Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkilgore | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else feel like they just read a bunch of assumptions with no support followed by a chart "proving" an exponential equation grows faster than a linear one?

What the heck am I supposed to take away from this?

This is a half ass theory, not evidence.

Where's a shred of evidence, on the time scales here, these "units of information" are retained (under either method). Are they even relevant compared to a _skill_ like reading that enables quicker information ingestion across an entire life o and is applicable across a wider range of problems than _individual information units you read_??

View on HN

Well, for me, this article and the previous one that was on HN some weeks ago were just propaganda to push the service they promote for eventual monetization. Something wrong with it? I don't know, well may be just lack of transparency I guess.

Starting from smokey definitions such as "potential", and that learning equals memorising.

What bit do you doubt?

The core concept that spaced repetition increases rapidly in effectiveness over time is called the Spacing Effect. There are many many studies that have investigated and proved it

> It takes you years to get twice as effective at reading

Evidence? What's the evidence this is a linear growth process? How many years? At what age? What populations? There is no rigor here at all.

The article links to a paper which estimates how much more effective you get at reading the more knowledge you have. It shows that for most ages you don't improve in this way, but for older ages you do.

Then it says for the "best case" that "adults" takes years to get twice as effective at reading.

If you don't believe this then it means you think it takes adults less than a year to get twice as effective? If effectiveness doubles each year then that would mean by the time a 25 year old becomes 65 that they're 1 million times as effective at reading than when they were 25. Does that sound reasonable to you?

"Proved" is not a word used in any physiological research I've ever been familiar with, at least not with paragraph, if not pages of qualification. Would you please link me to this proof?

Agree, I shouldn't have used the word "proved". But there is a lot of robust evidence for it going back to the 1800s. Many of the studies are linked to on the wikipedia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect

Reply on news.ycombinator.com