does this
| https://saveall.ai/
| b3nji wrote:
| Excellent, thank you.
| p-christ wrote:
| We wrote this at Save All (https://saveall.ai/) and want to know
| what you think - tell us why it's wrong / right
| carapace wrote:
| It's a good piece, and excellent as far as it goes. You should
| investigate hypnosis. E.g. you can just remember things, w/o
| spaced repetition or anything, just transfer a piece of
| knowledge directly to long-term memory immediately. The tricky
| part is second-order effects. Once you move naturally-autonomic
| subsystems into voluntary control you now have responsibility
| for them. The result is a kind of change-of-being learning as
| contrasted with accumulation-of-facts learning.
| p-christ wrote:
| Very interesting, how would i learn about something like
| that? Is there a resource you'd recommend?
| [deleted]
| p-christ wrote:
| Summary of article:
|
| The effectiveness of spaced repetition scales exponentially and
| much faster than other learning methods. So use spaced repetition
| and you'll learn a lot faster in the long-run.
| Trex_Egg wrote:
| Gwern had also written a long essay describing the same[1].
|
| [1]https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
| p-christ wrote:
| thanks will check that out
| dqpb wrote:
| I really like the idea of exponential learning, and was
| disappointed to see that this is just an ad for spaced
| repetition.
|
| My opinion is that true exponential learning depends on specific
| content in a specific order.
|
| What we need is the dependency tree of concepts. Does such a
| thing exist? Curriculums are kind of a non-rigorous attempt at
| this.
| redelbee wrote:
| I think a better title might be "Memorize Exponentially" because
| that seems to be the true gist of the article.
|
| There are undoubtedly many areas in which memorization is useful.
| I tend to use memorization as a second-order tool, in the sense
| that it is only useful to memorize once I've learned that
| memorization would be necessary.
|
| I memorize combinations to locks I unlock frequently. I memorize
| names of items I sell in my shop so I don't have to look them up
| over and over again.
|
| In school I often memorized equations just long enough to get by.
| The few that are still with me are not those I used most
| frequently; they are the equations I understood at a visceral
| level. Obviously this means I am more conversant in Newtonian
| happenings than quantum concerns, so maybe there is a place for
| memorization. Or perhaps I lack sufficient experience in the
| quantum to really feel the laws that govern the smallest realms.
|
| Either way the article paints a dull picture of learning. What of
| the feeling in the minds and hands of those future carpenters
| swinging their first hammer blows? What of the deep learning of
| the pianist that happens only after the transition from the first
| concerto as audience to the latest as featured virtuoso?
|
| An exponential increase in the type of "learning" furthered by
| spaced repetition might be useful to some. I still prefer the
| linear road to understanding.
| p-christ wrote:
| I understand what you mean but I think you underestimate how
| critical memory is for all forms of learning (even creative
| work/learning).
|
| Our working memories have a capacity of 4. This means that we
| basically can't understand something if it requires more than 4
| pieces of New knowledge to understand. To understand more
| complicated things we need to move some of the knowledge into
| our long-term memories.
|
| We wrote an article on this topic here that i'd love to know
| what you think of
|
| https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
| vector_spaces wrote:
| Someone took the time to read your article and give you their
| critical impression, and you respond here essentially by
| saying that they are wrong and that they should read another
| article you wrote to correct their thinking.
|
| This comes off as condescending and dismissive. It's a poor
| way to treat people who have taken the time to engage with
| your content, especially if engagement is what you want,
| which appears to be the case given your other replies on this
| topic.
|
| Take the time to respond to them directly rather than
| pointing them towards more content you've written, even if it
| means repeating ideas you've written elsewhere.
|
| This approach has a number of benefits:
|
| 1. It has the effect of presenting what you've read elsewhere
| inline (most readers won't click that link)
|
| 2. It gives you an opportunity to revisit and refine your own
| thinking, and
|
| 3. It forces you to think carefully about the criticisms
| levied
|
| And most importantly, it reciprocates the effort they've put
| into reading your post and responding to you so that you
| don't come off like a jerk.
| p-christ wrote:
| Sorry, you're right. I was maybe too focused on being
| efficient rather than polite. I'll edit my comment
| hex9893628af wrote:
| This is incorrect. Learning is doing. I know all about all
| sorts of things. That doesn't mean I can do many of them.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I read that article, and your introduction on learning
| quantum mechanics is actually how I learned quantum
| mechanics! Or at least, about the known quantum particles in
| the standard model and their properties and behavior.
|
| This is how I learn basically everything. That and practical
| application, so I'd learn cooking by cooking but I'd learn
| about information theory by just reading for hours at a time
| and falling down one hole after another. All this makes me
| wonder, where do you get the "you have 4 working memory
| slots" thing from? And how would you actually go about
| forcing things into long term memory?
| aintmeit wrote:
| Hey, your username reminds me of the statistical measure called
| _p-value_. I hope Save All will help people beat the odds and
| cast off the shackles of the power law as it 's applied to the
| act of learning.
| p-christ wrote:
| lol thanks!
| p-christ wrote:
| what did you think of the article?
| aintmeit wrote:
| A+
| swyx wrote:
| its not just note taking + spaced repetition - you can also
| change your slope greatly by learning in public and learning with
| peers.
|
| ive done a lot of thinking on this area and have mocked up a "Big
| L" notation for learning curves - shameless plug:
| https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation
| Buttons840 wrote:
| There are a few e-ink note taking devices. They pride themselves
| on feeling like paper, but they're far more expensive than a
| notebook and offer trade-offs rather than clear advantages.
|
| For example, is using a text search on an e-ink device better
| than knowing "I wrote this down in the first 1/3rd of the
| notebook on the page with a coffee stain". Maybe? Maybe not. It's
| a trade-off. A physical notebook and an e-notebook both offer
| different ways of indexing, searching, and remembering where
| things are. One is not clearly superior to the other in this
| respect.
|
| These e-ink devices have left a clear advantage they could claim
| unrealized.
|
| I want an e-ink notepad where I can turn my notes into spaced
| repetition. I want to take hand written notes, proven to improve
| memory, and then I want to blot out portions of the page and have
| those blotted out portions be presented to me by a spaced
| repetition algorithm to help me remember my own hand written
| notes.
|
| I'd pay a lot for such a dedicated device. Getting hand written
| notes and images into Anki or other spaced repetition programs
| sucks. I'd love to just be able to write or draw, with my own
| hand, and easily integrate with a spaced repetition algorithm.
| This is valuable enough that I'd happily use a dedicated device
| just for this purpose.
| nyxtom wrote:
| Another method I have used in the past is to rewatch content I
| used to learn a subject at 3-4x speed. A lot of high quality
| content that spans multiple days can be viewed in only a few
| hours this way. The key I've learned with this is to do this
| across variations of the content you wish to learn and re-learn.
| Combine this with audio books at similar speeds and you can
| really get through content very quickly.
|
| When using this method if you are learning something for the
| first time or you come across something that peaks your interest,
| an exercise or question, pause and take notes, implement the
| solution in multiple variations, then continue the video/audio.
| belkarx wrote:
| What speed do you use the first time around?
| nyxtom wrote:
| Depends on the content I'm looking at and if there is a lot
| of terminology that I'm unfamiliar with. If I find that I am
| pausing quite often to take notes then I just slow it down to
| 1.5x.
| p-christ wrote:
| How do you get videos to 3-4x speed? I find most video players
| only allow up to 2x speed?
| nyxtom wrote:
| I've had to use some browser extensions for 3-4x speeds.
| Anything that is HTML5 enabled video will be supported by it.
| Unfortunately I don't have a solution for anything on the
| phone :/
|
| The one I use for desktop is
| https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed
| keeptrying wrote:
| This article is about memorizing more effectively not learning.
|
| To learn, you need to act and have the world give you feedback.
|
| If you're starting a company, you need to create something and
| get feedback on its value and iterate.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| I apologize in advance to the author but this is pretty dumb.
| Learning is not remembering all the words in a dictionary or all
| entries in an encyclopedia. You learn exponentially by layering
| concepts and ideas, one more complex than the previous one, on
| top of each other. You advance by understanding more deeply what
| you read and actually think for yourself. Wise men recommend to
| learn for 1/3 of the time, think for 1/3 and apply your knowledge
| to the real world for 1/3. You advance by learning from more
| advanced masters and more advanced books on the same topic.
| [deleted]
| ac130kz wrote:
| 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.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| Title is misleading. This isn't learning exponentially. Anybody
| who has used a spaced repetition app (like Anki) knows that you
| generally learn around the same number of words every day. You're
| not going to be learning 10 words in a day and then one week
| later, learn 1000 words in a day.
|
| This article talks about how the reps needed to learn _one_ piece
| of information, reduces exponentially over time. You might need 1
| rep per day at the beginning, but only 1 rep per 100 days after a
| month. This basically means that if you have a lifespan of 100
| years, spaced repetition means you only need around 10-20 reps to
| remember each piece of knowledge for the rest of your life.
|
| But learning N items will still take 10*N reps. It scales
| linearly. A far cry from exponential
| anon2020dot00 wrote:
| 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 knows already
| where to find such decks, that would be cool.
| allenu wrote:
| > 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
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Is this what you are looking for?
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/
| p-christ wrote:
| I find the Anki shared decks are basically not high quality
| enough. Do you ever use them? Which ones do you use?
| chatterhead wrote:
| Anki is great; the problem really is the inability for
| people to use it on their phone (without paying) and
| properly build and maintain decks.
|
| Would very much like a version control system for Anki
| decks so updating cards can be done by the community and
| transparently. This would allow people to validate and
| properly maintain decks that change with time (like
| programming languages / regulatory requirements / operating
| standards etc).
| pastram_i wrote:
| Is anki the solution you imagine? https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Or
| is there a use case that anki doesn't solve?
| p-christ wrote:
| Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful
| unfortunately
| schainks wrote:
| They are hit or miss, depending what you're trying to do.
| Qualadore wrote:
| They're a lot better than Save All's builtin decks, such as
| only including 1,000 of the most frequent words of a
| language, and only nouns, and not even including the word's
| gender.
|
| Rarely with these SRS services do you see actual high-
| quality decks that outdo public Anki decks, which is a
| shame because it would be a great way to add value.
| detuneattune wrote:
| Instead of there being competing spaced repetition
| programs and services, I'd much rather companies just go
| down the route of making well-curated, frequently
| updating Anki decks and putting them behind a paywall
| instead.
|
| Refold, a company focused on language learning, does
| exactly this [0], and having tried their JP1K deck for
| Japanese for a while, I can say without any hesitation
| that it was shocking just how high quality everything
| was.
|
| It had the full works: Japanese audio, kanji, furigana,
| multiple definitions, a custom background, etc. And I
| wouldn't be surprised if there were even more changes
| since the last time I tried it.
|
| I recall there being something similar to this for
| medical programs, but overall I'd say that this approach
| sadly isn't something that a lot of people are focusing
| on.
|
| [0] https://refold.la/decks
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Fluent Forever started with this approach:
| https://fluent-forever.com/shop
| pastram_i wrote:
| 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?
| p-christ wrote:
| (1) We are going to incentivise high quality decks by
| allowing people to sell access to their decks
|
| (2) The main problem we see with Anki public decks is
| that the user themselves decides whether they got the
| question "right" or not when reviewing the cards. This
| lack of a "teacher" means that it is very very difficult
| to learn using someone else's cards.
|
| You basically end up kind of getting something wrong but
| then saying it was right anyway. Do that a few times and
| your trust & investment in the process goes and you'll
| eventually you lose motivation to carry on with the deck.
|
| Save All decks are different. WE decide whether you got
| it right or not, not you. This makes it much easier for
| you to learn using someone else's decks
| allenu wrote:
| 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.
| belkarx wrote:
| Another idea: decent, effective decks of cards exist for other
| platforms like Quizlet - just figure out how to convert them
| (there are apparently some extensions that do this as of now)
| p-christ wrote:
| I completely agree. We've started building that on Save All and
| will be going more in that direction in future.
|
| The Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful
| unfortunately
| biophysboy wrote:
| I've been using spaced repetition software (Anki) to learn
| Japanese. Community decks are really powerful for the basics,
| but personal decks are unavoidable later on.
|
| For language learning, there are flash card generators that
| make this a simple one-click process. I think these strike the
| right balance of simplicity & flexibility/personalization. Of
| course, a tool like this relies on a free database that you can
| map concepts onto. But I could see this sort of working with
| wikipedia or some documentation.
| visarga wrote:
| You might get more value from cards you write yourself. You
| should do that when you encounter the information.
| segh wrote:
| https://quantum.country/ teaches quantum computing as essays
| with embedded flashcards, as a new "mnemonic medium". I wonder
| if there is a market for context plus flashcards. What if books
| came with their own spaced repetition decks?
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| codazoda wrote:
| 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 things I learn.
|
| I even created a little web page for the app, but I've mostly
| abandoned the idea due to a lack of interest.
|
| https://stray.joeldare.com
| p-christ wrote:
| 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/
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| 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.
| p-christ wrote:
| Haha, where would you rank this one in terms of quality?
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| To be perfectly honest, I flagged it because of the
| knowledge gained graph. It's a wild extrapolation.
|
| For context, I was a big fan of SRS and even contributed
| to Anki back in the day! I was really into foreign
| language learning, had majored in one language and was
| learning another language in a separate language family.
|
| I built, ran and put my heart into brick and mortar
| language immersion school for years. Over time, I
| realized both from my learning experiences and those of
| my students that SRS fell far short of extensive reading.
|
| It's tempting to break things down to "units of
| information", as you put it your assumptions document.
| SRS is great for decontextualized information (e.g.,
| memorizing all the capital cities in the world), but
| that's not really how language works or how the brain
| works for most learning tasks. There are higher-level
| things your brain picks up, such as collocations, grammar
| and shared cultural beliefs.
|
| Over the short term, SRS can be useful for building a
| scaffold to work from, but over the long term, Extensive
| Reading crushes it on pretty much every metric, including
| raw size of passive and active vocabulary.
| rsanek wrote:
| Extensive reading sounds compelling. Do you have
| recommendations for services that offer such content? In
| my own language learning, I have found a few websites
| here and there (eg Hola Que Pasa [1]), but nothing that
| has a large database with varying levels of competence.
|
| [1] https://holaquepasa.com/
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I'd recommend avoiding "services" and going for books,
| starting with graded readers. There's a wealth of options
| for Spanish learners.
|
| If you absolutely hate books and want an online resource,
| then I'd suggest https://www.lingq.com. It has a lot of
| free content and lets you import your own. Their
| tech/design chops are meh, but it's run by true language
| learning enthusiasts and the founder dogfooded it for at
| least half a dozen languages.
| copperx wrote:
| Is Extensive Reading just that? Reading a lot in general?
| Or is it reading a lot on the specific subject that you
| want to learn, taking all possible branches?
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| It's about both the volume and the type of reading. See
| the 2nd page of this paper, under "What is extensive
| reading?": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/33453
| 5447_Extensive...
| fedeb95 wrote:
| IF
|
| Learn slow and you won't reach your potential. Learn fast and you
| might. Learn exponentially and you'll achieve more than anyone
| thought you could.
|
| THEN
|
| ...
|
| Else, we don't know.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| Still waiting for the incremental reading app like the one in
| supermemo 18... I'm more than willing to pay for it!
| p-christ wrote:
| what's that?
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| 5min video explaining it: https://youtu.be/DoQoeK53bP8
|
| or: https://www.supermemo.com/de/archives1990-2015/help/read
| cobachon wrote:
| I've paid for Anki on iOS and have gone as far as exporting
| flashcards from Emacs/org-mode which I keep in version control. I
| normally use it for specific information like runtimes of
| algorithms for interviews, rule of thumb numbers for doing
| estimations, etc. I also can imagine how medicine students use
| flashcards for remembering dozens of muscle or bone names.
|
| However, I'd be very interested in learning how people use SRS
| for remembering information they read on books/articles. Do you
| state new concepts as Q/A? Do you save interesting facts, or
| things you think might be useful in the future?
|
| I think this second type of information is not well suited for
| flashcards. The article seems to imply it is, though, and I'd
| love to be wrong about it.
| p-christ wrote:
| I use it for both types yeah. I basically try not to ever
| forget anything I hear that's useful.
|
| On Save All you can create cards that are just statements, no
| need to turn them into Q&A. So if I hear an interesting fact I
| usually just dump it in quickly verbatim.
| kwanele70 wrote:
| p-christ wrote:
| thanks lol
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I don't see how "reading" is anyone anyone on HN needs advice to
| do, all people do nowadays is reading if reading is defined as
| getting information from text on a screen. Using a computer is
| basically entirely reading.
|
| Edit: to the article's point spaced repetition to memorize domain
| specific facts is useful but it's not exponential like reading
| is.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| For something allegedly this important, the author could have
| invested more time into elaborating, providing more examples,
| etc. I'm still skeptical, this is just another rando Medium rant
| as far as I'm concerned.
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