4 ms·

Spaced repetition, also known as rote memorization, is a terrible way to "learn" anything. The trouble is, you aren't learning at all, you're hacking your brain

by dxhdr 13y ago

Spaced repetition, also known as rote memorization, is a terrible way to "learn" anything. The trouble is, you aren't learning at all, you're hacking your brain to force information into it that has no relevance and really doesn't want to be there. It's not a useful or pleasurable activity. It definitely won't make you smarter. Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memorization, 60% of it is gone within the first year of stopping (http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm). The brain does not want to work this way. I'll propose an alternative to rote memorization for learning: critical thinking.

dilap 13y ago
Spaced repetition is just choosing the frequency with which you engage in an activity. Whether that activity is memorizing random-facts w/o context or something more in-depth is up to you.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bayesianhorse 13y ago
Exams don't reward critical thinking, they reward you knowing your stuff. Same goes for life. Understanding a topic isn't enough, and for example medical doctors better know more about the diseases they are treating than they understand on an academical level with lots of critical thinking. This varies in different subjects of course. In computer science and business degrees you just don't have to be able to pull as many details out of your hat as in biology, medicine or law. The effort and work required to master a math-heavy homework assignment can be enough rote memorization. I've come to think of rote memorization as actually the most natural way to learn in a time efficient manner. I have yet to witness this approach compromising my understanding in any way.
__float 13y ago
As a member of various communities dedicated to language learning, spaced repetition software is very widespread. Languages require memorization, you simply need to remember the words so they eventually become second nature. Sometimes in life the answer can't be reasoned about, you just have to buckle down and memorize it.
tunesmith 13y ago
That's funny because you can write a deck to help you learn concepts of critical thinking. Necessity, Sufficiency, Contributory Causes; Propositional Logic, Predicate/First-Order, Modal... the deck won't TEACH you critical thinking, but it will make it much easier for you to learn it.
- btilly 13y ago
  Learning the names of things is not learning those things. This is particularly true when you're learning ways of thinking. What is important is not that you can identify and name methods of reasoning. It is important that you can apply the appropriate reasoning method to problems in your life.
gwern 13y ago
> Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memorization, 60% of it is gone within the first year of stopping (http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm). From the link: > This is a translation of a popular scientific article about memory and learning written by J.Kowalski, Poland, for Enter in November 1994. Translator comments are placed in square brackets... > Simulation experiments based on Wozniak's model of learning show that a student who stops repetitions after a 5-year-long work with SuperMemo is likely to forget 60% of the learned material in the first year after the cessation! [this figure has later been proven exaggerated] Isn't that a rather dishonest description? > I'll propose an alternative to rote memorization for learning: critical thinking. Memorization fosters understanding: http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#abstraction http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#abstraction
rsheridan6 13y ago
There are a lot of situations where you have to know a lot of facts and there's no way around rote memorization. Critical thinking isn't enough - you need a corpus of information. For example, if you're in a medical field, you'll have to memorize tons of facts about anatomy, physiology, disease states, drugs and other treatments, treatment algorithms, etc. Same with a language - you have to memorize thousands of words, lots of idioms, thousands of characters if it's Japanese or Chinese.
hngiszmo 13y ago
I kind of agree with you. Spaced repetition is raping your brain. School makes you want to do that for stupid stuff. Life sometimes brings along stuff, your brain is more susceptible for. I use fluxcards that I wrote myself and have some 2600 facts that I'm learning. The Spanish words work smoothly, cause I actually want to really not use them wrong in my daily life in Chile. The friends and family birthdays work so so. Yeah, I admit, I don't care so much. I learn them as a favor to my friends that enjoy when I remember their birthday but I find birthdays kind of unimportant. Then there is Farsi. I was in Iran and for my Iranian friends I learn some 35 words of Farsi. That is the worse. It makes no sense and my brain just won't accept these weird words to stick. Every time I want to use these words in a chat with my Iranian friends, I don't dare cause I just would mix things up and I don't get these words above the one month level in 2 years. If I would want to give up, I would have to delete these cards and acknowledge that I will not learn this stuff. At least not now, but I do it for them, so why not repeat one of these cards per day for them? Costs 3s and eventually I get my * brain to not forget these "important facts". Critical thinking would only help me to admit that I will not learn this or that now. If I took the conscious decision to learn stuff anyway I know nothing better than spaced repetition.
mistercow 13y ago
Critical thinking and memorization are not intrinsically at odds with each other. Rather, they are separate tools that are powerful when used together. If your critical thinking is strong, it can be used instead of memorization, but relying on this is a crutch, and it hurts you in the long run. I fell into this trap in math classes all the time. My exams would be covered in work where I would do something like reinventing the chain rule from the definition of the derivative. The definition of the derivative is elegant and obvious in its workings, and therefore easy to remember based on critical thinking. The chain rule commonly useful, but it's a special case, and the end result is opaque. So I wouldn't remember it, and I'd just figure it out from scratch on test day. As it turned out, that got me plenty far. But my grades would have been better if, having understood how to derive it, I had cached it in long term memory. I would have made fewer mistakes, had less work to check, and more time to check it. These days the same thing happens when I'm working on a math problem for practical purposes. I don't have a lot of these formulas committed to memory, so instead of spending time on actually solving the problem I have, I have to spend time rebuilding math from scratch. It's the same basic concept as caching and memoization in programming. It would be a mistake to write every function as a giant look up table to handle each parameter combination. But if your code keeps calling the same expensive pure function with the same parameters, you can greatly speed it up by caching the result.

by dxhdr 13y ago

dilap 13y ago

Spaced repetition is just choosing the frequency with which you engage in an activity. Whether that activity is memorizing random-facts w/o context or something more in-depth is up to you.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bayesianhorse 13y ago

Exams don't reward critical thinking, they reward you knowing your stuff. Same goes for life. Understanding a topic isn't enough, and for example medical doctors better know more about the diseases they are treating than they understand on an academical level with lots of critical thinking. This varies in different subjects of course. In computer science and business degrees you just don't have to be able to pull as many details out of your hat as in biology, medicine or law. The effort and work required to master a math-heavy homework assignment can be enough rote memorization. I've come to think of rote memorization as actually the most natural way to learn in a time efficient manner. I have yet to witness this approach compromising my understanding in any way.

__float 13y ago

As a member of various communities dedicated to language learning, spaced repetition software is very widespread. Languages require memorization, you simply need to remember the words so they eventually become second nature. Sometimes in life the answer can't be reasoned about, you just have to buckle down and memorize it.

tunesmith 13y ago

That's funny because you can write a deck to help you learn concepts of critical thinking. Necessity, Sufficiency, Contributory Causes; Propositional Logic, Predicate/First-Order, Modal... the deck won't TEACH you critical thinking, but it will make it much easier for you to learn it.

btilly 13y ago
Learning the names of things is not learning those things. This is particularly true when you're learning ways of thinking. What is important is not that you can identify and name methods of reasoning. It is important that you can apply the appropriate reasoning method to problems in your life.

gwern 13y ago

> Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memorization, 60% of it is gone within the first year of stopping (http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm). From the link: > This is a translation of a popular scientific article about memory and learning written by J.Kowalski, Poland, for Enter in November 1994. Translator comments are placed in square brackets... > Simulation experiments based on Wozniak's model of learning show that a student who stops repetitions after a 5-year-long work with SuperMemo is likely to forget 60% of the learned material in the first year after the cessation! [this figure has later been proven exaggerated] Isn't that a rather dishonest description? > I'll propose an alternative to rote memorization for learning: critical thinking. Memorization fosters understanding: http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#abstraction http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#abstraction

rsheridan6 13y ago

There are a lot of situations where you have to know a lot of facts and there's no way around rote memorization. Critical thinking isn't enough - you need a corpus of information. For example, if you're in a medical field, you'll have to memorize tons of facts about anatomy, physiology, disease states, drugs and other treatments, treatment algorithms, etc. Same with a language - you have to memorize thousands of words, lots of idioms, thousands of characters if it's Japanese or Chinese.

hngiszmo 13y ago

I kind of agree with you. Spaced repetition is raping your brain. School makes you want to do that for stupid stuff. Life sometimes brings along stuff, your brain is more susceptible for. I use fluxcards that I wrote myself and have some 2600 facts that I'm learning. The Spanish words work smoothly, cause I actually want to really not use them wrong in my daily life in Chile. The friends and family birthdays work so so. Yeah, I admit, I don't care so much. I learn them as a favor to my friends that enjoy when I remember their birthday but I find birthdays kind of unimportant. Then there is Farsi. I was in Iran and for my Iranian friends I learn some 35 words of Farsi. That is the worse. It makes no sense and my brain just won't accept these weird words to stick. Every time I want to use these words in a chat with my Iranian friends, I don't dare cause I just would mix things up and I don't get these words above the one month level in 2 years. If I would want to give up, I would have to delete these cards and acknowledge that I will not learn this stuff. At least not now, but I do it for them, so why not repeat one of these cards per day for them? Costs 3s and eventually I get my * brain to not forget these "important facts". Critical thinking would only help me to admit that I will not learn this or that now. If I took the conscious decision to learn stuff anyway I know nothing better than spaced repetition.

mistercow 13y ago

Critical thinking and memorization are not intrinsically at odds with each other. Rather, they are separate tools that are powerful when used together. If your critical thinking is strong, it can be used instead of memorization, but relying on this is a crutch, and it hurts you in the long run. I fell into this trap in math classes all the time. My exams would be covered in work where I would do something like reinventing the chain rule from the definition of the derivative. The definition of the derivative is elegant and obvious in its workings, and therefore easy to remember based on critical thinking. The chain rule commonly useful, but it's a special case, and the end result is opaque. So I wouldn't remember it, and I'd just figure it out from scratch on test day. As it turned out, that got me plenty far. But my grades would have been better if, having understood how to derive it, I had cached it in long term memory. I would have made fewer mistakes, had less work to check, and more time to check it. These days the same thing happens when I'm working on a math problem for practical purposes. I don't have a lot of these formulas committed to memory, so instead of spending time on actually solving the problem I have, I have to spend time rebuilding math from scratch. It's the same basic concept as caching and memoization in programming. It would be a mistake to write every function as a giant look up table to handle each parameter combination. But if your code keeps calling the same expensive pure function with the same parameters, you can greatly speed it up by caching the result.