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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

"It boggles my mind to think that I used to know advanced calculus, group theory, linear algebra etc. I have forgotten all of it bar the very basic concepts behind them."

I thought it was just me!

edit: we should add confessions like DHH twitter where all these advanced programmers confessed they had to look up print() commands on google or whatever it was.

edit#2: The point might be that you don't remember linear algebra but you remember there is that tool to help. If multiple, parallel computations come up, you know to look up linear algebra. If a rate of change question comes up, you know to brush up on calculus. If the halting problem comes up, you know it isn't solved etc.

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I don’t think learning something and forgetting it should really be justified, it’s just not an efficient use of time.

If you wanted the benefit of knowing tools that help with linear algebra, memorize that, there’s not point cramming the entire thing just for a class.

I think a good remedy to this issue is spaced repetition software like Anki/SuperMemo. It’s a bit messy to use with math, especially with something like a proof, and they’re meant for cards that shouldn’t take you longer than say 10 seconds to solve. It is doable though if you can break things down into atomic components. And it can be worth more than you realize to have usable access to those memories for say decades rather than till the month after your class

I think it’s difficult though to make classes focus on such long-term memories because tests create such poor short-term incentive structures which aren’t easily replaceable. I think the only way to get around this is to just focus on learning what you want and if you’re missing something that seems useful to acquire it on your own rather than being required to study something and just forgetting it as soon as the test passes.

I've also found Anki a good remedy to the "I feel bad that I don't remember this from undergrad" problem. I'm still nowhere near as fast at actually doing maths as when I was taking or teaching it. But now when some basic, relevant mathematical fact comes up in life and I've forgotten it, it just means there's one more thing I need to put into Anki, not that my mathematical knowledge is on a steady, irreversible downtrend.

Likely unwanted commentary but how do you do leech handling/minimum information principle with your math cards? I'm a SuperMemo user and I think one of the biggest failures I see with Anki, in general, is that it doesn't handle leeches well (leeches are cards you repeatedly fail that end up taking most of your time) and failure to adhere to minimum information principle (only 1 thing to recall per card). I think with math this would become even more difficult if you make minute long cards to go over some proof you will definitely be setting yourself up to suffer.

I'm only one year into using Anki and to be honest mathematics hasn't been a huge focus for me, so I'm not a great person to ask. Have you read this article by Michael Nielsen? http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

I've noticed that I spend a lot of time on leeches and sometimes I go back to break them down into smaller pieces, but I haven't found it to be a major problem. How does SuperMemo handle it?

A long time ago I gave up the "manager track" and went back to be an individual contributor mostly because i noticed I was having to look up things I "ought" to have known

Slowly now I am settling into the idea (the confidence) that I am actually pretty good at this, and that occasionally looking up how to open a csv file is just an artifact of knowing why and what if not precisely how

(it's also a good indication that another abstraction that is easier to remember might be useful)

I’ve spent the last few months immersed in modern C++ after mainly doing C# at my job over the last few years. I opened up a C# REPL (can’t recall why exactly) and realised I wasn’t exactly sure how to print to the console....

Lol, I felt amazing the other day for being able to write an ajax request without looking it up after more than half a year of not coding in javascript. I was already looking it up while testing it and was actually surprised when I saw that it was working.

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