9 ms·

Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work

215 points by ColinWright 3y ago

konschubert 3y ago
When I studied Physics, I could sometimes take hours to digest a single page of a textbook or my lecture notes - providing that it was a good textbook. It’s not enough to just understand what is written. You have to understand why it is like described. Why it can’t be different - or could it? You need to build an intuition for both the physics and the math describing it. You have to push until it clicks. It’s hard work.
- chongli 3y ago
  Yes. This is the same for both math and programming. These skills take a lot of practice to develop. It’s like playing a musical instrument: you won’t learn how to do it if all you do is read the book. What’s strange to me is how people seem to resist this fact. Like it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it. But for math and physics at least they seem to think it’s somehow different? That they ought to be able to solve the problems just by picking up a pencil? And when they don’t get a decent grade on the exam they look over at the person who got 100 and say “that’s why! I can’t do it because I’m not a genius like they are!”
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not. The reward is built-in. This is a bit harder for maths/physics once you're past the trivial stuff and most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      > most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems. Maybe that's the difference between people who are good at it and people who aren't. I found solving math problems (the ones you get in a practice course at a university) hugely rewarding. Finally figuring it out was so satisfying. Coincidentally, my endeavors playing an instrument were never particularly fruitful.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      >The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not The feedback is only fast if you're already skilled. It's pretty common for new students to have no proper sense of what sounds good (particularly since it's familiar to them), such that they struggle to figure out what they need to improve. Similar to digital artists flipping the image often to make it easier to identify issues by making the image somewhat unfamiliar to them, forcing their brain to actually look at the image rather than just using its previous idealized mental representation of what the image looked like.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Not everything is hard work. Some are smarter (or better equipped) than others. You can spend an eternity teaching me math and still won't be able to accomplish anything. It's almost like different people exist and they have different skill sets and interests.
    - Tainnor 3y ago
      Unless you have a specific learning disability, I refuse to believe that you are unteachable. Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). That's fine. Maybe abstract reasoning doesn't come as natural to you as it does to others, that's possible. But we know how plastic the brain is. Given enough time and dedication, you should be able to learn things - certainly not PhD level stuff, but the basics.
      - beebeepka 3y ago
        I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else. Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.
        Tainnor 3y ago
        I apologise if I have caused any offense, because that wasn't my intent. I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.
        beebeepka 3y ago
        Oh, understood the main point just fine. You are not wrong. Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.
  - palata 3y ago
    To be fair, the "you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it" hides a very complex process. Some people "practice" by trying to play the same thing over and over, and it is equivalent to "hearing" vs "listening". Learning how to play an instrument (and also a particular piece of music) is a very complex process. Just like you need to learn the skills to "learn from a book", you need to learn the skills to "practice an instrument".
  - Asraelite 3y ago
    I agree with your point but I think playing a musical instrument is a bad analogy because of one fundamental difference: In most intellectual fields, you can take your sweet time to remember what you learned so long as you remember it eventually. Music requires practice to recall everything in real time.
- andai 3y ago
  When learning new programming concepts, I would often have to learn them 5 or 10 times before they clicked. Once they clicked, they seemed completely obvious, and I couldn't imagine what it's like to not understand it. Two mathematicians are discussing a theorem. The first mathematician says that the theorem is trivial. He then proceeds with two hours of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is indeed trivial.
  - wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
    I used to require this, but after having spent many years programming this stopped being the case. I've reached the point where i can see a new abstraction and usually immediatly understand it, regardless of language.
    - MaxBarraclough 3y ago
      Has your career taken you across many different programming paradigms? A C programmer with no experience in concatenative or, especially, functional languages will have little chance of understanding code written in Forth or Haskell. They will have to start at the bottom of the learning curve. The differences between languages aren't just skin-deep. Same goes for the design patterns in those languages. Haskell's applicatives have no analog in C, for instance.
      - dehrmann 3y ago
        > Forth or Haskell You're not wrong, but those don't crack the top-10 of in-demand languages. Enough functional paradigms have also crept into more popular languages that you wouldn't be completely lost.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    I remember this having been my experience with teaching myself to code as a kid. All I remember is initial endless frustration from having to re-read tutorials and documentation and still not understanding anything. Then at some point I can't remember, everything clicked into place and I can't understand why I didn't understand it before. Once I had those basics down, I haven't had that kind of struggle. I went through a similar phase with math, struggled with basic algebra for years, then at some point it all clicked into place and I unintentionally ended up skipping all high school algebra to get to early calculus. It makes it really hard when helping other people through those early concepts (like pointers), because "keep working and at some point it'll just click for you" isn't very convincing.
- readingnews 3y ago
  This is the "problem" today that I see in the classroom (I used to teach CS until recently)... learners today do not want to dedicate the time it takes to truly understand. Not all of them, but a LOT of them have the opinion that they just need to get through this damn algorithms class, get the damn piece of paper (diploma) so they can go out and start a job doing "real" programming. Those students, they do not get FAANG jobs, or make big money. The few that want to understand are much more like the articles description, and they end up five years on far ahead of their peers at work. Just my $0.02.
  - watwut 3y ago
    I remember having schoolmates like that 20 years ago.
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  I wish they'd always explain 'the initial seed' first. What was the initial thought or idea, that, when pursued and expanded on, resulted in the concept that im trying to learn right now? That sort of initial seed would give me so much information...
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  I simply can’t read the text book, at least without context. Doing the problem sets over and over again works better for me. Practice is the key, it might make sense to unsuccessfully attempt the problems before ready the chapter, since you would have more context for readying.
- AlexAndScripts 3y ago
  I find it beneficial to just keep asking why. Sure, the answer is sometimes "because universe", but asking why (not just how) over and over again helps me build my mental model. On that topic... Does anyone have any clue how and why magnetism works? I have a A Level Physics test next week :)
- goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
  math requires something different than memory, it requires understanding and fluency in its variety of symbolic languages, which can only built with intellectually engaged work.
  - pas 3y ago
    math requires an absurd amount of memorized techniques/patterns ... maybe that's what you mean by fluency? of course these are rarely static (after all one can learn proofs of theorems without being able to solve any problem), hence the need for the "muscle memory" of how to apply these techniques to the particular patterns.
- portpecos 3y ago
  If someone were to create an animation of that physics page you described, do you think it might have shortened the time spent to digest that concept?
  - Balgair 3y ago
    I never really got the difference between the dot and cross products until many years after graduation. And then I only got it because I managed to stumble upon a good video with somewhat decent animations. Like, 2-D, sure, seems easy enough. But once you go to 4-D, things get really hard to grok. Passionate science educators online have really filled in a lot of my education.
pawelduda 3y ago
Spaced repetition is underrated. I still remember a lot from my cards despite not having studied them for years
- andai 3y ago
  I had the opposite experience. If something's easy to remember, I don't need Anki. If something's hard to remember (I really struggle with birthdays, for example), even Anki doesn't help! The cards all end up as "leech" and Anki stops showing them to me. (I found this behaviour amusing, since the whole point of using Anki is to help me learn things that are difficult to remember!) They say if a card is ending up as a leech, it's a "problem" card and you should somehow improve it. But I'm not sure how to improve this: Side A: name. Side B: birthday. (Cards are also shown reversed.) Arguably I could add some kind of mnemonics, or learn the Mnemonic Major System for remembering numbers. (On that note, does anyone have specific advice for remembering birthdays? The Dutch among you will say "hang a birthday calendar in your toilet", which was probably the correct solution all along...)
  - Tomte 3y ago
    Why would you need to learn birthdays (except maybe closest family)? It's maybe the canonical thing to put into a calendar. "Because I want to" is obviously fine, but it still reminds me of the infamous "capitals of the world" flashcards that spaced repetition practitioners warn against.
    - jonpurdy 3y ago
      It wasn't until I discovered Anki a few years ago that I finally was able to remember my parents' and sisters' birthdays (despite calendar reminders every year). Why remember something that can be looked up? Latency; it's super useful to have things appear in your brain so you can immediately do something useful with them instead of slowing down and looking something up and potentially losing context.
      - andai 3y ago
j4yav 3y ago
I can assure you, books work
victorlf 3y ago
Shameless plug: I'm building https://python.cards https://python.cards to learn Python with spaced repetition. I've uploaded some videos on Youtube of the process of distilling the information from the Python docs into flashcards, and have plans on trying out LLMs to help in this process.
- AlexErrant 3y ago
  As someone also building an SRS product, why did you decide on Python as your initial market? I genuinely feel like programming is best learned by _doing_, and thankfully it's pretty easy to practice writing Python. I feel like a better way to learn Python is to introduce a concept/word, and give a playground where the student can play with it.
  - victorlf 3y ago
    Many reasons, most of them hypothesis. For one, the book "The programmer's brain" says that spaced repetition is the best way to learn the syntax, idioms, caveats of a programming language, but it's hard to find a product that offers this. I don't suggest you should learn Python _only_ with python.cards. I assume every python.cards user will be doing some online course, or working with Python, and my decks will just boost their knowledge of the language. I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Python is not their main occupation. These people struggle to accumulate knowledge, because they may encounter concepts or APIs only from time to time, and by that time they already forgot. Also, I want to cover some "unorthodox" topics for which spaced repetition may be specially well suited. For example, I'm building a deck called "A tour of the standard library", where you can learn all the modules that are available, just so you know what is out there, without going deep into it. Another idea is to have decks to learn all the built-in exceptions by heart, or the nomenclature. I think this helps build a mental model of the width and depth of the language so you can better integrate all the knowledge you find while coding, searching online, or reading code.
    - AlexErrant 3y ago
      > the book "The programmer's brain" says that spaced repetition is the best way to learn the syntax, idioms, caveats of a programming language Unfortunately, hard disagree. The best way to learn a Lisp is to write Lisp. You can look at code all you want, but you won't get used to the syntax/parens until you start writing it. Same applies to non-Lisps. > I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Python is not their main occupation. These people struggle to accumulate knowledge, because they may encounter concepts or APIs only from time to time, and by that time they already forgot. This is a great point. Static typing is great for API discovery, which Python sadly lacks. However, I wonder how much LLMs are eating this "low-code" market. Also, if Python is non-critical to their jobs, I suspect that they won't feel motivated to explicitly study Python over the long term. Doing spaced repetition is famously hard, and non-motivated people will likely give up and just do "JIT learning". > Also, I want to cover some "unorthodox" topics for which spaced repetition may be specially well suited. For example, I'm building a deck called "A tour of the standard library", where you can learn all the modules that are available, just so you know what is out there, without going deep into it. FWIW I'm learning Rust, and to "learn what's out there" I've just been binging random Rust videos on Youtube at 2x over lunch. Granted I'm an experienced dev and I have an intuition as to what "should" be out there, so perhaps this story is of limited use.
venus-project 3y ago
[dead]
apienx 3y ago
The director of the Australian Society for Medical Research has a nice TEDx talk about all aspects of learning here: https://youtu.be/kKvK2foOTJM?si=RF479ogKABAtcCUE https://youtu.be/kKvK2foOTJM?si=RF479ogKABAtcCUE
lawn 3y ago
> Why Books Don’t Work I think it should be clear that it's not books that don't work, but how many people approach books that's ineffective. Just reading books isn't enough, you have to internalize the lessons which is often hard work.
demondemidi 3y ago
Glad he provided a transcript, which is technically, a book.
Avicebron 3y ago
I typically have a low opinion on rote memorization, I remember years ago at university my roommate swore by his note cards (physical index cards at the time) while I strongly maintained the need to build up intuition around the math and physics I was doing. He was in med school and I was in engineering, but I felt that the memorization while successful at least for him, was limiting in terms of potential innovation.
- dsgnr 3y ago
  Yeah med students seem to be unique in the amount of stuff they need to remember, at least in terms of users Ive worked with. The amount of things medical students need to memorize to pass their USMLE exams is insane. I designed and built a learning tool at a startup for med students using picture mnenomics and spaced repetition quizzing that seriously helped those students and lead to the startup being acquired.
  - AlexErrant 3y ago
    The ability to link image-metaphors/mnemonics to concepts is something that really should spread to other (non-medical) domains. An example of a picture mnemonic for others: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2023/04/story-3308-768x432.jpg https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/202... Article: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/usc-dornsife-alumnus-revolutionizing-medical-school/ https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/usc-dornsife-alumnus-r... If you're comfortable saying, did your startup/acquirer have any interest in developing products for other domains?
    - Avicebron 3y ago
      I'm not the one you're asking, but I surprised you don't think that mnemonic isn't used in other domains. It typically doesn't look like a fully fleshed out pizza shop, but I distinctly remember explaining an cell scaffold that I had synthesized like a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs to some of the undergraduates I was mentoring.. I never felt that other domains didn't address the natural inclination to use abstraction as a way to convey concepts/processes.
iandanforth 3y ago
After watching the studying video I'm surprised there is no direct GPT-4 integration with his tool. There's a clear opportunity for dynamic question generation such that you have notes/cards which can't be memorized but instead ask novel questions around the same point.
- cvhashim04 3y ago
  Can you clarify what studying video you mean?
ThinkBeat 3y ago
Books work well and have been the standard for learning many topics for hundreds of years. They have few technical problems, Easy to sell, borrow, give away. Yes, you can go about reading a book in different ways depending on what and why you are reading and what works for you. I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days, at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition every year, or at least every couple of years. There are just about no scientific discoveries in math that requires undergraduate and few matters that require an entirely new edition of graduate books. I have also heard but never experienced that some books apparently have an online component that is valid only for one person or one semester or possibly one student per semester. If true this is even worse. I strongly prefer books to videos. A lecture is good to prepare you or to wet your appetite. And to clarify known difficult spots in the book.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Most books are very badly written.
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    compared with what?
  - palata 3y ago
    Most [everything] is bad. It's your job to find the good ones and enjoy them.
- brandall10 3y ago
  The university textbook issue was big when I was a student in the mid-late 90s. In fact, one of my CS professors went on a rant about it, how it is simply a way to invalidate the used book market... he then told us to buy books from an online storefront with this funny name (that he assured us had nothing to do with the rainforest) that sold them for a sizable discount instead our own university bookstore.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  > I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days, at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition every year, or at least every couple of years. This seems to be a specifically American (or anglo? not sure about the UK/Australia/etc.) thing. I've never heard about this happening in Germany where there are standard textbooks in about every field that people have been using for decades - and in many cases, people just simply go with the lecture and the associated notes instead of a textbook.
tedmcory77 3y ago
Yea, it's always bugged us that we learn the way folks did hundreds of years ago. Which is why we built https://www.munkle.it https://www.munkle.it the way we did and focused on speed of review. I used to not like the feeling that spaced repetition did (it's always in that slightly hard stage) but apparently that's what helps you remember.
- andai 3y ago
  I can't tell (neither from the website, nor from using it) how this is different from any other flashcard software? You mention you focused on "speed of review". How did you do that? There are apparently no hotkeys? (My speed of review is therefore lower than Anki, due to needing to use the mouse.)
  - tedmcory77 3y ago
    Q,W,E < No need for mouse. First card in Welcome to Munkle Deck.
lapcat 3y ago
[flagged]
- Tomte 3y ago
  Don't complain reflexively without looking at the submission. It's >95% text, the whole video transcript.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > Don't complain reflexively "Please add" is not a complaint, it's a polite request. The fact that there's also a video transcript just proves that the [video] label is accurate.
    - Tomte 3y ago
      You're wrong. [video] is only an (unnecessary) warning for people who don't like videos. If most of the page is text there is no reason at all to "warn" anyone.
      - lapcat 3y ago
        The HN guidelines don't say anything about transcripts: "If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        Tomte 3y ago
        It's not a video!
AlexErrant 3y ago
Ulgh why didn't the blog link to "Why books donʼt work" https://andymatuschak.org/books/ https://andymatuschak.org/books/ Some select disjoint passages: > Like lectures, books have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation, but the medium does have an implicit model. And like lectures, that model is transmissionism. Sequences of words in sequences of lines in sequences of pages, the form of a book suggests people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. In caricature: “The author describes an idea in words on the page; the reader reads the words; then the reader understands the idea. When the reader reaches the last page, they’ve finished the book.” Of course, most authors don’t believe that people learn things this way, but because the medium makes the assumption invisible, it’s hard to question. > Readers must learn specific reflective strategies. “What questions should I be asking? How should I summarize what I’m reading?” Readers must run their own feedback loops. “Did I understand that? Should I re-read it? Consult another text?” Readers must understand their own cognition. “What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?” > These skills fall into a bucket which learning science calls “metacognition.” The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them.Baker, L. (1989). Metacognition, comprehension monitoring, and the adult reader. Educational Psychology Review, 1(1), 3–38. Worse, even if readers know how to do all these things, the process is quite taxing. Readers must juggle both the content of the book and also all these meta-questions. People particularly struggle to multitask like this when the content is unfamiliar. > My collaborator Michael Nielsen and I made an initial attempt with Quantum Country, a “book” on quantum computation. But reading this “book” doesn’t look like reading any other book. The explanatory text is tightly woven with brief interactive review sessions, meant to exploit the ideas we just introduced. Reading Quantum Country means reading a few minutes of text, then quickly testing your memory about everything you’ve just read, then reading for a few more minutes, or perhaps scrolling back to reread certain details, and so on.
- montefischer 3y ago
  A far more practical idea is to internalize the practice of 'metacognition' so you can apply it to the vast corpus of books that already exist. It is also interesting to consider previous attempts to wrap a cognitive model around the physical medium of the book, like the monastic 'lectio divina' of the middle ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina
keiferski 3y ago
I like books, but I basically agree with the idea that the traditional front-to-back text narrative format is hugely inefficient. I think a lot of people interpret technological developments as some of natural process, and therefore the omnipresence and long existence of books implies that they are a great learning method. In reality, though, the format of a book itself is probably just more "evolutionarily fit" compared to alternatives. If a device that could record and replay audio was somehow invented prior to the printing press, it seems highly likely to me that we'd live in a audio-based world, not a text one. After all, societies spent thousands of years using only spoken language, with writing as a fairly recent phenomenon. A more efficient book system, IMO, would incorporate spaced repetition more directly, whether by highlighting the key points at the bottom of each page, or even by deliberately including "reminder" paragraphs throughout the book.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
I find two things help me learn: A top down description: start with what something is, why it's important, and how it fits in with other things, then an outline of the details, then the finer details and so on. This is almost impossible to find in textbooks or lectures, which for the most part are bottom up. Trying to figure out the thing without any help, or very little help, at each step of the above. This sounds pointless, but it actually works really well. If I try my best to figure out how something works without knowing anything I end up "priming" my brain for the answer, and end up getting a (relatively) instant understanding. It's like you make a hole that is the rough shape of the answer in your mind and the answer fills the void. Put another way you motivate your brain to wanting to know what it is. The best bit is how far you can get by yourself and the positive feeling that gives you. This might just be me, I've never met anyone who feels the same way about learning.
- Avicebron 3y ago
  I don't think it's just you, I have a similar need for a holistic understanding of the process/needs before I feel that I'm learning/contributing in an organized way. I left the biotech startup world a while ago because I found that in the organizations I was working with, there was an extreme siloing happening from top down management, and I chafed under the unspoken assumption that I was expected to operate as a black box transforming data from input to output without knowing the whole process This isn't helped by how the biotech world stratifies itself into PhDs and non-PhDs
- danielbln 3y ago
  Towards your first point, I love interacting with LLMs (ignoring all the issues about confabulation etc.) because I can ask it for top down, high level outlines and drill down to the bottom however I please, and ask for multiple paths down as well.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    I agree, that's a bright spot which I've just started to get into. It's a real boon for personalised learning. Even mistakes by LLMs are helpful: you know that they're unreliable and you have to stay on your toes, so what they're telling you makes sense. That only benefits actual understanding, rather than rote learning.
JohnFen 3y ago
Books don't work? I beg to differ. Books are how I've learned 80% of what I know. They work better for me than any other method I've experienced. However, I'd agree that textbooks don't work. At least, they don't work for me.
rickcarlino 3y ago
I've used spaced repetition to memorize nearly 5,000 words over the last 15 years, but I struggle to apply spaced repetition outside of key/value pair memorization. It seems that SRS is best used for "know what" rather than "know how". I am curious if anyone has applied spaced repetition to memorization of things other than terminology and how they did it.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Nope, you're entirely correct. It's for vocabulary and terminology mainly, or other simple facts like historical dates, country capitals, etc. It's irrelevant to conceptual learning, where it may be very difficult to understand something, but once you do you understand it for life.
- dan-g 3y ago
  I was in this boat until I read Andy’s article on how to write good prompts, which I’d highly recommend: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
- Asraelite 3y ago
  The problem with SRS in my opinion is the inability to do many-to-one mappings. That is, a single question that builds upon your knowledge of already-learned simpler concepts by combining them together into a compound problem. In the context of language learning this could be a sentence which tests multiple individual vocabulary items and grammatical patterns together. In the context of maths it could be using multiple techniques in sequence to solve a more complex equation. I think this would bridge the gap between the atomic knowledge that flashcards give you and the more generalized knowledge that applied practice gives you. AFAIK, no existing SRS is capable of this. I started working on a prototype web app that could do it but I haven't finished it yet. I plan to return to it at some point.
  - rickcarlino 3y ago
    From a language learning perspective, I think this is accomplished via memorization of complete sentences. I am building an SRS as a side project where you memorize complete sentences instead of single vocabulary words and your response is graded by an LLM so that you don’t lose points when your answer is not quite correct or differs slightly in prompt meaning. is that what you meant? I have had good luck using this technique for memorization of grammar rather than memorization of vocabulary.
glimshe 3y ago
"Expert" educated through books tells us why books don't work.
- blackbear_ 3y ago
  Your point being...?
pyjarrett 3y ago
The real problem is teaching children that "reading" is merely decoding words off a page, and "listening" is merely hearing the words someone says. The book itself is a way to open the door to learning, not the end point. Reading subject titles first, cross-referencing, and working examples and doing projects help teach and cement ideas. There's techniques like SQ4R [1] for reading, and hugely applicable to general technical and article reading is "How to read a paper" [2]. For lecturers, there's "How to Speak" [3], and for those attending a talk there's the Cornell Notes system. [4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R [2]: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPaper.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes
- flir 3y ago
  Your first link is interesting. Looks like an expanded "see one do one teach one". Everything revolves around a "cementing" stage, doesn't it. Practice makes perfect.
- dan-g 3y ago
  To others wondering about the discrepancy between SQ4R being mentioned in the comment text and the title of the linked source being SQ3R (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R), it looks like others [1] add an additional R (marked with an asterisk below), for the following: 1. Survey 2. Question 3. Read 4. Recite 5. *Rephrase 6. Review [1] https://www.american.edu/provost/academic-access/sq4r.cfm https://www.american.edu/provost/academic-access/sq4r.cfm
  - jackphilson 3y ago
    are there more accepted alternatives to this, or is this optimal?
hyperthesis 3y ago
In math textbooks, the exercises contain much of the exposition. Some is in the answers. And some of facts you are expected to learn only appear in your own workings. So "reading" a math textbook misses most of it.
Smaug123 3y ago
I know everyone always just responds to the title, but do read/listen to this one. I think it's Dwarkesh's best episode ever. Dwarkesh always asks great questions, and Matuschak has this amazing knack of interpreting those questions in the most interesting ways, while constantly challenging their assumptions.
- andymatuschak 3y ago
  Thank you for these very kind comments!
  - fivestones 3y ago
    Since you’re here Is there anywhere to get the software you are using in the video for reading/making flashcards? It looks amazing. Please tell me you have it in a GitHub repo somewhere.
- fredoliveira 3y ago
  I'm a huge fan of Andy's work and have been for years. Absolutely loved this episode. If I may suggest another one of Dwarkesh's episodes that I thoroughly enjoyed: his 2 episode interview of Carl Shulman. It is an absolute treat. Completely different subjects, of course, but equally engaging.
masto 3y ago
Why books don't work... for Andy Matuschak. People are different, you know.
Zigurd 3y ago
Depends on the kind of book and subject matter. Dwarkesh is right about books you need to read all or nearly all of to get the benefit. But to answer "Do people care about understanding?" for a lot of books: No. The reader cares about their problems and solving them. Based on reader feedback, only a special kind of reader reads a programming book cover to cover. 90%+ people who read substantial parts of a programming book, dip into the parts that interest them after, perhaps, reading the first few chapters to figure out how to navigate the book. Online, you have the freedom to do better and to publish similar material in multiple modes, from passive and linear, to self-paced interactive to human-guided. There isn't one answer, which the post touches on in several places including regarding spaced repetition. LLMs are likely to have an impact on the value of pedagogical techniques like spaced repetition because spaced repetition is a tool for overcoming human impediments to acquiring and navigating huge, difficult, knowledge bases. Then using that knowledge requires enormous effort and aptitude. That's where humans competing with LLMs are like pick-and-shovel miners competing with a giant dragline at mining coal.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  OTOH if the knowledge base is finite but a real mf'er, spaced repetition is great for humans. Git comes to mind as perhaps ideal subject matter.
steve1977 3y ago
I’m a huge fan of the incremental reading approach as provided by SuperMemo. While it’s certainly even better suited to hypertext, it also works well for most non-fiction (e)books, at least for me. https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading
loughnane 3y ago
Books work—good books anyway—, but most of us aren’t taught how to read well. The next time you want to get something from a book do some new things with it. 1. Skim it first. 2. Find some interesting entries in the index if it has one and jump there to check it out. 3. Ask questions while you read. Write them down the book. 4. Reread the book (spaced repetition). It will go faster because you e built a structure with your notes the first time. 5. Don’t waste time on bad books. A good analogy is pitching. The pitcher is the writer, the ball is the knowledge and you are the catcher. Nothing works if the pitcher can’t throw or if the catcher can’t catch. Likewise if there’s no ball to throw. So it is you’ll get nothing out of the book if the writer can’t deliver or has nothing to say. But a well crafted book stuffed with knowledge won’t to any good if you receive it.
ryloric 3y ago
> Books don't work Stupidest title I've seen in some time. Maybe there's some additional context I'm missing.
- Smaug123 3y ago
  The context you appear to be missing is actually the content of the post. It's often the way with articles: they give a title, which is then expanded upon in the main text.
  - matheusiacono 3y ago
    Even books follow this way.
  - ryloric 3y ago
    That's called clickbait.
satisfice 3y ago
I wrote about a more relaxed version of this, some years ago. See Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. I wrote it to explain the techniques I use to compete as a technical guy who dropped out of high school. It’s actually not very hard to compete if you see education as an ongoing process of personal construction, rather than some plug of knowledge that an expert gave you (along with a certificate). I collect books and papers which I ignore until I have a relevant problem, at which point I go into a process of intensive inquiry similar to that describe in the post.

215 points by ColinWright 3y ago

When I studied Physics, I could sometimes take hours to digest a single page of a textbook or my lecture notes - providing that it was a good textbook. It’s not enough to just understand what is written. You have to understand why it is like described. Why it can’t be different - or could it? You need to build an intuition for both the physics and the math describing it. You have to push until it clicks. It’s hard work.

chongli 3y ago
Yes. This is the same for both math and programming. These skills take a lot of practice to develop. It’s like playing a musical instrument: you won’t learn how to do it if all you do is read the book. What’s strange to me is how people seem to resist this fact. Like it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it. But for math and physics at least they seem to think it’s somehow different? That they ought to be able to solve the problems just by picking up a pencil? And when they don’t get a decent grade on the exam they look over at the person who got 100 and say “that’s why! I can’t do it because I’m not a genius like they are!”
- cinntaile 3y ago
  The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not. The reward is built-in. This is a bit harder for maths/physics once you're past the trivial stuff and most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    > most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems. Maybe that's the difference between people who are good at it and people who aren't. I found solving math problems (the ones you get in a practice course at a university) hugely rewarding. Finally figuring it out was so satisfying. Coincidentally, my endeavors playing an instrument were never particularly fruitful.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    >The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not The feedback is only fast if you're already skilled. It's pretty common for new students to have no proper sense of what sounds good (particularly since it's familiar to them), such that they struggle to figure out what they need to improve. Similar to digital artists flipping the image often to make it easier to identify issues by making the image somewhat unfamiliar to them, forcing their brain to actually look at the image rather than just using its previous idealized mental representation of what the image looked like.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Not everything is hard work. Some are smarter (or better equipped) than others. You can spend an eternity teaching me math and still won't be able to accomplish anything. It's almost like different people exist and they have different skill sets and interests.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    Unless you have a specific learning disability, I refuse to believe that you are unteachable. Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). That's fine. Maybe abstract reasoning doesn't come as natural to you as it does to others, that's possible. But we know how plastic the brain is. Given enough time and dedication, you should be able to learn things - certainly not PhD level stuff, but the basics.
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else. Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.
      - Tainnor 3y ago
        I apologise if I have caused any offense, because that wasn't my intent. I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.
        beebeepka 3y ago
        Oh, understood the main point just fine. You are not wrong. Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.
- palata 3y ago
  To be fair, the "you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it" hides a very complex process. Some people "practice" by trying to play the same thing over and over, and it is equivalent to "hearing" vs "listening". Learning how to play an instrument (and also a particular piece of music) is a very complex process. Just like you need to learn the skills to "learn from a book", you need to learn the skills to "practice an instrument".
- Asraelite 3y ago
  I agree with your point but I think playing a musical instrument is a bad analogy because of one fundamental difference: In most intellectual fields, you can take your sweet time to remember what you learned so long as you remember it eventually. Music requires practice to recall everything in real time.
andai 3y ago
When learning new programming concepts, I would often have to learn them 5 or 10 times before they clicked. Once they clicked, they seemed completely obvious, and I couldn't imagine what it's like to not understand it. Two mathematicians are discussing a theorem. The first mathematician says that the theorem is trivial. He then proceeds with two hours of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is indeed trivial.
- wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
  I used to require this, but after having spent many years programming this stopped being the case. I've reached the point where i can see a new abstraction and usually immediatly understand it, regardless of language.
  - MaxBarraclough 3y ago
    Has your career taken you across many different programming paradigms? A C programmer with no experience in concatenative or, especially, functional languages will have little chance of understanding code written in Forth or Haskell. They will have to start at the bottom of the learning curve. The differences between languages aren't just skin-deep. Same goes for the design patterns in those languages. Haskell's applicatives have no analog in C, for instance.
    - dehrmann 3y ago
      > Forth or Haskell You're not wrong, but those don't crack the top-10 of in-demand languages. Enough functional paradigms have also crept into more popular languages that you wouldn't be completely lost.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I remember this having been my experience with teaching myself to code as a kid. All I remember is initial endless frustration from having to re-read tutorials and documentation and still not understanding anything. Then at some point I can't remember, everything clicked into place and I can't understand why I didn't understand it before. Once I had those basics down, I haven't had that kind of struggle. I went through a similar phase with math, struggled with basic algebra for years, then at some point it all clicked into place and I unintentionally ended up skipping all high school algebra to get to early calculus. It makes it really hard when helping other people through those early concepts (like pointers), because "keep working and at some point it'll just click for you" isn't very convincing.
readingnews 3y ago
This is the "problem" today that I see in the classroom (I used to teach CS until recently)... learners today do not want to dedicate the time it takes to truly understand. Not all of them, but a LOT of them have the opinion that they just need to get through this damn algorithms class, get the damn piece of paper (diploma) so they can go out and start a job doing "real" programming. Those students, they do not get FAANG jobs, or make big money. The few that want to understand are much more like the articles description, and they end up five years on far ahead of their peers at work. Just my $0.02.
- watwut 3y ago
  I remember having schoolmates like that 20 years ago.
justanotherjoe 3y ago
I wish they'd always explain 'the initial seed' first. What was the initial thought or idea, that, when pursued and expanded on, resulted in the concept that im trying to learn right now? That sort of initial seed would give me so much information...
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
I simply can’t read the text book, at least without context. Doing the problem sets over and over again works better for me. Practice is the key, it might make sense to unsuccessfully attempt the problems before ready the chapter, since you would have more context for readying.
AlexAndScripts 3y ago
I find it beneficial to just keep asking why. Sure, the answer is sometimes "because universe", but asking why (not just how) over and over again helps me build my mental model. On that topic... Does anyone have any clue how and why magnetism works? I have a A Level Physics test next week :)
goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
math requires something different than memory, it requires understanding and fluency in its variety of symbolic languages, which can only built with intellectually engaged work.
- pas 3y ago
  math requires an absurd amount of memorized techniques/patterns ... maybe that's what you mean by fluency? of course these are rarely static (after all one can learn proofs of theorems without being able to solve any problem), hence the need for the "muscle memory" of how to apply these techniques to the particular patterns.
portpecos 3y ago
If someone were to create an animation of that physics page you described, do you think it might have shortened the time spent to digest that concept?
- Balgair 3y ago
  I never really got the difference between the dot and cross products until many years after graduation. And then I only got it because I managed to stumble upon a good video with somewhat decent animations. Like, 2-D, sure, seems easy enough. But once you go to 4-D, things get really hard to grok. Passionate science educators online have really filled in a lot of my education.

pawelduda 3y ago

Spaced repetition is underrated. I still remember a lot from my cards despite not having studied them for years

andai 3y ago
I had the opposite experience. If something's easy to remember, I don't need Anki. If something's hard to remember (I really struggle with birthdays, for example), even Anki doesn't help! The cards all end up as "leech" and Anki stops showing them to me. (I found this behaviour amusing, since the whole point of using Anki is to help me learn things that are difficult to remember!) They say if a card is ending up as a leech, it's a "problem" card and you should somehow improve it. But I'm not sure how to improve this: Side A: name. Side B: birthday. (Cards are also shown reversed.) Arguably I could add some kind of mnemonics, or learn the Mnemonic Major System for remembering numbers. (On that note, does anyone have specific advice for remembering birthdays? The Dutch among you will say "hang a birthday calendar in your toilet", which was probably the correct solution all along...)
- Tomte 3y ago
  Why would you need to learn birthdays (except maybe closest family)? It's maybe the canonical thing to put into a calendar. "Because I want to" is obviously fine, but it still reminds me of the infamous "capitals of the world" flashcards that spaced repetition practitioners warn against.
  - jonpurdy 3y ago
    It wasn't until I discovered Anki a few years ago that I finally was able to remember my parents' and sisters' birthdays (despite calendar reminders every year). Why remember something that can be looked up? Latency; it's super useful to have things appear in your brain so you can immediately do something useful with them instead of slowing down and looking something up and potentially losing context.
    - andai 3y ago

j4yav 3y ago

I can assure you, books work

victorlf 3y ago

Shameless plug: I'm building https://python.cards https://python.cards to learn Python with spaced repetition. I've uploaded some videos on Youtube of the process of distilling the information from the Python docs into flashcards, and have plans on trying out LLMs to help in this process.

AlexErrant 3y ago
As someone also building an SRS product, why did you decide on Python as your initial market? I genuinely feel like programming is best learned by _doing_, and thankfully it's pretty easy to practice writing Python. I feel like a better way to learn Python is to introduce a concept/word, and give a playground where the student can play with it.
- victorlf 3y ago
  Many reasons, most of them hypothesis. For one, the book "The programmer's brain" says that spaced repetition is the best way to learn the syntax, idioms, caveats of a programming language, but it's hard to find a product that offers this. I don't suggest you should learn Python _only_ with python.cards. I assume every python.cards user will be doing some online course, or working with Python, and my decks will just boost their knowledge of the language. I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Python is not their main occupation. These people struggle to accumulate knowledge, because they may encounter concepts or APIs only from time to time, and by that time they already forgot. Also, I want to cover some "unorthodox" topics for which spaced repetition may be specially well suited. For example, I'm building a deck called "A tour of the standard library", where you can learn all the modules that are available, just so you know what is out there, without going deep into it. Another idea is to have decks to learn all the built-in exceptions by heart, or the nomenclature. I think this helps build a mental model of the width and depth of the language so you can better integrate all the knowledge you find while coding, searching online, or reading code.
  - AlexErrant 3y ago
    > the book "The programmer's brain" says that spaced repetition is the best way to learn the syntax, idioms, caveats of a programming language Unfortunately, hard disagree. The best way to learn a Lisp is to write Lisp. You can look at code all you want, but you won't get used to the syntax/parens until you start writing it. Same applies to non-Lisps. > I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Python is not their main occupation. These people struggle to accumulate knowledge, because they may encounter concepts or APIs only from time to time, and by that time they already forgot. This is a great point. Static typing is great for API discovery, which Python sadly lacks. However, I wonder how much LLMs are eating this "low-code" market. Also, if Python is non-critical to their jobs, I suspect that they won't feel motivated to explicitly study Python over the long term. Doing spaced repetition is famously hard, and non-motivated people will likely give up and just do "JIT learning". > Also, I want to cover some "unorthodox" topics for which spaced repetition may be specially well suited. For example, I'm building a deck called "A tour of the standard library", where you can learn all the modules that are available, just so you know what is out there, without going deep into it. FWIW I'm learning Rust, and to "learn what's out there" I've just been binging random Rust videos on Youtube at 2x over lunch. Granted I'm an experienced dev and I have an intuition as to what "should" be out there, so perhaps this story is of limited use.

venus-project 3y ago

[dead]

apienx 3y ago

The director of the Australian Society for Medical Research has a nice TEDx talk about all aspects of learning here: https://youtu.be/kKvK2foOTJM?si=RF479ogKABAtcCUE https://youtu.be/kKvK2foOTJM?si=RF479ogKABAtcCUE

lawn 3y ago

> Why Books Don’t Work I think it should be clear that it's not books that don't work, but how many people approach books that's ineffective. Just reading books isn't enough, you have to internalize the lessons which is often hard work.

demondemidi 3y ago

Glad he provided a transcript, which is technically, a book.

Avicebron 3y ago

I typically have a low opinion on rote memorization, I remember years ago at university my roommate swore by his note cards (physical index cards at the time) while I strongly maintained the need to build up intuition around the math and physics I was doing. He was in med school and I was in engineering, but I felt that the memorization while successful at least for him, was limiting in terms of potential innovation.

dsgnr 3y ago
Yeah med students seem to be unique in the amount of stuff they need to remember, at least in terms of users Ive worked with. The amount of things medical students need to memorize to pass their USMLE exams is insane. I designed and built a learning tool at a startup for med students using picture mnenomics and spaced repetition quizzing that seriously helped those students and lead to the startup being acquired.
- AlexErrant 3y ago
  The ability to link image-metaphors/mnemonics to concepts is something that really should spread to other (non-medical) domains. An example of a picture mnemonic for others: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2023/04/story-3308-768x432.jpg https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/202... Article: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/usc-dornsife-alumnus-revolutionizing-medical-school/ https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/usc-dornsife-alumnus-r... If you're comfortable saying, did your startup/acquirer have any interest in developing products for other domains?
  - Avicebron 3y ago
    I'm not the one you're asking, but I surprised you don't think that mnemonic isn't used in other domains. It typically doesn't look like a fully fleshed out pizza shop, but I distinctly remember explaining an cell scaffold that I had synthesized like a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs to some of the undergraduates I was mentoring.. I never felt that other domains didn't address the natural inclination to use abstraction as a way to convey concepts/processes.

iandanforth 3y ago

After watching the studying video I'm surprised there is no direct GPT-4 integration with his tool. There's a clear opportunity for dynamic question generation such that you have notes/cards which can't be memorized but instead ask novel questions around the same point.

cvhashim04 3y ago
Can you clarify what studying video you mean?

ThinkBeat 3y ago

Books work well and have been the standard for learning many topics for hundreds of years. They have few technical problems, Easy to sell, borrow, give away. Yes, you can go about reading a book in different ways depending on what and why you are reading and what works for you. I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days, at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition every year, or at least every couple of years. There are just about no scientific discoveries in math that requires undergraduate and few matters that require an entirely new edition of graduate books. I have also heard but never experienced that some books apparently have an online component that is valid only for one person or one semester or possibly one student per semester. If true this is even worse. I strongly prefer books to videos. A lecture is good to prepare you or to wet your appetite. And to clarify known difficult spots in the book.

ekianjo 3y ago
Most books are very badly written.
- zabzonk 3y ago
  compared with what?
- palata 3y ago
  Most [everything] is bad. It's your job to find the good ones and enjoy them.
brandall10 3y ago
The university textbook issue was big when I was a student in the mid-late 90s. In fact, one of my CS professors went on a rant about it, how it is simply a way to invalidate the used book market... he then told us to buy books from an online storefront with this funny name (that he assured us had nothing to do with the rainforest) that sold them for a sizable discount instead our own university bookstore.
Tainnor 3y ago
> I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days, at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition every year, or at least every couple of years. This seems to be a specifically American (or anglo? not sure about the UK/Australia/etc.) thing. I've never heard about this happening in Germany where there are standard textbooks in about every field that people have been using for decades - and in many cases, people just simply go with the lecture and the associated notes instead of a textbook.

tedmcory77 3y ago

Yea, it's always bugged us that we learn the way folks did hundreds of years ago. Which is why we built https://www.munkle.it https://www.munkle.it the way we did and focused on speed of review. I used to not like the feeling that spaced repetition did (it's always in that slightly hard stage) but apparently that's what helps you remember.

andai 3y ago
I can't tell (neither from the website, nor from using it) how this is different from any other flashcard software? You mention you focused on "speed of review". How did you do that? There are apparently no hotkeys? (My speed of review is therefore lower than Anki, due to needing to use the mouse.)
- tedmcory77 3y ago
  Q,W,E < No need for mouse. First card in Welcome to Munkle Deck.

lapcat 3y ago

[flagged]

Tomte 3y ago
Don't complain reflexively without looking at the submission. It's >95% text, the whole video transcript.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Don't complain reflexively "Please add" is not a complaint, it's a polite request. The fact that there's also a video transcript just proves that the [video] label is accurate.
  - Tomte 3y ago
    You're wrong. [video] is only an (unnecessary) warning for people who don't like videos. If most of the page is text there is no reason at all to "warn" anyone.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      The HN guidelines don't say anything about transcripts: "If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - Tomte 3y ago
        It's not a video!

AlexErrant 3y ago

Ulgh why didn't the blog link to "Why books donʼt work" https://andymatuschak.org/books/ https://andymatuschak.org/books/ Some select disjoint passages: > Like lectures, books have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation, but the medium does have an implicit model. And like lectures, that model is transmissionism. Sequences of words in sequences of lines in sequences of pages, the form of a book suggests people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. In caricature: “The author describes an idea in words on the page; the reader reads the words; then the reader understands the idea. When the reader reaches the last page, they’ve finished the book.” Of course, most authors don’t believe that people learn things this way, but because the medium makes the assumption invisible, it’s hard to question. > Readers must learn specific reflective strategies. “What questions should I be asking? How should I summarize what I’m reading?” Readers must run their own feedback loops. “Did I understand that? Should I re-read it? Consult another text?” Readers must understand their own cognition. “What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?” > These skills fall into a bucket which learning science calls “metacognition.” The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them.Baker, L. (1989). Metacognition, comprehension monitoring, and the adult reader. Educational Psychology Review, 1(1), 3–38. Worse, even if readers know how to do all these things, the process is quite taxing. Readers must juggle both the content of the book and also all these meta-questions. People particularly struggle to multitask like this when the content is unfamiliar. > My collaborator Michael Nielsen and I made an initial attempt with Quantum Country, a “book” on quantum computation. But reading this “book” doesn’t look like reading any other book. The explanatory text is tightly woven with brief interactive review sessions, meant to exploit the ideas we just introduced. Reading Quantum Country means reading a few minutes of text, then quickly testing your memory about everything you’ve just read, then reading for a few more minutes, or perhaps scrolling back to reread certain details, and so on.

montefischer 3y ago
A far more practical idea is to internalize the practice of 'metacognition' so you can apply it to the vast corpus of books that already exist. It is also interesting to consider previous attempts to wrap a cognitive model around the physical medium of the book, like the monastic 'lectio divina' of the middle ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina

keiferski 3y ago

I like books, but I basically agree with the idea that the traditional front-to-back text narrative format is hugely inefficient. I think a lot of people interpret technological developments as some of natural process, and therefore the omnipresence and long existence of books implies that they are a great learning method. In reality, though, the format of a book itself is probably just more "evolutionarily fit" compared to alternatives. If a device that could record and replay audio was somehow invented prior to the printing press, it seems highly likely to me that we'd live in a audio-based world, not a text one. After all, societies spent thousands of years using only spoken language, with writing as a fairly recent phenomenon. A more efficient book system, IMO, would incorporate spaced repetition more directly, whether by highlighting the key points at the bottom of each page, or even by deliberately including "reminder" paragraphs throughout the book.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

I find two things help me learn: A top down description: start with what something is, why it's important, and how it fits in with other things, then an outline of the details, then the finer details and so on. This is almost impossible to find in textbooks or lectures, which for the most part are bottom up. Trying to figure out the thing without any help, or very little help, at each step of the above. This sounds pointless, but it actually works really well. If I try my best to figure out how something works without knowing anything I end up "priming" my brain for the answer, and end up getting a (relatively) instant understanding. It's like you make a hole that is the rough shape of the answer in your mind and the answer fills the void. Put another way you motivate your brain to wanting to know what it is. The best bit is how far you can get by yourself and the positive feeling that gives you. This might just be me, I've never met anyone who feels the same way about learning.

Avicebron 3y ago
I don't think it's just you, I have a similar need for a holistic understanding of the process/needs before I feel that I'm learning/contributing in an organized way. I left the biotech startup world a while ago because I found that in the organizations I was working with, there was an extreme siloing happening from top down management, and I chafed under the unspoken assumption that I was expected to operate as a black box transforming data from input to output without knowing the whole process This isn't helped by how the biotech world stratifies itself into PhDs and non-PhDs
danielbln 3y ago
Towards your first point, I love interacting with LLMs (ignoring all the issues about confabulation etc.) because I can ask it for top down, high level outlines and drill down to the bottom however I please, and ask for multiple paths down as well.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  I agree, that's a bright spot which I've just started to get into. It's a real boon for personalised learning. Even mistakes by LLMs are helpful: you know that they're unreliable and you have to stay on your toes, so what they're telling you makes sense. That only benefits actual understanding, rather than rote learning.

JohnFen 3y ago

Books don't work? I beg to differ. Books are how I've learned 80% of what I know. They work better for me than any other method I've experienced. However, I'd agree that textbooks don't work. At least, they don't work for me.

rickcarlino 3y ago

I've used spaced repetition to memorize nearly 5,000 words over the last 15 years, but I struggle to apply spaced repetition outside of key/value pair memorization. It seems that SRS is best used for "know what" rather than "know how". I am curious if anyone has applied spaced repetition to memorization of things other than terminology and how they did it.

crazygringo 3y ago
Nope, you're entirely correct. It's for vocabulary and terminology mainly, or other simple facts like historical dates, country capitals, etc. It's irrelevant to conceptual learning, where it may be very difficult to understand something, but once you do you understand it for life.
dan-g 3y ago
I was in this boat until I read Andy’s article on how to write good prompts, which I’d highly recommend: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
Asraelite 3y ago
The problem with SRS in my opinion is the inability to do many-to-one mappings. That is, a single question that builds upon your knowledge of already-learned simpler concepts by combining them together into a compound problem. In the context of language learning this could be a sentence which tests multiple individual vocabulary items and grammatical patterns together. In the context of maths it could be using multiple techniques in sequence to solve a more complex equation. I think this would bridge the gap between the atomic knowledge that flashcards give you and the more generalized knowledge that applied practice gives you. AFAIK, no existing SRS is capable of this. I started working on a prototype web app that could do it but I haven't finished it yet. I plan to return to it at some point.
- rickcarlino 3y ago
  From a language learning perspective, I think this is accomplished via memorization of complete sentences. I am building an SRS as a side project where you memorize complete sentences instead of single vocabulary words and your response is graded by an LLM so that you don’t lose points when your answer is not quite correct or differs slightly in prompt meaning. is that what you meant? I have had good luck using this technique for memorization of grammar rather than memorization of vocabulary.

glimshe 3y ago

"Expert" educated through books tells us why books don't work.

blackbear_ 3y ago
Your point being...?

pyjarrett 3y ago

The real problem is teaching children that "reading" is merely decoding words off a page, and "listening" is merely hearing the words someone says. The book itself is a way to open the door to learning, not the end point. Reading subject titles first, cross-referencing, and working examples and doing projects help teach and cement ideas. There's techniques like SQ4R [1] for reading, and hugely applicable to general technical and article reading is "How to read a paper" [2]. For lecturers, there's "How to Speak" [3], and for those attending a talk there's the Cornell Notes system. [4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R [2]: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPaper.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes

flir 3y ago
Your first link is interesting. Looks like an expanded "see one do one teach one". Everything revolves around a "cementing" stage, doesn't it. Practice makes perfect.
dan-g 3y ago
To others wondering about the discrepancy between SQ4R being mentioned in the comment text and the title of the linked source being SQ3R (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R), it looks like others [1] add an additional R (marked with an asterisk below), for the following: 1. Survey 2. Question 3. Read 4. Recite 5. *Rephrase 6. Review [1] https://www.american.edu/provost/academic-access/sq4r.cfm https://www.american.edu/provost/academic-access/sq4r.cfm
- jackphilson 3y ago
  are there more accepted alternatives to this, or is this optimal?

hyperthesis 3y ago

In math textbooks, the exercises contain much of the exposition. Some is in the answers. And some of facts you are expected to learn only appear in your own workings. So "reading" a math textbook misses most of it.

Smaug123 3y ago

I know everyone always just responds to the title, but do read/listen to this one. I think it's Dwarkesh's best episode ever. Dwarkesh always asks great questions, and Matuschak has this amazing knack of interpreting those questions in the most interesting ways, while constantly challenging their assumptions.

andymatuschak 3y ago
Thank you for these very kind comments!
- fivestones 3y ago
  Since you’re here Is there anywhere to get the software you are using in the video for reading/making flashcards? It looks amazing. Please tell me you have it in a GitHub repo somewhere.
fredoliveira 3y ago
I'm a huge fan of Andy's work and have been for years. Absolutely loved this episode. If I may suggest another one of Dwarkesh's episodes that I thoroughly enjoyed: his 2 episode interview of Carl Shulman. It is an absolute treat. Completely different subjects, of course, but equally engaging.

masto 3y ago

Why books don't work... for Andy Matuschak. People are different, you know.

Zigurd 3y ago

Depends on the kind of book and subject matter. Dwarkesh is right about books you need to read all or nearly all of to get the benefit. But to answer "Do people care about understanding?" for a lot of books: No. The reader cares about their problems and solving them. Based on reader feedback, only a special kind of reader reads a programming book cover to cover. 90%+ people who read substantial parts of a programming book, dip into the parts that interest them after, perhaps, reading the first few chapters to figure out how to navigate the book. Online, you have the freedom to do better and to publish similar material in multiple modes, from passive and linear, to self-paced interactive to human-guided. There isn't one answer, which the post touches on in several places including regarding spaced repetition. LLMs are likely to have an impact on the value of pedagogical techniques like spaced repetition because spaced repetition is a tool for overcoming human impediments to acquiring and navigating huge, difficult, knowledge bases. Then using that knowledge requires enormous effort and aptitude. That's where humans competing with LLMs are like pick-and-shovel miners competing with a giant dragline at mining coal.

Zigurd 3y ago
OTOH if the knowledge base is finite but a real mf'er, spaced repetition is great for humans. Git comes to mind as perhaps ideal subject matter.

steve1977 3y ago

I’m a huge fan of the incremental reading approach as provided by SuperMemo. While it’s certainly even better suited to hypertext, it also works well for most non-fiction (e)books, at least for me. https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading

loughnane 3y ago

Books work—good books anyway—, but most of us aren’t taught how to read well. The next time you want to get something from a book do some new things with it. 1. Skim it first. 2. Find some interesting entries in the index if it has one and jump there to check it out. 3. Ask questions while you read. Write them down the book. 4. Reread the book (spaced repetition). It will go faster because you e built a structure with your notes the first time. 5. Don’t waste time on bad books. A good analogy is pitching. The pitcher is the writer, the ball is the knowledge and you are the catcher. Nothing works if the pitcher can’t throw or if the catcher can’t catch. Likewise if there’s no ball to throw. So it is you’ll get nothing out of the book if the writer can’t deliver or has nothing to say. But a well crafted book stuffed with knowledge won’t to any good if you receive it.

ryloric 3y ago

> Books don't work Stupidest title I've seen in some time. Maybe there's some additional context I'm missing.

Smaug123 3y ago
The context you appear to be missing is actually the content of the post. It's often the way with articles: they give a title, which is then expanded upon in the main text.
- matheusiacono 3y ago
  Even books follow this way.
- ryloric 3y ago
  That's called clickbait.

satisfice 3y ago

I wrote about a more relaxed version of this, some years ago. See Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. I wrote it to explain the techniques I use to compete as a technical guy who dropped out of high school. It’s actually not very hard to compete if you see education as an ongoing process of personal construction, rather than some plug of knowledge that an expert gave you (along with a certificate). I collect books and papers which I ignore until I have a relevant problem, at which point I go into a process of intensive inquiry similar to that describe in the post.