Comment by yermierc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yermierc | Hacker News Reader

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"A friend" reporting in...

While many people may love Anki, you can count me out. I used it extensively during my first 2 years of medical school along with trying physical cards, Quizlet, and even my own custom batch files and macros. I think that it works for a very particular use case, and you need to fully commit to it to get the intended benefits.

My personal belief is that an "adaptive" learning system doesn't just adapt to the spacing effect, but to your study habits, emotional state, learning style, and even the global activity linked to certain concepts. (e.g. If you have a centralized API, you can track which facts learners struggle with and use the algorithms weight those facts for first-time learners). Learning isn't just meant to be something you do in isolation - there is a community aspect and there are endless things you can with a big data approach.

Our goal is to take spaced repetition and this new concept of meta-adaptivity and apply it to the masses, not just the hardcore users. Yeah, it sounds like a fancy vision but we're further along than you'd think. Would love to start a discussion on this and possibly get more manpower on making this a reality. (I dropped my career as a surgeon to make this happen, so we're all-in at this point).

A few references:

1. Dyrbye LN, Thomas MR, Shanafelt TD. Systematic review of depression, anxiety, and other indicators of psychological distress among U.S. and Canadian medical students. Acad Med. 2006 Apr;81(4):354-73. Review. PubMed PMID: 16565188.

2. Beard C, Clegg S, Smith K. Acknowledging the affective in higher education. BRIT EDUC RES J. 2007; 33(2): 235–252

3. Burleson W, Picard R. Affective Agents: Sustaining Motivation to Learn Through Failure and a State of “Stuck”. Social and Emotional Intelligence in Learning Environments Workshop in conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Maceio-Alagoas, Brasil. August 31, 2004. http://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/04.burleson-picard.pdf

4. Durlak JA, Weissberg RP, Dymnicki AB, Taylor RD, Schellinger KB. The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: a meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Dev. 2011 Jan-Feb;82(1):405-32. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x. PubMed PMID: 21291449.

After a career of being a chef with employees, I decided to return to school to learn how to write. There is one thing that struck me with the professors in college. While in the kitchen, if a cook made a mistake, the failure and responsibility fell on me whether I was a sous-chef or executive chef.

Earlier in my career I was a chef de partie in a two Michelin star restaurant with a team of 4 cooks under me. If a cook made a mistake, the chef didn't talk to him, the chef would literally scream at me. I asked one of the cooks who worked with the chef for many years why the chef was yelling at me instead of the cook and he said that I was responsible for everything that happens on my station.

Here is the striking contrast between learning in the real world and learning in a school. In the real world, the teacher is responsible for the failure of the person learning, while in the school the student is responsible of the failure to learn.

As a chef, I can break people's spirits day and night, I have a mouth like chef Ramsey and scars on my chin where I've been punched hard, but that doesn't serve me any purpose. People breaking emotionally happens a lot especially in kitchens. There is a reason there is a lot of drug use and alcohol abuse in restaurants.

If I opened a restaurant in the town I'm in now I would never find decent cooks. I would have to train them. Unlike a college professor I wouldn't succeed by giving out F's and pushing people to drop out. I'd have to know on a case by case basis how far I can push a person to learn; to know when to give a cook a hug and to know when to scream, "where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?"

Some people hear things like that and they change a behavior to end a chef being annoying while others see it as a threat to their employment. The same feedback is different with people. The ability to hire or fire someone gives an employer an enormous amount of power over that person.

Absolutely, adaptive learning must address the emotional state of the student. Not only does every student have a different rate of learning and different types of intelligence, for example, some people are much better with kinesthetic reasoning while other verbal reasoning, everybody has a different stress threshold before they break emotionally or give up.

This message really resonated with me. Thank you very much for sharing. One thing that we've really thought about is how to learn in the real world for subjects outside of school. I know this is a silly example, but check out this set: http://www.memorangapp.com/flashcards/20746/How+to+cook+the+...

We're working on a version of our platform where you could define need-to-know facts for your employees and then give them an engaging, adaptive way to learn. These data would be fed back to you and you could determine how to help your employees, or who is falling behind. Maybe even aspects of your "curriculum" for employee training that are insufficient.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

I'm going to approach this from a professional chef point of view. For the home cook there isn't much you can do. The way to get good at it is following Dave Grohl's advice to get good at playing the guitar or drums, suck at it for a long time.

After a while I forget what the exact temperatures are but I have them written down on an index card in my recipes folder.

In the restaurant, there are some things that need to be memorized. First and foremost is the menu, every new employee needs to memorize it and it is hard to do. I worked 3.5 years in a restaurant that changed the menu every Thursday night. Nobody had a clue what was going on until Wednesday the next week. The second thing is the wine list and which dishes go with each wine. For the bartenders, they need to memorize 100s of different drinks. Both the cooks and the wait staff need to memorize the ingredients as many customers are allergic to nuts, dairy, and shell fish. Who doesn't know that there is lobster in the paella?

A restaurant will have 30 - 40 recipes and memorizing them greatly increases the speed of the cooks, a lot. However, many restaurants consider these trade secrets and like the fashion industry a recipe can't be copyrighted. The restaurants I worked in never really kept the recipes a secret because few people had the skill to implement them correctly. That paella recipe isn't a big deal going back to what I said earlier that the most important thing was sucking at making it for a long time.

There is nothing clever or special about how you or other chefs treat and abuse your employees.

You seem to have successfully, in your mind, justified verbal abuse ("it's OK if they can handle it and I gave them a hug last week").... let's call that "enlightened bullying" verses straight up bullying.

The ability to put up with bullies in the workplace do not make a better chef (I would prefer to see a study if you disagree, not just hear about engrained culture). It selects for psychopaths, not good cooks. It's not the military, it's a kitchen.

I train people everyday. Failure for them to learn is my failure. But I never insult or belittle them in private or public. That achieves nothing.

Fair enough. You are correct. But, your comment is attacking me! Ah, that is the secret. I'm writing code now instead of cooking. Within the new group I have entered, Hacker News, there is level of propriety that I must conform to or my behavior will be corrected by the group. For example, in the old group, aggression was a necessity of survival. Now that my behavior is falling outside of appropriate, you are reprimanding me. We are completely anonymous but your word choice still makes me feel threatened. You are challenging me. If you challenge me further I might take a moment to find a psychology study which supports what I'm saying right now, there are a few. Which means if I want to continue to be in the in group, I will be required to adopt to a certain culture and cultural norms.

Nonetheless, are you training people who have graduated college? Because there is a very big difference between training someone with enough self disciple to get through college and training someone being paid $10 an hour who was just released from jail or partied with cocaine and escorts the night before. I never used drugs which made me an outsider in the restaurant industry. I strongly believe that a lot of the people I worked with sometimes needed a hug and sometimes needed someone to yell at them. And, definitely they needed someone who knew the difference.

I also strongly believe the reason they ended up with me screaming at them was a total failure of the educational system in the United States. You train people everyday. Unlike a college professor you also have financial incentive to be effective at it. They do not.

The point I was making is that learning including memorization and behavior correction which is a type of learning is more than just linear memorization and punctuated adaptive learning, that learning must include emotional and stress assessment and consideration of the power relationship between a teacher and student which isn't inherently bad.

You do understand that your comment is aggressive and you are correct which gives you the right to be aggressive? However, you would never outright challenge your boss like that. Aggression is appropriate in certain circumstances. There is something very powerful about the pigs in Angry Birds taunting the player when the player fails and when the birds cheer. The pigs taunting is very motivating pushing people to learn the spacial reasoning to get better at the game. Can you imagine how angry people would be if the Khan Academy used subtle taunts to motive kids like Angry Birds does? Critics will say we don't know if that motivates kids or not. I say let's do A/B testing. We will know in a week and I wouldn't be surprised if taunts from the pigs and, on the other side, to keep the emotions equal, supporting cheers from the birds strongly motivates children to learn. That is on topic. What is the psychology of motivation?

I think screaming at people and all sorts of other stuff (16-hour days?) is just an unfortunate reality of the restaurant business. It's not like your experience is unique. I feel like most of the problems could be resolved with more money - because the real problem is that every day there's some unpredictable crisis and you have to pull the resources to deal with it out of your ass. Service jobs are so hard because clients want cheap, high quality, fast service are there is tons of competition.

> "where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?"

I'm stating the obvious here, but verbal abuse is not ok in a professional setting, never ever. There's nothing to justify it, not even "success" (a better cooked meal, more revenues coming in for the company etc).

I think I'd prefer it over office politics, though: it doesn't happen behind your back. (Not that that's a choice anyone has to make.)

They are not exclusive, you get both verbally abused and office politics. Being open is not the same thing as being abusive.

I agree with this, but in some professions this is a very established way of doing things with a long history that's been passed down from mentor to students for a long time. If you refuse to work in these types of situations then you had better not try to still work in that profession.

How do you define verbal abuse? We all have different codes of morality. Is manipulating your employees verbal abuse to you? Is lying or placating things verbal abuse to you? What about going behind your back and telling another employee to talk to you instead of telling you face to face? Is that verbal abuse? Well it is to me. Whereas, I could care less if someone said "Where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?" I am extremely offended by the other examples. I think they are never ok in a professional setting, "never ever". Not even justified by success, revenue, or majority vote. Please realize that your morale code is not the only morale code, that your way of communicating, is not everyone's way of communicating. Trying to say that your rules, that your methods, are the ones that everyone needs to follow is childish.

The other things you described do not fit the definition of verbal abuse. Verbal abuse is negative statements directly to a person.

Your post is defending verbal abuse, which might be a legitimate argument you could make. However, don't pretend what you do to people is not verbal abuse with some mental gymnastics to convince yourself that someone talking to HR behind your back about a problem is what real verbal abuse is.

Since when does verbal abuse need to be made directly at a person? And don't make assumptions like "someone" talking to "HR". I'm specifically referring to situations where my boss talked shit to other employees who held the same position as myself. Negative statements? What is negative to you? Because I don't feel disrespected by some curse words or jokes. I feel disrespected when people are dishonest with me. Or when they talk shit behind my back.

I get where you're coming from, but am torn about agreeing. The problem is that your argument can be used, exactly as you made it, to defend physical abuse too -- or anything at all. Either you don't believe in any universal human rights (in which case your argument is perfectly consistent) or you do believe in some, and then your disagreement with the OP is just about where to draw the line (in which case accusing him of childishness for wanting to enforce rules of behavior seems hypocritical, since you do that too, just in different circumstances).

The argument I am supporting is that different things work for different people. So yes this applies to all human "rights". That said, if a population, say the state of Texas agrees that physical abuse in the workplace is wrong, then I think that it's perfectly reasonable for a rule to exist for that particular population.

The case that OP is making is that X is the only acceptable way to talk to people in the work place.

When it comes to violence, enough of us agree within our "populations" so to speak. When it comes to how people should communicate with their words, there is enough diversity to warrant freedom of choice. I think that it's important that OP be able to choose to not work in a place where their competency is questioned without regard to their feelings. However, it's completely unreasonable to tell everyone how their businesses should be ran, or how their bosses should talk to them. Not all of us enjoy being patronized, or are ok with being dishonest about how we really feel. Enough of us disagree on the best way to communicate in the workplace that there shouldn't be one right answer. OP presented their case without any regard for the other side, "never ever" as they put it. They didn't even consider the possibility that not all of us are so sensitive, that not all of us are helpless marshmallows squashed at the first f bomb, creamed by the first, second, or hundredth joke at our expense. That is the argument I'm making. Not that rules should not exist, but that rules need to address the fact that different things work for different people, and society cannot work if it is run under the assumption that what works for one person works for everyone.

> OP presented their case without any regard for the other side, "never ever" as they put it. They didn't even consider the possibility that not all of us are so sensitive, that not all of us are helpless marshmallows squashed at the first f bomb, creamed by the first, second, or hundredth joke at our expense. That is the argument I'm making. Not that rules should not exist, but that rules need to address the fact that different things work for different people, and society cannot work if it is run under the assumption that what works for one person works for everyone. reply

Fair enough, some people like a culture with directness, swearing, etc. Fwiw, though, you come across as equally sensitive and marshmallow-like as the OP, it's just that your point of sensitivity is the idea of people ever talking behind your back, while for example I accept (and expect) that as the natural behavior of nearly all humans. If you're cool applying your logic to that, too, and just choose to opt out of being around people who aren't direct, then that's fair.

> it's just that your point of sensitivity is the idea of people ever talking behind your back

Exactly, everyone has their own values. I value honesty. OP values dishonesty.

Though you haven't yet been called out for it, in your posts you repeatedly create a false dichotomy: either the boss is honest and must say "fuck you, you are a stupid fucking chef" or the only other choice is to be dishonest and patronise. That is not true. In this post, I am providing you direct feedback about how you are wrong, without calling you an idiot or saying something like "what the fuck do you think this is, reddit?" despite your basic errors in argumentation. Speaking these words would not be verbal abuse.

I'm pretty sure verbal abuse has a specific definition (not related to morality), and is not the same thing as "offensive to me", so you can't just redefine it as you did above.

It's a range. The exaggerations are there to make you think about things differently. One man's answer to "verbal abuse" is another man's "patronizing dishonesty". You've taken my hyperbole too literally. Statements like, "I value honesty. OP values dishonesty." are meant as a playful jest to make you question the value of honesty in modern society. There is no one going out and complaining that patronizing employees is morally wrong, because the vocal majority on the matter does not represent these people. There is no voice in defense of brutal sincerity. The point of all of this is simply to shed light on different values as was stated in my original post. My thesis does not revolve around the existence of a dichotomy, it revolves around the fact there is more than just the one set of values.

>There's nothing to justify it, not even "success" (a better cooked meal, more revenues coming in for the company etc).

Not even winning a war, saving a child from a burning building or eliminating behavior that kills surgery patients? Is nothing as important as a bruised ego?

The "real world" requires "learning" to be so intense and abusive that it routinely pushes people to mental health crises, drug abuse, and violence?

If a professor abused his students in this way, they would rightly be fired.

This looks great! I would totally shell out money for a premium card set - if only my professional area was represented.

Could you please create a mailing list for different professions/subject areas so potential customers could be alerted when relevant premium study sets are released?

For example, have a sign up list for people interested in accounting, one for law, one for technology exams etc. I would totally give you guys my email address so I can be alerted when relevant expert card sets are released.

As it is, I'll probably just forget about memorang.

> Could you please create a mailing list for different professions/subject areas so potential customers could be alerted when relevant premium study sets are released?

That is a fantastic idea, thank you so much! We can definitely create a few mailing lists and I'd be happy to keep you all in the loop. We currently have 10 new subjects in development and are scaling to release at a rate of (ideally) 3-4 per month by next summer. We hired a director of content specifically to recruit teams of experts and to oversee this creation process more fluidly. I'm going to set this up ASAP.

Send your email to feedback@memorangapp.com and your intended subject. It's possible one of our next releases will be appropriate for you.

> an "adaptive" learning system doesn't just adapt to the spacing effect, but to your study habits, emotional state, learning style, and even the global activity linked to certain concepts

That's interesting, how do you assess the marginal benefit of extra adaptation beyond the spacing effect? My understanding is that the spacing big is pretty big to begin with, compared to a blunt read and re-read approach. How better can it be with personal adaptation? Do you improve memorization time by 10%, 100%, more?

I can't answer with an exact number until we can do sufficient prospective studies, but I can share some data: We have done some studies where two students were already using Anki and were failing or in the danger zone of failing. After being introduced to Memorang for 6-8 weeks, they all increased their scores by a national standard deviation and had a 100% passing rate.

What does this mean? The students said that Anki didn't motivate them, and that study fatigue (Not the spacing effect) was the key differentiator. As a medical student I am very familiar with this, and so one of our main goals with Memorang is to keep people engaged in vivo, not just have an optimal algorithm should you religiously follow it to a T.

That's a very interesting point.

I love the stellar memory that Anki gives me but it's BORING. So so so BORING. It's the primary reason why I don't use it more often. I've been thinking about an alternative for some time, so it's nice to see that someone else is working on it.

I'm not actually too sure of what you're doing that's different though, and the slides you provided have been a bit vague.

Can you elaborate more on what exactly memorang does that keeps people "engaged in vivo"?

And how exactly does it "adapt to [..] study habits, emotional state, learning style, and even the global activity linked to certain concepts"?

>Can you elaborate more on what exactly memorang does that keeps people "engaged in vivo"

Between algorithm choices, learning modes, and other customization options there are dozens of ways you can learn the same material instead of simply flashcards like Anki.

For the other components, some of these are works in progress and others are already present. I would encourage you to learn a subject towards 100% and you'll see exactly what we mean. Part of the answer is gamification via scores and leaderboards, some is advanced study stats where you can compare your progress, gain insights into how you learn, and see how you stack against the global average. Another part of the answer is targeted feedback via the "tutor" which will introduce study tips and humor depending on your progress.

We also are launching a 2.0 version very early next year which will be a fruitful step in the right direction.

Overall, we have a pretty broad vision for what we think we can accomplish and are actively working towards getting there from a tech point of view (development) and via academic research with well known universities. The ultimate goal would be that you could just sit down, select what you need to know, and then be perfectly guided towards subject mastery in whatever way is most optimized for you as an individual.

Sorry, but while the product may or may not be good, every sentence that I read from you sounds like OMG HYPE.

"The ultimate goal would be to be perfectly guided to mastery"...? Yeah, and the ultimate goal of every NLP startup is to have 100% natural language understanding by the machine... but that doesn't mean that any of them can promise that in the foreseeable future, or that I won't laugh at them if they do.

"I would encourage you to learn a subject towards 100% and you'll see exactly what we mean."

That... is already what I do with Anki, or at least as reasonably close to 100% as possible under reasonable time constraints. It's patronising of you to assume that I don't, or to claim that your product is the only way to reach that.

Good luck with your startup.

> It's patronising of you to assume that I don't, or to claim that your product is the only way to reach that.

I'm pretty sure he is saying "use our product to learn a single subject to 100% and you will see what I mean".

Often it is hard to explain the benefits of a platform with a few quick comments on hn.

Yeah, I was a bit too negative with my feedback, on second reading you are right.

I see that you're angry, but I think it's because you misread my comment.

When I wrote "I encourage you to learn a subject towards 100% mastery and you'll see exactly what we mean" it was purely meant to encourage you to learn a small subject on Memorang to help answer your questions about the methods you inquired regarding interacting with the learning system. It wasn't, as you seem to believe, a statement that you couldn't learn via alternative methodologies.

You're right, I'm sorry to have assumed the worst! Looking back I definitely came across rather negative.

I will give it a go, the screenshots look quite nice.

Could it have been that your students were just bored with what they had been using? (i.e., not "anki" vs. "memorang", but "something I've used" vs "something new" effect?)

It's an interesting thought! Boredom can definitely lead to study fatigue, but the people in this example were medical students preparing for a high-stakes board exam at a top-10 institution. Boredom might be less of an issue at this level - it's more about efficiency and a tremendous feeling of stress and pressure. Indeed, several of these students who were in danger of failing were studying as much as 10-12 hours per day... essentially spinning their wheels in the mud.

That being said, combatting boredom is a really important thing to consider.

I've played a little with Memorang after reading this yesterday, but I'm struggling to understand what the difference in studying was before and after of Anki.

What was the reason Memorang changed for the students that Anki didn't provide? Better default flash cards? Gamification? Or multi-factors?

I've been using Anki for about a year, and I've read a lot about Anki burnout (missing a few days means I'm going to dedicate 2-3 hours on the weekend to catch up). I don't procrastinate this as much so this becomes less of a fear.

Thank you for the questions. I think it's likely multi-factorial and to be honest there are many features we haven't yet built that Anki has and are in our backlog... there's still much work to be done. It's likely some combination of expert content, multiple learning modes, gamification, friendly UI, and collaborative features. Give or take the importance of one or the other depending on the person. Some struggle with time management, others study fatigue, and others just don't like or trust user-generated content. For my own studying, I'm not a big fan of pure flashcards and prefer other methods of active recall.

This looks really interesting. How can I get in touch with you? (you can find contact details on my profile).

We're developing a learning platform for Anatomy, called Kenhub[0] and we've built our own quizzes with some aspects of spaced repetition already. We're looking at ways of taking it to the next level in terms of adaptability. We're also considering ways of re-purposing our original content to reach wider audience (we have thousands of our own anatomy illustrations and meta-data). Perhaps there's a way to collaborate with you?

[0] https://www.kenhub.com

I've actually been following you guys for at least a year and think what you're doing is pretty cool. Memorang started out as a pure anatomy tool and we've been actively building our own curriculum, but as you know - producing the images takes a lot of time and having them NOW is a very attractive option.

You can email us at founders@memorangapp.com and it would be great to pick up the conversation!

Kenhub looks great. I recently completed the surgical primary exams in Australia, and before that knocked over a whole body dissection course.

I have some very different ideas about how anatomy could be ideally taught in some scenarios (which I am in the process of developing!) but certainly wish I had of had access to what looks to be an excellent resource you have developed.

It must have taken an age and a small fortune to get your own illustrations! would you ever consider a licensing deal?

It was/still is our largest investment so far, and probably our biggest asset. Not just illustrations, but we also produce our own videos, write articles and more... We do license our illustrations to institutions, individual instructors etc. And we're always looking for ways to collaborate with others in this space. Medical education is an interesting niche. Shoot me an email and let's chat and see? (email on my profile)

Specifically for Medical vocabulary, I heard that MosaLingua recently released an app: http://www.mosalingua.com/applications-apprendre/medical-eng...

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