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.
“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.”
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.
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.
Hey, you sound like me! I’ve been using SuperMemo daily for more than a decade, and I’ve noticed something similar. Processing information and thinking in terms of “how do I make a flashcard that covers this fact?” has been helpful at both making flashcards but also just general understanding stuff. Taking notes in my Notes app in the form of questions and answers has been very useful.
I agree completely. Creating good cards, or thinking about how to cover a topic/fact with cards well forces you to break it down into very small pieces. Otherwise the cards get bulky, aren't precise enough and are generally annoying.
Breaking it down into such small bits makes it immediately obvious if I haven't understood something, because I either wouldn't understand the answer for one of my own cards, or wouldn't even know how to create an answer.
If done properly, it's much harder for something to "slip through the cracks" so to speak.
When I first started properly integrating this into my day to day life I also noticed that I was interested in remembering many more mundane things than I would've expected. Simple stuff that I really didn't have a place to write them down for, but that also weren't really important enough to take time out of my day to actively memorize it. There's a place for that now. It's been really interesting to see how broadly applicable spaced repetition is and that it's not just useful to learn for college exams.
Yes, exactly! I frequently notice during my day-to-day life, I will ask myself simple questions like “what is the state department?” and then I Google the question, read the answer, and create a question and answer pair in as simple language as possible and then store that in my notes app. I no longer feel embarrassed, but I’m actually excited to find these kinds of gaps in my knowledge. I also feel way less pressure to act like I understand something that I don’t out of fear of looking stupid. It has been such an overall net positive for my brain.
Reading this comment had me cheering “yes, a thousand times yes” but then it occurred to me how often I turn to an O’Reilly book instead of a concrete project and I wondered why.
I think I subconsciously avoid new projects to learn something programming-related because of how often they end up unbounded in time due to one of the fundamental attributes of writing software: unknown unknowns. The kinds of sticking points in a project that could take you minutes to figure out, or days, or even weeks.
I have limited free time and I want only so much of it to be _more_ programming. (I’m a professional software engineer) If I can’t be certain I can timebox a new pet project with _some_ degree of successful outcome, I think I’m low key anxious enough to avoid starting it.
Does anyone else struggle with this? How do folks overcome it and work on new things without them taking over?
I run into the same thing with projects of many kinds.
If I want to do something like move a light fixture in my house, it seems like it should be fairly straightforward. Choose where I want the new one to be. Create hole. Move wires. Connect fixture.
But it only seems that simple because I'm ignorant. I have to install a new junction box, which requires having a joist nearby, or adding a cross-support between two. Am I going to need to move any insulation? What insulation do I even have? Is the existing wiring long enough, or in the right place, or am I going to have to replace it? And I need to pin the wires down every so often? What? How? Where? Where do I even find that info? And never mind patching the hole I'm leaving behind. It's not just eyeballing a drywall patch. I can't match the old texture of the ceiling, even if I thought it was plain. My patch is really noticeable. And on and on.
Unknown unknowns take what I thought was going to be a little afternoon project and turn it into asking all my friends for recommendations of people who aren't booked 6 months out and are willing to handle a tiny little project cleaning up after my ignorance.
Taking on projects before I even know what I don't know has gotten me into more trouble than just about anything else.
I've never nearly burnt my house down taking notes from a book and hiring a professional to do the actual work!
Limit the degrees of freedom. If the goal is to learn a new programming language, pick an interesting problem that you’ve already solved (e.g. todo list manager, pomodoro timer, etc.). If you want to learn a new domain (e.g. networking), pick a familiar language. Choose boring tech for everything else—-things like deployment, monitoring, etc. If your goal is not learning k8s, just SCP stuff to a VPS. It can be crappy. Crappy is how you learn.
It’s like you’ve seen into my very soul. I often struggle to isolate individual problems within a new problem space because my brain prefers to see the interconnected web of what could be if I just did this thing right. Excellent advice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Memorization helps in the murky world of haven’t-quite-learned-it-yet. By knowing certain things to be true because you’ve memorized them, you can start to make connections to other things and investigate why those things are true. I most recently experienced this memorizing a bunch of stuff on intermodulation in RF (amateur radio). It had me questioning “why is this so?”, so I found a related domain: audio. Turns out IMD is an issue with mastering using saturation plugins (which add harmonics). Since I have some music background, this made the whole thing far more sensible to me. It’s really a process of presenting yourself with some disconnected facts, and filling in the gaps over time.
>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.
For me (in medicine), it is the exact opposite. Memorization comes first, then you start to actually understand and learn things. Everything is so intermingled and there is no "learn this first to understand that". In addition, you can't start practicing things before memorizing them.
I feel like it's the same thing with the mnemonics. It's useful at first, but not very practical or efficient. However, as you use it more, you actually learn and stop using the mnemonic.
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
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.
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?
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_??
Well, for me, this article and the previous one that was on HN some weeks ago were just propaganda to push the service they promote for eventual monetization. Something wrong with it? I don't know, well may be just lack of transparency I guess.
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
The article links to a paper which estimates how much more effective you get at reading the more knowledge you have. It shows that for most ages you don't improve in this way, but for older ages you do.
Then it says for the "best case" that "adults" takes years to get twice as effective at reading.
If you don't believe this then it means you think it takes adults less than a year to get twice as effective? If effectiveness doubles each year then that would mean by the time a 25 year old becomes 65 that they're 1 million times as effective at reading than when they were 25. Does that sound reasonable to you?
"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?
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
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.
Have you tried image occlusion for Anki? It does exactly what you mentioned: you occlude parts of an image (your notes in this case) and creates cards based on that. It's more tedious than an integrated solution would be, but I'm sure there are ways to make the card creation process more seamless. Maybe an Android e-ink where you can click "Share" on your notes, and choose the image occlusion "plugin app".
Yeah, there's also tablets like the Remarkable which claim to be hackable. I've thought of trying to build this myself.
With the right plugins maybe Anki wouldn't be too bad, still not as seamless as a dedicated device though. And I think this idea is important enough to warrant a dedicated device. Imagine how helpful it could be to have all students trained to use such a device to memorize their own notes. Memorization alone isn't enough, but it can serve as a foundation to build knowledge on top of. Many student lack any sort of foundation, and efficient memorization would do a lot for them.
Yes, memorization is one of the most important tools for learning. It greatly speeds up the process and sometimes is necessary in fields like medicine.
One problem I can immediately think of with a dedicated device is "vendor lock-in". Especially when you are going to spend a long time creating decks or practicing them, you wouldn't want to lose your progress or cards because some company stopped supporting their proprietary format.
This is actually the only reason I won't ever consider using most of these "Next Anki" or "Anki but better" SRS apps that pop up every now and then.
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
The rate of repetitions scales sublinearly with respect to time.
Consider a uniform repetition approach that repeats each item once per day. The rate of our uniform repetition system scales linearly with respect to time. If one item takes 1 second to review, then I will lose 1 second per day. Therefore, N items causes me to lose N seconds per day. Even in the case where I don’t add items to my list, I lose N seconds per day.
In contrast, as you stated, the amount of time we lose per item per day reduces exponentially with spaced repetition, however. If we don’t add any items to our list, the review time asymptotically approaches 0 seconds/day.
Unrelated to all of this, I agree the title may be a touch embellished. :)
Think about it in terms of how many days of knowledge each rep gets you.
The first rep gets you 1 extra day of knowledge.
The next rep gets you 2 extra days.
The next one gets you 5 extra days.
So each rep is getting you more and more knowledge even though the time required to execute the rep remains the same. This is exponential growth.
If you only have 1 card then for most days you won't have any reviews to do so it doesn't work. But if you add cards regularly then over the long-run every day you'll be getting more and more "extra days of knowledge" by doing the same amount of reviews each day.
My main point is that when people think about "learning", they think about learning new pieces of information. Reps only reinforce old pieces, they don't teach anything new. Retaining knowledge is part of learning, sure, and I saw your article about "learning is remembering" which was a good read. And I support your initiative, spaced repetition is an amazing tool. But I'd still say "learn exponentially" implies more than just retention. I'd personally love a system that lets me pick up exponentially more new knowledge per day, though I'm not sure if that's possible
If you've forgotten something then you don't have that knowledge anymore. So remembering things for longer means you are effectively gaining knowledge.
It's like someone giving you $10 and then trying to argue that they haven't actually given you $10 because just a few minutes ago you had a $10 bill in your pocket but you spent it on something else.
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.
> 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.
I hadn’t heard of Fresh Cards before, but this looks lovely.
I’ve used Anki over the years to great effect with second language learning and am fully bought into the paradigm, but I do find Anki quite clunky as a piece of software. Fresh Cards seems like it’s designed specifically in response to that.
Does this use a similar repetition algorithm to Anki? Are there any obvious limitations versus Anki? What sort of UX differences would a long-term Anki user need to get comfortable with?
Would also be keen to hear from anyone here that’s used this.
Thanks for the response. I read up on how Anki's algorithm works and tried to match it closely, although Fresh Cards doesn't have the exact same algorithm. I actually ended up adding a way for you to provide your own scheduling algorithm via javascript if that's your sort of thing. I also built a web page just so you can see the effects of recalling correctly and incorrectly, as well as reviewing too early or too late: https://www.freshcardsapp.com/srs/simulator/
I also included my attempt at converting Anki's algorithm to javascript so you can compare and contrast. I'm open to any feedback on improving the algo that I do use!
In terms of limitations, probably the biggest one is that Anki lets you create cards using a template system, which Fresh Cards doesn't have yet. In Anki you can create one note and then from that have multiple flashcards auto-generated using several templates. You can also do something similar with cloze deletions. One of my goals is to get to 100% Anki compatibility over the next few months, so I'll be adding a template system and similar cloze-deletion system.
In terms of UX, the app actually has multiple review styles. When I first built the app, a lot of users actually wanted to re-review cards, but the app would strictly schedule them, so you didn't have a way to do that. (Anki lets you "review ahead", but for the most part tries to keep you on the schedule.)
To satisfy both users who wanted to review whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted and users who wanted to stick to a spaced repetition system, I designed the UX to act as a "playlist". You just hit play and it'll start reviewing the cards in the order that you see. (You can sort and filter based on spaced repetition algorithm, or use several other modes.)
The app is pretty much designed to just pick up and go without a lot of instruction, so it should be easy to get used to.
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.
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.
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.
(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
I don't understand how your 2nd point is a problem. If you already say you're right even though you are not, you won't lose any motivation to carry on because you have no motivation already.
If you don't want to learn (or memorize), no technique or tool will allow you to learn. Make a tool that solves this "problem", and the user will simply find other ways for running away, like not using the tool.
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.
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?
At least coming from the medical school perspective - there is a huge culture of using shared Anki decks built off of popular board review books and courses so you can read a chapter/finish a section in some course and immediately jump to Anki to do the corresponding flashcards.
It's gotten so popular that now theres a shared 30,000k card deck called AnKing that a lot of students use. The deck itself is free, but the curators of the deck recently launched a new paid service to automatically update the deck as new cards from the community are added: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/rb62m6/a...
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.
You misunderstand how important memory is for learning. Ofsted, the UK school inspection board, actually defines learning itself as a "change in long-term memory". You can't learn anything without a change to your memory, they aren't separate things.
So, sure, you should try to apply your knowledge and layer concepts on top of each other. But if you do that AND also remember a lot more of such experiences you'll learn a lot faster.
I agree that memory is (very) important for understanding but not in the way it’s purported by the article. I don’t need to remember the exact way something was written by the author. In fact, I’d argue that by focusing on literal remembering you are understanding less than otherwise.
> I don’t need to remember the exact way something was written by the author.
I agree. Who ever said you should try to remember that? Remember the high-level important and transferable information, don't waste time trying to remember information that won't help you elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Qué Pasa [1]), but nothing that has a large database with varying levels of competence.
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.
> Effectiveness of spaced repetition scales really fast / exponentially whereas other learning methods don't scale like that - do you agree?
Of course not. As I wrote, in the comment you’re replying to, I was a user and evangelist of SRS for years but eventually saw the reverse.
It’s a very useful tool for a certain narrow niche of memorization tasks. However, it’s an extremely inefficient learning method over the long run compared to reading and using information or skills in context.
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?
Why should I, as the user, spend time and create cards on a piece of non-free software which I have no control over? What if you stop the service? I tried it for a few minutes, but couldn't find a "export" feature apart from the "email us to get your cards as csv" part. An "export cards and progress" feature would be nice.
I tried adding a few cards, which seems to work fine even in the worst case scenario. It seems to work even in other languages? I haven't tested it enough to comment on how well it does though, but my guess would be as well as GPT does in the said language. This has the potential to be a huge time saver. If it could handle something like a few pages of notes and divide it up, I can see it being the new standard of SRS for many people.
As I said, I can't see myself using any non-free software for something as critical as learning.
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.
A couple of books: "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder, and "Monsters and Magical Sticks" by Steven Heller, both are written for the therapeutic context but the material is universal.
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.
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.
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.
I use (or more precisely, abuse) Cloze Deletion. Text goes in, you chose which parts to hide, it creates multiple cards for you, each hiding the parts you chose. In my experience it is the most efficient way to create new cards.
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.
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Ah OK, that makes more sense. I think my main confusion there is that getting twice as effective at spaced repetition doesn't seem to directly translate into learning more — as another comment mentioned, you're still learning the same number of flash cards in the second week, right? What really is the y-axis in the graphs?
> 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.
From my perspective as a reader, I'm not sure I see either post discussing working through problems and applying your knowledge, but I do think the inclusion of that would make them both much stronger, especially since it seems like you've clearly thought about them from your comments! I do see the mention of reading + spaced repetition and the mention of memory helping math problems in the other post, but I'm not sure I see where you've explored what that active use and problem solving looks like (or how spaced repetition helps).
Again, I think this a great idea, and I don't mean to be negative for the sake of negative — you were asking for feedback on your post, and I figured I'd offer some :)
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?
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.