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I am one of those guys who had a 4.0 GPA in college but I never used spaced repetition because what I was doing seemed to work well enough. Post-college I tried

I am one of those guys who had a 4.0 GPA in college but I never used spaced repetition because what I was doing seemed to work well enough. Post-college I tried it for learning japanese and it seems like a downgrade from my usual approach. The best way to learn something is by contextualizing it. For example it doesn't matter if you forget a math formula if you know how to re-derive it. If the formula is truly important, every time you access it, the entire DAG of knowledge leading up to that formula will be "refreshed". This is a very natural spaced repetition that erodes from the edge of your knowledge graph since the basic building blocks are refreshed so often. New knowledge is extremely easy to acquire, and your graph can be "refactored" every so often. The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. For example it's possible for you to learn the flashcards for "three" and "one" but not know the word for "two". This is insane way of doing things. You are just refreshing random isolated nodes. Not only does it make it a lot harder to learn (since random out of order information is harder to compress), the knowledge graph you build is a tangled mess that's not as usable and doesn't degrade gracefully.

jacobolus 7y ago
The problem is that students are provided with almost no support in development of metacognitive skills. They don’t even learn how to approach non-trivial but eminently solvable problems other people have posed, much less how how to “refactor” past understanding, how to investigate completely new subjects, how to hunt for problems to work on, how to manage projects that take longer than a day, etc. I think SRS software can be profitably used, but it would take a lot of thought and planning. For example, an SRS software system which randomly assigned difficult exercises from different past chapters of a math textbook could be pretty helpful, to keep the student occasionally revisiting topics instead of working through a chapter in a week or two and never returning to it again.
kiba 7y ago
The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. For example it's possible for you to learn the flashcards for "three" and "one" but not know the word for "two". This is insane way of doing things. You are just refreshing random isolated nodes. Not only does it make it a lot harder to learn (since random out of order information is harder to compress), the knowledge graph you build is a tangled mess that's not as usable and doesn't degrade gracefully. I found it helpful to break content down into constituent parts, but also to make cards unify those constituent parts. So, there will be cards about individual facts, but also cards that relate those individual facts. And eventually cards that related the cards that related the cards that related the individual facts. Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach. What do you need to do to “cement understanding and intuition of the unit circle”? The common diagrams shown in high school trigonometry courses – e.g. https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_md.gif https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_m... – basically involve only 2 meaningful facts: a rhombus made of two equilateral triangles has a long diagonal with squared length of 3, and a square has a diagonal with a squared length of 2. (a) These are fairly easy to figure out, and once understood are quite easy to remember, and (b) all of the derived factoids are pretty much trivial. Students are typically taught this material in a quite terrible way, unfortunately.
  - kiba 7y ago
    I memorized the facts and then was able to figure out the relationships after the fact. That may be a brute force way of doing it, but it works for me.
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      My point is that there’s very little there. People shouldn’t need to go to extensive effort or need a special system or method to learn 2 simple facts. Taking a simple thing and wrapping it in a big pile of obfuscation is a poor way to teach/learn. (That this is taught this way is not the fault of students.)
reubens 7y ago
That is a very elegant way to put what I said so grumpily, thank you.
plmu 7y ago
But sometimes you lack the time to re-derive.
knubie 7y ago
> The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. I think this is a really important insight and a big problem I noticed as well. When I started working on my own space repetition app[1] I really wanted to enable and facilitate this kind of interconnection of concepts. I added a notes section in addition to cards and the ability to link/reference notes from cards, cards from notes, cards from other cards, etc. I found this really helpful for example with Japanese. Having a sentence card for a vocab word that also links back to a long form note on the grammar being used in the card. Another example is kanji. Making cards for individual kanji as well as vocab cards that use those kanji and linking them together. Over time I was able to build up a huge web of interconnected information. [1] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/

jacobolus 7y ago

The problem is that students are provided with almost no support in development of metacognitive skills. They don’t even learn how to approach non-trivial but eminently solvable problems other people have posed, much less how how to “refactor” past understanding, how to investigate completely new subjects, how to hunt for problems to work on, how to manage projects that take longer than a day, etc. I think SRS software can be profitably used, but it would take a lot of thought and planning. For example, an SRS software system which randomly assigned difficult exercises from different past chapters of a math textbook could be pretty helpful, to keep the student occasionally revisiting topics instead of working through a chapter in a week or two and never returning to it again.

kiba 7y ago

The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. For example it's possible for you to learn the flashcards for "three" and "one" but not know the word for "two". This is insane way of doing things. You are just refreshing random isolated nodes. Not only does it make it a lot harder to learn (since random out of order information is harder to compress), the knowledge graph you build is a tangled mess that's not as usable and doesn't degrade gracefully. I found it helpful to break content down into constituent parts, but also to make cards unify those constituent parts. So, there will be cards about individual facts, but also cards that relate those individual facts. And eventually cards that related the cards that related the cards that related the individual facts. Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach.

jacobolus 7y ago
> Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach. What do you need to do to “cement understanding and intuition of the unit circle”? The common diagrams shown in high school trigonometry courses – e.g. https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_md.gif https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit-circle7_43215_m... – basically involve only 2 meaningful facts: a rhombus made of two equilateral triangles has a long diagonal with squared length of 3, and a square has a diagonal with a squared length of 2. (a) These are fairly easy to figure out, and once understood are quite easy to remember, and (b) all of the derived factoids are pretty much trivial. Students are typically taught this material in a quite terrible way, unfortunately.
- kiba 7y ago
  I memorized the facts and then was able to figure out the relationships after the fact. That may be a brute force way of doing it, but it works for me.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    My point is that there’s very little there. People shouldn’t need to go to extensive effort or need a special system or method to learn 2 simple facts. Taking a simple thing and wrapping it in a big pile of obfuscation is a poor way to teach/learn. (That this is taught this way is not the fault of students.)

reubens 7y ago

That is a very elegant way to put what I said so grumpily, thank you.

plmu 7y ago

But sometimes you lack the time to re-derive.

knubie 7y ago

> The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. I think this is a really important insight and a big problem I noticed as well. When I started working on my own space repetition app[1] I really wanted to enable and facilitate this kind of interconnection of concepts. I added a notes section in addition to cards and the ability to link/reference notes from cards, cards from notes, cards from other cards, etc. I found this really helpful for example with Japanese. Having a sentence card for a vocab word that also links back to a long form note on the grammar being used in the card. Another example is kanji. Making cards for individual kanji as well as vocab cards that use those kanji and linking them together. Over time I was able to build up a huge web of interconnected information. [1] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/