12 ms·

Learn Exponentially

262 points by p-christ 4y ago

p-christ 4y ago
We wrote this at Save All (https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/) and want to know what you think - tell us why it's wrong / right
- carapace 4y ago
  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.
  - p-christ 4y ago
    Very interesting, how would i learn about something like that? Is there a resource you'd recommend?
    - carapace 4y ago
      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.
- atahanacar 4y ago
  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.
  - p-christ 4y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, we are going to add an export feature sometime soon
aintmeit 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  lol thanks!
- p-christ 4y ago
  what did you think of the article?
  - aintmeit 4y ago
    A+
anon2020dot00 4y ago
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.
- pastram_i 4y ago
  Is anki the solution you imagine? https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Or is there a use case that anki doesn’t solve?
  - p-christ 4y ago
    Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful unfortunately
    - pastram_i 4y ago
      I don’t disagree, but from their reply the request is community based. And any community based product is just a good as… well, their community. So how would a different community tool provide better content? What tactics could be used to increase quality?
      - p-christ 4y ago
        (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
cdiamand 4y ago
This assumes that the human mind can continue to expand and hold increasing amounts of information, right? Is that something that we know for sure?
- p-christ 4y ago
  Yep! Our long-term memories can store almost the entire internet as it was in 2016 inside it! See here for a reference for that: https://www.livescience.com/53751-brain-could-store-internet.html https://www.livescience.com/53751-brain-could-store-internet... Or this article we wrote also talks about it: https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
  - p-christ 4y ago
    So there is a theroetical point at which your brain will get "full" but it would take so much knowledge to do that that it's basically impossible.
redelbee 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  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 https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
  - vector_spaces 4y ago
    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.
vmoore 4y ago
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.
Trex_Egg 4y ago
Gwern had also written a long essay describing the same[1]. [1]https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
- p-christ 4y ago
  thanks will check that out
nyxtom 4y ago
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.
- belkarx 4y ago
  What speed do you use the first time around?
  - nyxtom 4y ago
    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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  How do you get videos to 3-4x speed? I find most video players only allow up to 2x speed?
  - nyxtom 4y ago
    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 :/ The one I use for desktop is https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed
  - sinsterizme 4y ago
    There are browser extensions that do this
deleted 4y ago
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NoraCodes 4y ago
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.
motohagiography 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  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.
- bibanez 4y ago
  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.
otras 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  > 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.
b3nji 4y ago
I'm confused, when they say a reminder, what do they mean? Also, when they used books as an example, do they mean read the same thing 2 days later? It would be great if someone could provide an example to an old dummy like me.
- biophysboy 4y ago
  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.
  - b3nji 4y ago
    Thanks, so essentially you set a reminder for you ti sit, and remember what you learned a few days prior?
    - p-christ 4y ago
      Yeah. There is software that organises the reminders for you aswell e.g. my company Save All does this https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/
      - b3nji 4y ago
        Excellent, thank you.
    - biophysboy 4y ago
      Basically yes. The exact time isn't so important, as long as the rough interval increases with each success and decreases with each failure.
      - b3nji 4y ago
        Brill, thanks for the explanation.
deleted 4y ago
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KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
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.
- throwamon 4y ago
  > Using a computer is basically entirely reading I gather you've never met a zoomer in your life
pkilgore 4y ago
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_??
- p-christ 4y ago
  What bit do you doubt? 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
  - pkilgore 4y ago
    "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?
    - p-christ 4y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
  - pkilgore 4y ago
    > It takes you years to get twice as effective at reading Evidence? What's the evidence this is a linear growth process? How many years? At what age? What populations? There is no rigor here at all.
    - 4y ago
codazoda 4y ago
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. https://stray.joeldare.com https://stray.joeldare.com
- p-christ 4y ago
  This seems like what a spaced repetition app does, is there a difference? For example lots of people use Save All for this exact reason https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/
  - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    And orders of magnitude more use Anki: https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ 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.
    - p-christ 4y ago
      Haha, where would you rank this one in terms of quality?
      - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
        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.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
Still waiting for the incremental reading app like the one in supermemo 18... I'm more than willing to pay for it!
- p-christ 4y ago
  what's that?
  - Silverback_VII 4y ago
    5min video explaining it: https://youtu.be/DoQoeK53bP8 https://youtu.be/DoQoeK53bP8 or: https://www.supermemo.com/de/archives1990-2015/help/read https://www.supermemo.com/de/archives1990-2015/help/read
- Denzel 4y ago
  What’s a good email to get in contact with you?
  - Silverback_VII 4y ago
    silverback_vii () gmx net
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    I'm building it, have the foundation in a popular app already. Reach out? alex ... manabi.io
kwanele70 4y ago
- p-christ 4y ago
  thanks lol
  - haskellandchill 4y ago
    well they were right, learn exponentially! oh it's another spaced repetition blog post...
kzrdude 4y ago
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.
ac130kz 4y ago
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.
cobachon 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  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.
- atahanacar 4y ago
  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.
Buttons840 4y ago
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.
- atahanacar 4y ago
  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".
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    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.
keeptrying 4y ago
This article is about memorizing more effectively not learning. To learn, you need to act and have the world give you feedback. If you’re starting a company, you need to create something and get feedback on its value and iterate.
fedeb95 4y ago
IF Learn slow and you won’t reach your potential. Learn fast and you might. Learn exponentially and you’ll achieve more than anyone thought you could. THEN ... Else, we don't know.
p-christ 4y ago
Summary of article: 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.
SnowHill9902 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  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.
  - SnowHill9902 4y ago
    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.
    - p-christ 4y ago
      > 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.
zacharybk 4y ago
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? Thanks in advance.
- p-christ 4y ago
  Save All does that. You can create a deck and then share it so a whole team can use it https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/
swyx 4y ago
its not just note taking + spaced repetition - you can also change your slope greatly by learning in public and learning with peers. ive done a lot of thinking on this area and have mocked up a "Big L" notation for learning curves - shameless plug: https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation
dqpb 4y ago
I really like the idea of exponential learning, and was disappointed to see that this is just an ad for spaced repetition. My opinion is that true exponential learning depends on specific content in a specific order. What we need is the dependency tree of concepts. Does such a thing exist? Curriculums are kind of a non-rigorous attempt at this.
deleted 4y ago
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celdon25 4y ago
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.
woojoo666 4y ago
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
- Denzel 4y ago
  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. :)
- p-christ 4y ago
  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.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
xkgt 4y ago
Are there any Blinkist kind of service providing SRT prompts for books?
deleted 4y ago
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262 points by p-christ 4y ago

We wrote this at Save All (https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/) and want to know what you think - tell us why it's wrong / right

carapace 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  Very interesting, how would i learn about something like that? Is there a resource you'd recommend?
  - carapace 4y ago
    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.
atahanacar 4y ago
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.
- p-christ 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, we are going to add an export feature sometime soon

aintmeit 4y ago

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.

p-christ 4y ago
lol thanks!
p-christ 4y ago
what did you think of the article?
- aintmeit 4y ago
  A+

anon2020dot00 4y ago

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.

pastram_i 4y ago
Is anki the solution you imagine? https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Or is there a use case that anki doesn’t solve?
- p-christ 4y ago
  Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful unfortunately
  - pastram_i 4y ago
    I don’t disagree, but from their reply the request is community based. And any community based product is just a good as… well, their community. So how would a different community tool provide better content? What tactics could be used to increase quality?
    - p-christ 4y ago
      (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

cdiamand 4y ago

This assumes that the human mind can continue to expand and hold increasing amounts of information, right? Is that something that we know for sure?

p-christ 4y ago
Yep! Our long-term memories can store almost the entire internet as it was in 2016 inside it! See here for a reference for that: https://www.livescience.com/53751-brain-could-store-internet.html https://www.livescience.com/53751-brain-could-store-internet... Or this article we wrote also talks about it: https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
- p-christ 4y ago
  So there is a theroetical point at which your brain will get "full" but it would take so much knowledge to do that that it's basically impossible.

redelbee 4y ago

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.

p-christ 4y ago
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 https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
- vector_spaces 4y ago
  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.

vmoore 4y ago

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.

Trex_Egg 4y ago

Gwern had also written a long essay describing the same[1]. [1]https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

p-christ 4y ago
thanks will check that out

nyxtom 4y ago

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.

belkarx 4y ago
What speed do you use the first time around?
- nyxtom 4y ago
  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.
p-christ 4y ago
How do you get videos to 3-4x speed? I find most video players only allow up to 2x speed?
- nyxtom 4y ago
  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 :/ The one I use for desktop is https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed
- sinsterizme 4y ago
  There are browser extensions that do this

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

NoraCodes 4y ago

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.

motohagiography 4y ago

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.

p-christ 4y ago
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.
bibanez 4y ago
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.

otras 4y ago

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.

p-christ 4y ago
> 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.

b3nji 4y ago

I'm confused, when they say a reminder, what do they mean? Also, when they used books as an example, do they mean read the same thing 2 days later? It would be great if someone could provide an example to an old dummy like me.

biophysboy 4y ago
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.
- b3nji 4y ago
  Thanks, so essentially you set a reminder for you ti sit, and remember what you learned a few days prior?
  - p-christ 4y ago
    Yeah. There is software that organises the reminders for you aswell e.g. my company Save All does this https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/
    - b3nji 4y ago
      Excellent, thank you.
  - biophysboy 4y ago
    Basically yes. The exact time isn't so important, as long as the rough interval increases with each success and decreases with each failure.
    - b3nji 4y ago
      Brill, thanks for the explanation.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

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.

throwamon 4y ago
> Using a computer is basically entirely reading I gather you've never met a zoomer in your life

pkilgore 4y ago

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_??

p-christ 4y ago
What bit do you doubt? 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
- pkilgore 4y ago
  "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?
  - p-christ 4y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
- pkilgore 4y ago
  > It takes you years to get twice as effective at reading Evidence? What's the evidence this is a linear growth process? How many years? At what age? What populations? There is no rigor here at all.
  - 4y ago

codazoda 4y ago

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. https://stray.joeldare.com https://stray.joeldare.com

p-christ 4y ago
This seems like what a spaced repetition app does, is there a difference? For example lots of people use Save All for this exact reason https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  And orders of magnitude more use Anki: https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ 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.
  - p-christ 4y ago
    Haha, where would you rank this one in terms of quality?
    - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      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.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

Still waiting for the incremental reading app like the one in supermemo 18... I'm more than willing to pay for it!

p-christ 4y ago
what's that?
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  5min video explaining it: https://youtu.be/DoQoeK53bP8 https://youtu.be/DoQoeK53bP8 or: https://www.supermemo.com/de/archives1990-2015/help/read https://www.supermemo.com/de/archives1990-2015/help/read
Denzel 4y ago
What’s a good email to get in contact with you?
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  silverback_vii () gmx net
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  I'm building it, have the foundation in a popular app already. Reach out? alex ... manabi.io

kwanele70 4y ago

p-christ 4y ago
thanks lol
- haskellandchill 4y ago
  well they were right, learn exponentially! oh it's another spaced repetition blog post...

kzrdude 4y ago

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.

ac130kz 4y ago

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.

cobachon 4y ago

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.

p-christ 4y ago
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.
atahanacar 4y ago
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.

Buttons840 4y ago

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.

atahanacar 4y ago
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".
- Buttons840 4y ago
  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.

keeptrying 4y ago

This article is about memorizing more effectively not learning. To learn, you need to act and have the world give you feedback. If you’re starting a company, you need to create something and get feedback on its value and iterate.

fedeb95 4y ago

IF Learn slow and you won’t reach your potential. Learn fast and you might. Learn exponentially and you’ll achieve more than anyone thought you could. THEN ... Else, we don't know.

p-christ 4y ago

Summary of article: 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.

SnowHill9902 4y ago

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.

p-christ 4y ago
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.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  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.
  - p-christ 4y ago
    > 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.

zacharybk 4y ago

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? Thanks in advance.

p-christ 4y ago
Save All does that. You can create a deck and then share it so a whole team can use it https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/

swyx 4y ago

its not just note taking + spaced repetition - you can also change your slope greatly by learning in public and learning with peers. ive done a lot of thinking on this area and have mocked up a "Big L" notation for learning curves - shameless plug: https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation

dqpb 4y ago

I really like the idea of exponential learning, and was disappointed to see that this is just an ad for spaced repetition. My opinion is that true exponential learning depends on specific content in a specific order. What we need is the dependency tree of concepts. Does such a thing exist? Curriculums are kind of a non-rigorous attempt at this.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

celdon25 4y ago

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.

woojoo666 4y ago

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

Denzel 4y ago
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. :)
p-christ 4y ago
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.
- woojoo666 4y ago

xkgt 4y ago

Are there any Blinkist kind of service providing SRT prompts for books?

deleted 4y ago

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