4 ms·

Interesting read. I have always felt very uncomfortable with lectures where the lecturer stands in the front and everybody listens. In my experience this setup

Interesting read. I have always felt very uncomfortable with lectures where the lecturer stands in the front and everybody listens. In my experience this setup is beneficial for about 10 minutes. After that almost all is forgotten, especially when the lecturer is speeding through a huge topic, because he needs to "get through it", sparing no time for the critical nuances. The best learning experiences I've ever made were with the "digital gardening" method explained in the article. Especially the process of writing down what I'm trying to understand and putting it in my own words is hugely beneficial. That old trick of Feynman's where you take a topic you don't understand and explain it to someone – be it a person, your personal wiki or just a text note – really works wonders. And revisiting a note and changing it a bit also seems to reflect how we remember things: Not regurgitating them, but reliving them. Apart from that I found the process of creating my own personal wiki highly rewarding and can only recommend it to others (if you have the time). It's an absolute joy to use something you've made and explain the creation of it to yourself using it. In my case I've also made the wiki in such a way that I can add exercises to notes and then do spaced repetition on those (which was also a blast to implement). The exercises themselves can be functions so that things get mixed up from time to time. I don't often do the exercises, but the process of creating them adds another layer of understanding from my experience. Edit: Continuation... But this is just me getting excited over the personalized wiki I've created. The article importantly mentions that "there is no one-size-fits-all app" to best understand something, so it takes some time and experimenting to figure out what works best for you (heck, I think I went through at least 5 iterations of note-making systems before I settled on this one for about two years now). And since we're on HN, I think everybody here has the skills to make their own. I really wish schools would add a dedicated, mandatory subject about learning to learn. It would have saved me a lot of time I wasted back in Uni and afterwards just trying to figure out how to quell this urge to retain information.

reimbar 6y ago
I'm curious about how you integrated spaced repetition and exercises to your personal wiki. What tools are you using?
- not_knuth 6y ago
  I wrote a tool myself :). Like many other wiki tools, at the core of it are a bunch of web pages. In my case each page is a note (which is preferably as atomic of a concept as can be) that consists of a section for the note and a section for exercises (each with an id) related to that note. I can then parse those exercises and feed them into a spaced repetition algorithm and practice web app.
oa335 6y ago
What tools did you use to build your wiki? Sounds very useful.
- not_knuth 6y ago
  Well in my case it was a mix of using Go for templates and general backend stuff, a couple of React and D3.js apps on the frontend for visualization, a Postgres DB for storing exercise results and that's about it. Single notes for example are simple templates that can be used in Go and I write the HTML raw with heavy use of snippets.
bradleyankrom 6y ago
Do you happen to have a link to Feynman’s comments on the topic?
- not_knuth 6y ago
  A bunch of quotes can be found on the Wikiquote page on Feynman [0] together with the proper references, but these two stand out: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” “Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, ‘I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.’ But a few days later he came to me and said: ‘You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.’“ His book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! also has a couple of anecdotes where he solves people's problems by asking them questions and trying to understand them. Unfortunately I read this some time back and the exact page numbers escape me. Generally, if you search for Feynman Technique you'll find anything in the direction of "explain it to someone to understand", but I think there is a lot of misattribution going on here. Like Einstein, people love to stick his name on things. And finally, an indirect, but in my opinion well-summarized reference to the way Feynman learned, was in the Richard Feynman section of Lex Friedman's 118th podcast [1]. [0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Quotes https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Quotes [1] https://youtu.be/U_6AYX42gkU?t=452 https://youtu.be/U_6AYX42gkU?t=452 (with exact starting time)
octostone 6y ago
Third person here who wants to bogart your personal wiki tools :)
findthewords 6y ago
A self-hosted personal wiki sounds like a fantastic idea! Is it just a html 'pedia? How do you host the media? I would love to see the "How this wiki was built" page of your wiki.
- reimbar 6y ago
  Another great local-first wiki tool is Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/). Each page is just a markdown file in a dedicated folder. They have backlinks and a bunch of plugins.
  - kelsolaar 6y ago
    And Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/ https://dynalist.io/) from the Obsidian authors!
- wtmt 6y ago
  As a different suggestion, you can have a wiki on your machine with TiddlyWiki. [1] With that, there’s no need for a server or complex software deployment and maintenance. [1]: https://tiddlywiki.com https://tiddlywiki.com
  - not_knuth 6y ago
    True that, albeit building my own wiki that has it's own feel and way of working was worth it to me. I took some inspirations from TiddlyWiki, but this space is really packed with a bunch of great tools. The ones I liked most were: Logseq (open source): https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ Roam Research: https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/
- not_knuth 6y ago
  Pretty much. One repo for the notes, one repo for the logic. I tried to keep it as flexible as possible so that I could theoretically integrate any kind of frontend/backend tech at a later point. At the moment everything gets hosted locally unfortunately. I was planning on polishing it so that it's easier to setup. Then I can put it on a Show HN in the future as a kind of "how this was built" :) and give some inspiration to other people who thought of building their own.

reimbar 6y ago

I'm curious about how you integrated spaced repetition and exercises to your personal wiki. What tools are you using?

not_knuth 6y ago
I wrote a tool myself :). Like many other wiki tools, at the core of it are a bunch of web pages. In my case each page is a note (which is preferably as atomic of a concept as can be) that consists of a section for the note and a section for exercises (each with an id) related to that note. I can then parse those exercises and feed them into a spaced repetition algorithm and practice web app.

oa335 6y ago

What tools did you use to build your wiki? Sounds very useful.

not_knuth 6y ago
Well in my case it was a mix of using Go for templates and general backend stuff, a couple of React and D3.js apps on the frontend for visualization, a Postgres DB for storing exercise results and that's about it. Single notes for example are simple templates that can be used in Go and I write the HTML raw with heavy use of snippets.

bradleyankrom 6y ago

Do you happen to have a link to Feynman’s comments on the topic?

not_knuth 6y ago
A bunch of quotes can be found on the Wikiquote page on Feynman [0] together with the proper references, but these two stand out: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” “Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, ‘I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.’ But a few days later he came to me and said: ‘You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.’“ His book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! also has a couple of anecdotes where he solves people's problems by asking them questions and trying to understand them. Unfortunately I read this some time back and the exact page numbers escape me. Generally, if you search for Feynman Technique you'll find anything in the direction of "explain it to someone to understand", but I think there is a lot of misattribution going on here. Like Einstein, people love to stick his name on things. And finally, an indirect, but in my opinion well-summarized reference to the way Feynman learned, was in the Richard Feynman section of Lex Friedman's 118th podcast [1]. [0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Quotes https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Quotes [1] https://youtu.be/U_6AYX42gkU?t=452 https://youtu.be/U_6AYX42gkU?t=452 (with exact starting time)

octostone 6y ago

Third person here who wants to bogart your personal wiki tools :)

findthewords 6y ago

A self-hosted personal wiki sounds like a fantastic idea! Is it just a html 'pedia? How do you host the media? I would love to see the "How this wiki was built" page of your wiki.

reimbar 6y ago
Another great local-first wiki tool is Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/). Each page is just a markdown file in a dedicated folder. They have backlinks and a bunch of plugins.
- kelsolaar 6y ago
  And Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/ https://dynalist.io/) from the Obsidian authors!
wtmt 6y ago
As a different suggestion, you can have a wiki on your machine with TiddlyWiki. [1] With that, there’s no need for a server or complex software deployment and maintenance. [1]: https://tiddlywiki.com https://tiddlywiki.com
- not_knuth 6y ago
  True that, albeit building my own wiki that has it's own feel and way of working was worth it to me. I took some inspirations from TiddlyWiki, but this space is really packed with a bunch of great tools. The ones I liked most were: Logseq (open source): https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ Roam Research: https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/
not_knuth 6y ago
Pretty much. One repo for the notes, one repo for the logic. I tried to keep it as flexible as possible so that I could theoretically integrate any kind of frontend/backend tech at a later point. At the moment everything gets hosted locally unfortunately. I was planning on polishing it so that it's easier to setup. Then I can put it on a Show HN in the future as a kind of "how this was built" :) and give some inspiration to other people who thought of building their own.