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The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it sh

The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. QCVC periodically inserts spaced repetition exercises that prompt the reader to recall arbitrary facts about what they just read. The authors even seem to be aware that mere mnemonics won't be enough, e.g., when they write: > I am, by the way, somewhat uncomfortable with some of the questions just asked. My personal experience is that spaced-repetition learning works well when learning facts I have a lot of context for, and care a lot about. It’s a rare person who finds the detailed entries in a unitary matrix fascinating! That’s not to say they aren’t – actually, they are, but you need a lot more context than I’ve provided to see why (for instance) that -i−i in the YY is just so darn interesting. Is lack of recall the problem or a symptom of the problem? If we want to learn about ants, should we start by drilling a million ant facts? Focus on building recall around all the categories of ants and their geography? Sorry, why do we care about Hadamard gates? All the "fixes" to this are squarely in the domain of books-as-books: better organization, better scaffolding, better sequencing of concepts, etc.

judofyr 6y ago
> The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. I think Quantum Country is extremely well made and an interesting idea, but come on: The idea of interspersing text with exercises is hardly revolutionary. In physics (which is my background) a regular textbook consists of chapters which each present a smaller topic followed by a bunch of exercises you should solve. The way you work through the book is by solving the exercises. Everyone knows that just reading the text is not enough. The author usually writes explicitly in the introduction that "the only way to learn this is to work through the exercises". A good book will have exercises which require understanding a mixture of the earlier chapters as well. Most of the exercises will focuses on what's new in _this_ chapter, but suddenly you need calculate some "basic" formula that was presented early on. Textbooks don't use spaced-repetition as described by SuperMemo, but they use many similar techniques. The page you linked to is enormous (91 pages printed it seems; although that's with a pretty big font) and looking through it seems to have 17 "exercises" and that is including some very basic ones as "What's the standard notation for the NOT gate?". How can they claim that it's not "learning from text" when they have a way bigger text-to-exercise ratio than any textbook I've read?
- jfarmer 6y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I meant that QCVC shows the opposite of what it intends: the bottleneck is _not_ lack of clever "memorization technology." They even kidna realize it themselves when they say "This works better w/ context." Well, ok, so how do you rapidly create context?! Well-written, well-framed, and well-sequenced exercises are great at that, especially if there's a healthy feedback loop.

judofyr 6y ago

> The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. I think Quantum Country is extremely well made and an interesting idea, but come on: The idea of interspersing text with exercises is hardly revolutionary. In physics (which is my background) a regular textbook consists of chapters which each present a smaller topic followed by a bunch of exercises you should solve. The way you work through the book is by solving the exercises. Everyone knows that just reading the text is not enough. The author usually writes explicitly in the introduction that "the only way to learn this is to work through the exercises". A good book will have exercises which require understanding a mixture of the earlier chapters as well. Most of the exercises will focuses on what's new in _this_ chapter, but suddenly you need calculate some "basic" formula that was presented early on. Textbooks don't use spaced-repetition as described by SuperMemo, but they use many similar techniques. The page you linked to is enormous (91 pages printed it seems; although that's with a pretty big font) and looking through it seems to have 17 "exercises" and that is including some very basic ones as "What's the standard notation for the NOT gate?". How can they claim that it's not "learning from text" when they have a way bigger text-to-exercise ratio than any textbook I've read?

jfarmer 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, I meant that QCVC shows the opposite of what it intends: the bottleneck is _not_ lack of clever "memorization technology." They even kidna realize it themselves when they say "This works better w/ context." Well, ok, so how do you rapidly create context?! Well-written, well-framed, and well-sequenced exercises are great at that, especially if there's a healthy feedback loop.