Spaced repetition and practice | Hacker News Reader

Spaced repetition and practice

experiments.oskarth.com

114 pointsoskarth24 comments

Gwern has a nice article on Spaced repetition: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition

Here's a HN discussion about that site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539390

Kind of a tangent but...

Anyone know of a nerdy source for stretching exercises? I'd love to know exactly how often, and how far to stretch to maximise progress rather than just guess but I've not really found anything that seems to have rigorous justification for their numbers.

I gotchu you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/jjprs/starting_str...

The Reddit user phrakture is awesome and absolutely knows what he's talking about. He contributed quality content very often to the /r/fitness subreddit. Check out those programs he crafted to get more flexible!

Starting Stretching: http://phraktured.net/starting-stretching.html

Molding Mobility: http://phraktured.net/molding-mobility.html

Antranik (/u/antranik) is good, too.

http://antranik.org/bodyweight-training/

Stretching Scientifically by Thomas Kurz is pretty much the bible on this topic.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stretching-Scientifically-Guide-Flex...

The other answers are great. I'll just add this quixotic little resource I've recently gotten into that explores yoga with a focus on modern anatomical knowledge.

http://www.bandhayoga.com

It's not specifically what you asked for, but as I've been learning about mobility work, I've found that the illustrations they use in their free book are especially helpful for learning to identify specific muscles and can help you narrow in on your problem areas in conjunction with other programs.

Have you looked into yoga? Search from Youtube: yoga with adriene or doyogawithme to get started.

Before you get too far into stretching, I'd consider how much you actually should stretch. There's been a lot of misinformation around stretching for a few decades now:

https://www.painscience.com/articles/stretching.php

Spaced repetition is more for remembering things. I've had good experience with it. However, I don't think the methods used in this article are valid to test spaced repetition. The test the author used are solving problems. Solving a problem require much more than recalling facts. Just because you remember something doesn't mean you understand it. In my opinion this is a very flawed experiment.

There must be an in-between case where a small problem is solved by remembering the method. The kind of thing where you end up looking up the double-angle formulae or checking the definition for integration by parts. I guess the programming equivalent is remembering how to insert into a tree or do a bubble sort.

Problem-solving in the general case encompasses all of human creativity: I wouldn't claim that one becomes capable of tackling difficult problems through memorising techniques. But once you're part-way to solving a problem there is often a sequence of simpler steps (analysis, not synthesis) - surely most of us would like to be faster/more efficient/make fewer errors in these steps.

I think my skills as an experienced developer come from having solved many problems (as well as having made plenty of mistakes) in the past. When I look at a problem these days I try to think back to similar problems in the past, what worked and what didn't. Its not so often that actually need to sit down and think through a new algorithm. So it comes down to "remembering things" as much as it does to "working things out".

It can also be used to schedule review of problems.

You can enter homework problems (like page number and problem number) into Anki and use that to schedule review.

You can use it to review proofs, too.

While this particular article was about SRS for learning programming (note: very interesting - may experiment applying this to teaching kids/young adults coding - possibly with a "limited, variable sugar reward system"), SRS can be applied to language learning, In fact, in language learning, it can be a fancy way of avoiding saying 'rote memorization'. The hard part for most people of language learning is 'rote memorization' (e.g. knowing conjugations cold, without thinking).

For those of you who are interested in language learning, I'd like to redirect you to tokenadult's very long and comprehensive post from 2.6 years ago.

"Learning foreign languages to high levels of communication proficiency was the first adult learning challenge I took on. I majored in Chinese at university and worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816

Brief aside on non-Anki SRS. Memrise is a SRS for language learning that I gave up on because it took 3-4x longer to demonstrate that I 'knew' a word because of the variations on testing (cloze, completion, multiple choice (guess). Also, no fault of Memrise - but the problem of SRS is that a) the decks cannot be reversed - e.g. French to English cannot easily be made English to French and b) eventually you just start spitting out entire phrases rather than individual words. Context is everything. Language can be subtle. We may forget the subtleties in our native language(s).

As for deck reversal... I have an Anki deck, where the default template actually generates multiple cards (I put in Kanji/Reading/English Definition, and it spits out 3 cards, with front being Kanji, Reading, English respectively).

You can do this in Anki by clicking on "Cards..." on the add dialog in Anki and then creating multiple cards.

This lets me concentrate on the parts of the word retention that I cannot hold onto. Sometimes it's recalling from reading, sometimes recalling from English. Mainly depends on how I initially encountered the word/ how familiar I am with the radicals. But it avoids reworking the things I _do_ get.

Thanks, I've been hiding from Anki! That is a clever idea that I will play with.

I don't bother reversing decks. It's more efficient to do more repetitions of Native->Foreign than it is to do equal repetitions of N->F and F->N.

i.e. if you can respond that the French for cat is "chat", then you will very likely remember that the English for "chat" is "cat".

That's a good piece of advice, although it always bothered me to create flashcards. I create cloze flashcards from notebooks of my knowledge: https://github.com/masteranza/MathematicaAnki

Is anyone aware of a spaced repetition app for iOS that allows you to enter content via a web interface? Most of the flash card apps I've seen require you to build out cards from within the app, which is tedious and clumsy.

Anki allows you to add cards through the Ankiweb interface, in addition to having a more flexible card/note data model than most of the alternatives.

The iOS Anki interface is pretty expensive at $25, but you can do everything through the web if you want, albeit clumsily.

https://quizlet.com/

Great article! Just a note: spaced repetition is not only for rote learning, or "remembering things".

When talking about spaced repetition, we need to make a distinction between repeated studying (seeing both the problem and answer) and testing. Once you've overlearned the material, the biggest value of an SRS comes from testing yourself, even if you don't see the solution after [1]. Another potential benefit is interleaving concepts from different problems [2].

Another distinction is what is being tested. For example, testing using same math problem you learned from is repeating both the concept learned and exact content of the problem. Repeating the exact content you originally studied may dilute the benefit of testing you on the concept. However, it is clear that repeated testing on the concept is very beneficial when the content is new (e.g. spaced testing related math problems, [3]). That isn't to say repeating the concept and content can't be beneficial, I think it can be useful, but I'm less sure about how it stacks up.

In the posted article, I think the type of SR will be useful because (1) recalling the pieces being tested are helpful when solving the problem (or a related one), and (2) hopefully they cue you to think of the problems domain they're related to. In a sense, interleaving the pieces can be a test of matching the piece with it's problem domain.

It seems like a better solution would be to create related problems related to the ones you learned initially, to test yourself in a spaced way. For example, you and a friend could solve the same Eloquent Javascript problems, and then create a handful of new problems that are in the same problem domain. Then, you could trade problems for spaced testing. This type of spaced testing could be thought of as repeating problem domain, but not exact problem content. To the degree that the SRS interleaves testing problem domains, it will likely be especially effective for solving new problems [2].

[1]: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/27/2/223.full.pdf+html

(based on this classic!: http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2008_Karpicke_...)

[2]: http://www.indiana.edu/~pcl/papers/carvalho_goldstone_delaye...

[3]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1266/abstract

"A spaced repetition system (SRS) is a way of efficiently repeating things you don’t want to forget, usually by using electronic flashcards. A SRS exploits the fact that if you remember something well you don’t have to repeat it as often."

It's interesting that the technique simply shoves the same information in your face until you no longer forget it, instead of actually trying to exploit known ways of learning quickly, such as via the Method of Loci.

They aren't mutually exclusive.

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