4 ms·

> The medical profession needs to figure out how to use technology more effectively in its processes. Med students are probably the most numerous users of spac

> The medical profession needs to figure out how to use technology more effectively in its processes. Med students are probably the most numerous users of spaced repetition tools like Anki. The rest of us are doing it the inefficient way.

Ericson2314 8y ago
Good tool wrong objective! OP means use technology to skip up-front memorization.
- assblaster 8y ago
  How do you acquire knowledge without memorization? What technology do you anticipate using? Johnny Mnemonic neural implantation?
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    All learning requires some memorization. That doesn't mean all memorization is equally good. Memorize that which is hard to look up. And compress what you need to memorize as much as possible; the compression process itself is intimical to understanding and generalizing. Medical school today would be like learning programming by memorizing the x86 ISA spec.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      The x86 ISA spec is a doddle compared to organic chemistry. Which is a pre-med subject. There is a minimum amount of material in any subject that needs to be available for rapid recall in order to be an expert in that subject. A wide variety of different areas have been studied to relate performance to level of learned information. Linguistic fluency requires easy recall of vocabulary. High rankings in chess depend on the recognition of thousands of distinct patterns. Musical improvisation requires thousands of hours of tedious repetition and practice. Effective programming requires a body of knowledge encompassing a variety of topics, a lot of which will be memorised as a side-effect of repeated exposure. But if you think you can be a better doctor than a doctor by scanning the indices of medical textbooks -- realising a little late that you are unfamiliar with a lot of the terms and also unsure in what order the concepts need to be assimilated before you can apply them -- then at least make sure your will is up to date.
      - Ericson2314 8y ago
        Orgo is exactly what I'm talking about. Whether or not it's harder or easier is besides the point: it's simply too low a level to be useful. I'm all for a liberal arts approach of understanding other layers of abstraction for more context, but empirically this is not how the vast majority of premeds experience the orgo requirement. And if liberal arts was really the goal, then corresponding amounts of public health classes would also be required (layers of abstraction above and below at equal distance). But that's not the case. Clearly then it's not about a broader perspective but instead about weeding people out arbitrarily for sake of some combination of wages and egos. I'm not a doctor or on that track. But I am a musician and programmer, at say 1000+ hours for the former, and 10,000s of hours for the latter. Not once have I engaged in flash-card-style rote memorization for either, especially not for any written test. I am certainly full of random facts by now, but the knowledge I hold most valuable is not that which I could also get from API docs or stack overflow. No doctor, med student, or premed I have ever met studdied their field remotely like the ways I've studdied mine. Is being a doctor inherently that different? I can't see why not, and if I look at economics and public health research the arguments I give leap out at me. (I also studdied Chinese for a few years when I was younger and definitely did not do enough flash cards. Now that is a field (language learning) where rote memorization is inherent to the problem at hand.)
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  > OP means use technology to skip up-front memorization. I would greatly prefer my doctors to not skip up-front memorization.
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    If my prescription required citations, my tested data, the doctor's conjectures (because most conditions cannot be diagnosised with much certainty yet), and formal reasoning to connect it all, I couldn't care less. (Before somebody complains of layman mob rule, remember checking a proof vs inventing a proof does and should require far less expertise.)
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    Also, let's be real, the type of cramming these students have to do is antithetical to long term retention. Most of the knowledge is still greatly reinforced in the job. Cramming for the test is a "first draft" for the rest of one's career, just as taking notes in lecture (also a bad idea btw) is first draft for preparing for the test.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      Cramming isn't spaced repetition. I would have thought that name "spaced repetition" explains why.

Ericson2314 8y ago

Good tool wrong objective! OP means use technology to skip up-front memorization.

assblaster 8y ago
How do you acquire knowledge without memorization? What technology do you anticipate using? Johnny Mnemonic neural implantation?
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  All learning requires some memorization. That doesn't mean all memorization is equally good. Memorize that which is hard to look up. And compress what you need to memorize as much as possible; the compression process itself is intimical to understanding and generalizing. Medical school today would be like learning programming by memorizing the x86 ISA spec.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    The x86 ISA spec is a doddle compared to organic chemistry. Which is a pre-med subject. There is a minimum amount of material in any subject that needs to be available for rapid recall in order to be an expert in that subject. A wide variety of different areas have been studied to relate performance to level of learned information. Linguistic fluency requires easy recall of vocabulary. High rankings in chess depend on the recognition of thousands of distinct patterns. Musical improvisation requires thousands of hours of tedious repetition and practice. Effective programming requires a body of knowledge encompassing a variety of topics, a lot of which will be memorised as a side-effect of repeated exposure. But if you think you can be a better doctor than a doctor by scanning the indices of medical textbooks -- realising a little late that you are unfamiliar with a lot of the terms and also unsure in what order the concepts need to be assimilated before you can apply them -- then at least make sure your will is up to date.
    - Ericson2314 8y ago
      Orgo is exactly what I'm talking about. Whether or not it's harder or easier is besides the point: it's simply too low a level to be useful. I'm all for a liberal arts approach of understanding other layers of abstraction for more context, but empirically this is not how the vast majority of premeds experience the orgo requirement. And if liberal arts was really the goal, then corresponding amounts of public health classes would also be required (layers of abstraction above and below at equal distance). But that's not the case. Clearly then it's not about a broader perspective but instead about weeding people out arbitrarily for sake of some combination of wages and egos. I'm not a doctor or on that track. But I am a musician and programmer, at say 1000+ hours for the former, and 10,000s of hours for the latter. Not once have I engaged in flash-card-style rote memorization for either, especially not for any written test. I am certainly full of random facts by now, but the knowledge I hold most valuable is not that which I could also get from API docs or stack overflow. No doctor, med student, or premed I have ever met studdied their field remotely like the ways I've studdied mine. Is being a doctor inherently that different? I can't see why not, and if I look at economics and public health research the arguments I give leap out at me. (I also studdied Chinese for a few years when I was younger and definitely did not do enough flash cards. Now that is a field (language learning) where rote memorization is inherent to the problem at hand.)
jacques_chester 8y ago
> OP means use technology to skip up-front memorization. I would greatly prefer my doctors to not skip up-front memorization.
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  If my prescription required citations, my tested data, the doctor's conjectures (because most conditions cannot be diagnosised with much certainty yet), and formal reasoning to connect it all, I couldn't care less. (Before somebody complains of layman mob rule, remember checking a proof vs inventing a proof does and should require far less expertise.)
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  Also, let's be real, the type of cramming these students have to do is antithetical to long term retention. Most of the knowledge is still greatly reinforced in the job. Cramming for the test is a "first draft" for the rest of one's career, just as taking notes in lecture (also a bad idea btw) is first draft for preparing for the test.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    Cramming isn't spaced repetition. I would have thought that name "spaced repetition" explains why.