Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
dwarkeshpatel.com
dwarkeshpatel.com
The book itself is a way to open the door to learning, not the end point. Reading subject titles first, cross-referencing, and working examples and doing projects help teach and cement ideas.
There's techniques like SQ4R [1] for reading, and hugely applicable to general technical and article reading is "How to read a paper" [2]. For lecturers, there's "How to Speak" [3], and for those attending a talk there's the Cornell Notes system. [4]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R
[2]: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape...
Everything revolves around a "cementing" stage, doesn't it. Practice makes perfect.
1. Survey
2. Question
3. Read
4. Recite
5. *Rephrase
6. Review
It’s not enough to just understand what is written. You have to understand why it is like described. Why it can’t be different - or could it? You need to build an intuition for both the physics and the math describing it.
You have to push until it clicks.
It’s hard work.
What’s strange to me is how people seem to resist this fact. Like it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it. But for math and physics at least they seem to think it’s somehow different? That they ought to be able to solve the problems just by picking up a pencil? And when they don’t get a decent grade on the exam they look over at the person who got 100 and say “that’s why! I can’t do it because I’m not a genius like they are!”
Maybe that's the difference between people who are good at it and people who aren't. I found solving math problems (the ones you get in a practice course at a university) hugely rewarding. Finally figuring it out was so satisfying.
Coincidentally, my endeavors playing an instrument were never particularly fruitful.
The feedback is only fast if you're already skilled. It's pretty common for new students to have no proper sense of what sounds good (particularly since it's familiar to them), such that they struggle to figure out what they need to improve. Similar to digital artists flipping the image often to make it easier to identify issues by making the image somewhat unfamiliar to them, forcing their brain to actually look at the image rather than just using its previous idealized mental representation of what the image looked like.
Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.
I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.
Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.
Either way I recommend reflecting on it.
Quoted sentence does a lot of heavy lifting in your reasoning. Being intrinsically interested in something is integral part of learning. And, yes, obviously for people who have zero interest in subject it will act as "specific learning disability". I know this because I tend to be interested in programming-related subjects and, consecutively, capable of learning them, but I could never muster any interest trigonometry or calculus homework. I've also known multiple people who felt the same way about debugging their software development homework - they weren't interested and hated every second of it.
Ironically, this is one of the first things they teach you in college level math (or at least they did in my case).
There are a lot of different reasons why students feel the way you do and (unfortunately) give up on math. It’s a shame because I believe most of those reasons are specific to the high school setting and from what I’ve seen, students have a much better time if they come back to math later in life and study without that environment.
Interest also plays a role, of course. And not everyone will have the interest to go back and study again, later in life.
Which brings us to my original point - not everyone can do it (well).
He would intuit solutions to problems based on extrapolating from the textbook. The undergraduate stuff all clicked right away for him.
Even when we scored the same on an exam, the difference in effort expended was dramatic
Some people "practice" by trying to play the same thing over and over, and it is equivalent to "hearing" vs "listening". Learning how to play an instrument (and also a particular piece of music) is a very complex process. Just like you need to learn the skills to "learn from a book", you need to learn the skills to "practice an instrument".
In most intellectual fields, you can take your sweet time to remember what you learned so long as you remember it eventually. Music requires practice to recall everything in real time.
Two mathematicians are discussing a theorem. The first mathematician says that the theorem is trivial. He then proceeds with two hours of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is indeed trivial.
A C programmer with no experience in concatenative or, especially, functional languages will have little chance of understanding code written in Forth or Haskell. They will have to start at the bottom of the learning curve.
The differences between languages aren't just skin-deep. Same goes for the design patterns in those languages. Haskell's applicatives have no analog in C, for instance.
You're not wrong, but those don't crack the top-10 of in-demand languages. Enough functional paradigms have also crept into more popular languages that you wouldn't be completely lost.
I went through a similar phase with math, struggled with basic algebra for years, then at some point it all clicked into place and I unintentionally ended up skipping all high school algebra to get to early calculus.
It makes it really hard when helping other people through those early concepts (like pointers), because "keep working and at some point it'll just click for you" isn't very convincing.
I’ve started to call it paying the “time tax” or “staring tax”, I have to just review tough concepts (code, concept, leetcode solution, math problem) for a long while before it eventually clicks.
Haha, monads still haven't clicked for me despite knowing F# and Clojure pretty well. I think of them as "functors that you can flatten" (and functors are "things you can `map` over", and `map` is "a structure-preserving transformation"). I know monads syntactically, but not intuitively. Despite this I still manage to work with monads pretty well - sometimes rote knowledge is enough. Maybe if my work involved discovering new monads I'd feel like I'd know them better. (I just see the same option/list/result(ish)/generator-style monads over and over.)
Those students, they do not get FAANG jobs, or make big money. The few that want to understand are much more like the articles description, and they end up five years on far ahead of their peers at work.
Just my $0.02.
That sort of initial seed would give me so much information...
On that topic... Does anyone have any clue how and why magnetism works? I have a A Level Physics test next week :)
of course these are rarely static (after all one can learn proofs of theorems without being able to solve any problem), hence the need for the "muscle memory" of how to apply these techniques to the particular patterns.
Like, 2-D, sure, seems easy enough. But once you go to 4-D, things get really hard to grok.
Passionate science educators online have really filled in a lot of my education.
Yes, you can go about reading a book in different ways depending on what and why you are reading and what works for you.
I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days, at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition every year, or at least every couple of years.
There are just about no scientific discoveries in math that requires undergraduate and few matters that require an entirely new edition of graduate books.
I have also heard but never experienced that some books apparently have an online component that is valid only for one person or one semester or possibly one student per semester. If true this is even worse.
I strongly prefer books to videos. A lecture is good to prepare you or to wet your appetite. And to clarify known difficult spots in the book.
In fact, one of my CS professors went on a rant about it, how it is simply a way to invalidate the used book market... he then told us to buy books from an online storefront with this funny name (that he assured us had nothing to do with the rainforest) that sold them for a sizable discount instead our own university bookstore.
This seems to be a specifically American (or anglo? not sure about the UK/Australia/etc.) thing. I've never heard about this happening in Germany where there are standard textbooks in about every field that people have been using for decades - and in many cases, people just simply go with the lecture and the associated notes instead of a textbook.
I really, really, really wish people would quit repeating this without evidence.
Maybe ... maybe ... this is true for some huge name who can force the adoption of some huge number of textbooks. Maybe.
However, for any random lecturer who teaches an upper level technical class, the maximum level of revenue any seller can expect from that class is probably about $200 x 50 students = $10,000.
Where the hell is the bribe money going to come out of that? By the way, last I checked, the publishers wouldn't even let us keep the sample copy they sent to us. Yeah, they're that cheap.
And do you really think that your technical lecturer/professor or anybody in the publisher is going to risk going taking potentially illegal behavior for $1000?
If your lecturer/professor is that money driven, they would be better off simply not taking an underpaid, overworked position teaching your sorry ass and instead teach the same technical material to professionals who will pay more than your semester tuition for a one-week program.
Now, if you want to talk about the publishers bribing government bureaucrats over high school textbooks, that is an entirely different and completely documented thing.
First lecture the professor holds up book X. "I have taught using this book for years. A few days ago I decided to use book Y (holds it up) going forward."
That means very little, history is littered with awful standards used for centuries, there is no magic that translates longevity into greatness
> They have few technical problems
Hard to bookmark (and find what those are for later), hard to search, hard to annotate (and search those later), hard to edit, hard to embed rich/dynamic content, hard to track understanding, hard to adjust content based on that, hard to tailor to a specific reader in general, hard to update layout, hard to collaborate, ...
> Hard to bookmark (and find what those are for later), hard to search, hard to annotate (and search those later), hard to edit, hard to embed rich/dynamic content, hard to track understanding, hard to adjust content based on that, hard to tailor to a specific reader in general, hard to update layout, hard to collaborate, ...
Not all of these are even true of physical books - people have been bookmarking them and scribbling in the margins for ages. And also, e-books and PDFs exist, for the people that prefer them.
As for the "tailoring to a specific reader" and "tracking understanding", that's a problem for any learning resource, as people are incredibly varied. Maybe in certain situations, learning resources exist that are extremely adaptable, but I've rarely seen that. In general, for a given topic one should check out different books until one finds one that is well-suited, skip sections that are obvious, consult other sources where one remains confused, do exercises if the book has them, etc.
Books being hard to edit and/or collaborate on could maybe (if it's even true) be a problem for authors, but why does it matter for readers?
The one thing that I do consider true is that you can't do extremely fancy visualisations in a book. But there's no problem with supplementing a book with e.g. a website where you can find interactive visualisations, etc. (also: simply not every topic needs complex interactive visualisations).
> Not all of these are even true of physical books - people have been bookmarking them and scribbling in the margins for ages.
All of that is true for physical books, if you're limited to tiny margins and can't easily find your margin scribbles later, then it's a format fail, you just continue to use the same flawed logic "done for ages = good"
> And also, e-books and PDFs exist, for the people that prefer them.
Which mostly repeat the paper medium, so fail to solve most of those issues
> As for the "tailoring to a specific reader" and "tracking understanding", that's a problem for any learning resource, as people are incredibly varied.
Yet it's especially a problem with books
> In general, for a given topic one should check out different books
In general one should not limit oneself to books, even for just a starting point
> Books being hard to edit and/or collaborate on could maybe (if it's even true) be a problem for authors, but why does it matter for readers?
For example, to remove "sections that are obvious", add "exercises", find reference to "other sources", see explanations from other readers etc.
> there's no problem with supplementing a book with e.g. a website where you can find interactive visualisations, etc.
The problem is it's a big limitation of the format, and you can't integrate it well if you have to switch back and forth
> also: simply not every topic needs complex interactive visualisations
Which topic do you think can't benefit from one?
Yes, because learning is hard. A book is not a guarantee that you'll learn something - but neither is any other sort of resource.
The thesis of this discussion is that "books don't work" and that's blatantly false. Maybe there's certain people for whom they really "don't work", but as a general statement, it's false.
> Which topic do you think can't benefit from one?
I don't need fancy data visualisation if I read up on the history of the Roman Empire, for example. Or if I want to read Plato. Or to understand axiomatic set theory.
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I'll just put it differently: if you prefer other kinds of resources and they work for you - great. But to say "books don't work" just means that you artificially limit the things you learn. Writing books is comparatively easy (if you're an expert in the area). Doing fancy interactive experiences etc. requires much more time, skill, knowledge etc. - there's probably 3 to 4 orders of magnitude more stuff that has been written in books than has been made available through other means, so saying "books suck" means just locking yourself out of a lot of stuff.
And of course just dumping your expert knowledge on the page is easier than creating an effective learning experience
Some books come with one or two strings built in that can be used. Mostly to track where you are in the book right now, and the other one for something you find important.
Then there are thousands of different bookmarks you can buy as many as you need.
You also have adhesive-colored tabs you can use to mark whatever you like.
You can also bend the top or bottom corner of a page, Or use scissors and remove the corner entirely.
Bookmarking technology for real life books is mature and easy to use.
Some books make it easy to write down here you are externally. Page Numbers, or like the Bible with several numeric markings that makes finding a quote fast and easy.
Books can come with indexes that make finding things easier. To browse through index entries can also provide interesting insight.
It is super easy to annotate. You can use a pencil and things can be erased if you desire. You can use pens You can use highlighters, You can use stickers, You can write the margins You can attach post it notes You can attach documents (pressed between the existing pages.
The way you do bookmark, highlight, and scribble can be of tremendous value for the next reader. (Or it can be flat out annoying).
It is also easy these days to take a photo of a page with your cellphone and do whatever you want. then you can if you so wish print and glue it in, or insert a page or whatever into the book.
A book can have very rich illustrations and graphics.
If you do need to reference rich media you can print a QR code in the relevant part of the book so people can quickly pull up the video or whatever there is a need for.
How do you group all the bookmarks that are related to a given topic? Use a specific bookmark color? How do you then change the whole group? Or, physically go to every single bookmark and change it to a different color? How would you list all paragraphs you've bookmarked together (let's say you want to track a story of a given character interaction with another one)? How do you add longer custom text to the bookmarks? Physical ones don't have enough space for your questions that you'd later like to go back to to find answers to
I mean even in the most trivial case- using a string to track where you are: why is this even needed when a computer can do the tracking automatically? Also, that string only tracks 2 pages, not the exact point in text
Indexes are also not great, they're slow to use, usually incomplete (so any primitive full-text search would beat them), and uneditable by the reader, so don't reflect
"Take a picture" is a laughable suggestion, why would I also need to waste time to OCR "to do whatever I need" when I could start with a better format in the first place?
A top down description: start with what something is, why it's important, and how it fits in with other things, then an outline of the details, then the finer details and so on. This is almost impossible to find in textbooks or lectures, which for the most part are bottom up.
Trying to figure out the thing without any help, or very little help, at each step of the above. This sounds pointless, but it actually works really well. If I try my best to figure out how something works without knowing anything I end up "priming" my brain for the answer, and end up getting a (relatively) instant understanding. It's like you make a hole that is the rough shape of the answer in your mind and the answer fills the void. Put another way you motivate your brain to wanting to know what it is. The best bit is how far you can get by yourself and the positive feeling that gives you.
This might just be me, I've never met anyone who feels the same way about learning.
This isn't helped by how the biotech world stratifies itself into PhDs and non-PhDs
I found it to be very effective though time consuming. Even if you don't figure out the solution, when you read other solution later, everything just clicks.
It seems that SRS is best used for "know what" rather than "know how".
I am curious if anyone has applied spaced repetition to memorization of things other than terminology and how they did it.
It's for vocabulary and terminology mainly, or other simple facts like historical dates, country capitals, etc.
It's irrelevant to conceptual learning, where it may be very difficult to understand something, but once you do you understand it for life.
In the context of language learning this could be a sentence which tests multiple individual vocabulary items and grammatical patterns together. In the context of maths it could be using multiple techniques in sequence to solve a more complex equation.
I think this would bridge the gap between the atomic knowledge that flashcards give you and the more generalized knowledge that applied practice gives you.
AFAIK, no existing SRS is capable of this. I started working on a prototype web app that could do it but I haven't finished it yet. I plan to return to it at some point.
Some select disjoint passages:
> Like lectures, books have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation, but the medium does have an implicit model. And like lectures, that model is transmissionism. Sequences of words in sequences of lines in sequences of pages, the form of a book suggests people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. In caricature: “The author describes an idea in words on the page; the reader reads the words; then the reader understands the idea. When the reader reaches the last page, they’ve finished the book.” Of course, most authors don’t believe that people learn things this way, but because the medium makes the assumption invisible, it’s hard to question.
> Readers must learn specific reflective strategies. “What questions should I be asking? How should I summarize what I’m reading?” Readers must run their own feedback loops. “Did I understand that? Should I re-read it? Consult another text?” Readers must understand their own cognition. “What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?”
> These skills fall into a bucket which learning science calls “metacognition.” The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them.Baker, L. (1989). Metacognition, comprehension monitoring, and the adult reader. Educational Psychology Review, 1(1), 3–38. Worse, even if readers know how to do all these things, the process is quite taxing. Readers must juggle both the content of the book and also all these meta-questions. People particularly struggle to multitask like this when the content is unfamiliar.
> My collaborator Michael Nielsen and I made an initial attempt with Quantum Country, a “book” on quantum computation. But reading this “book” doesn’t look like reading any other book. The explanatory text is tightly woven with brief interactive review sessions, meant to exploit the ideas we just introduced. Reading Quantum Country means reading a few minutes of text, then quickly testing your memory about everything you’ve just read, then reading for a few more minutes, or perhaps scrolling back to reread certain details, and so on.
It is also interesting to consider previous attempts to wrap a cognitive model around the physical medium of the book, like the monastic 'lectio divina' of the middle ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina
I think it should be clear that it's not books that don't work, but how many people approach books that's ineffective.
Just reading books isn't enough, you have to internalize the lessons which is often hard work.
In reality, though, the format of a book itself is probably just more "evolutionarily fit" compared to alternatives. If a device that could record and replay audio was somehow invented prior to the printing press, it seems highly likely to me that we'd live in a audio-based world, not a text one. After all, societies spent thousands of years using only spoken language, with writing as a fairly recent phenomenon.
A more efficient book system, IMO, would incorporate spaced repetition more directly, whether by highlighting the key points at the bottom of each page, or even by deliberately including "reminder" paragraphs throughout the book.
An example of a picture mnemonic for others: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/202...
Article: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/usc-dornsife-alumnus-r...
If you're comfortable saying, did your startup/acquirer have any interest in developing products for other domains?
It typically doesn't look like a fully fleshed out pizza shop, but I distinctly remember explaining an cell scaffold that I had synthesized like a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs to some of the undergraduates I was mentoring..
I never felt that other domains didn't address the natural inclination to use abstraction as a way to convey concepts/processes.
https://www.build-electronic-circuits.com/wp-content/uploads...
but I'm _surprised_ that complex metaphorical images like the one in the parent haven't spread to other domains. As you said, we often make verbal metaphors when teaching, but explicit visual metaphors are _relatively_ rare. I'm talking about literal political cartoon as mnemonic device. How often do you see visual metaphors in textbooks? They're usually more interested in correctness.
Perhaps AI will make generating these images easier, if the difficulty in creating the graphics was the sticking point. Or maybe the problem is in sharing them, which is a problem that I'm working on.
I disagree that rote memorization limits innovation in the medical field. Biology has complex problems, and "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong". There's a reason why so many clinical trials fail, and it's not for a lack of technical innovation.
I feel like the medical _system_ as a whole needs systematic/organizational disruption, not technological disruption. For example, CGMs are a technology that have been around for decades and only now are we seeing usage in non-diabetic populations. The system (they require a prescription) is preventing the innovation.
If I may suggest another one of Dwarkesh's episodes that I thoroughly enjoyed: his 2 episode interview of Carl Shulman. It is an absolute treat. Completely different subjects, of course, but equally engaging.
They say if a card is ending up as a leech, it's a "problem" card and you should somehow improve it. But I'm not sure how to improve this: Side A: name. Side B: birthday. (Cards are also shown reversed.)
Arguably I could add some kind of mnemonics, or learn the Mnemonic Major System for remembering numbers. (On that note, does anyone have specific advice for remembering birthdays? The Dutch among you will say "hang a birthday calendar in your toilet", which was probably the correct solution all along...)
"Because I want to" is obviously fine, but it still reminds me of the infamous "capitals of the world" flashcards that spaced repetition practitioners warn against.
Why remember something that can be looked up? Latency; it's super useful to have things appear in your brain so you can immediately do something useful with them instead of slowing down and looking something up and potentially losing context.
So what I'd actually need is "what are all the birthdays that occur this month", and then have a ritual habit installed that at the first day of the month I would spend a few minutes pondering this list in my mind.
(Again, the birthday wall calendar would probably work better here...)
I have a "Roman Emperors" Anki deck. It serves absolutely no purpose except making me feel good about it, but it works well (except maybe for the final few emperors, those tend to be leeches).
I admit birthdays of acquaintances don't quite fit under "random trivia", but I'll still maintain that learning random birthdays seems useless, when the calendar works so well.
Similarly, I struggle with understanding/remembering the structure of my family tree, at least for the family members that I never met (I am often told stories about ancestors, and am shamed for my inability/unwillingness to naturally and automatically memorize them). So I broke the family tree up into individual relations and made Anki cards of them.
That worked a little better than the birthdays, but still a struggle, because it is "meaningless information" as far as my own brain is concerned. I might consciously think it's important to have knowledge of your ancestry, but my neurology apparently disagrees... Alas!
I'm bad at it too and my wife is not, so she can figure out my own family tree better than I can; it makes for good party banter.
(Though the digital one does become useful due to the automatic reminders.)
That probably depends on what and how much you are trying to memorize with Anki. It is easy to learn a few words in a foreign language, but try to learn three to five new words per day for a year straight and suddenly you realize how far spaced repetition can bring you.
For leeches, what helps is to create more cards with the same concept (and do not suspend the leech, you are right that is not a good idea). If I struggle learning a word, I create more sentences using that word, or connect it with synonyms and antonyms. For birthdays, maybe try to add some memories related to that birthday: some particular gift, a happy moment during that day, the weather or location where you celebrated... Just see what sticks :)
[month] -> [list of important birthdays]
> Eliminating 10% of the most difficult items in a generic material may produce an increase in the speed of learning of up to 300%.
Instead of Name -> Birthday, try "X's birthday is in {month}", or "Y's birthday is the {N}th of January" or "Z's birthday is just before {some notable date, like Christmas}" or "A's birthday is just after {B ... someone whos birthday you remember}". e.g. I remember my best friend's wife's birthday because it occurs shortly after mine. I remember a girl who I used to live across from 25 years ago because her birthday was just before mine.
This way, you have multiple different ways of relating to the information. If the related key date is coming up, you can think "oh...Z's birthday is around now"...which should be enough for you to functionally act on it.
Try to avoid the mindset of single cards. If you _really_ want the information, break it down in different ways.
Wrestling with the information in this way is a good way to find patterns and relations to it in the first place (put the information IN your brain well)...then use spaced repetition to practice getting the information OUT of your brain well.
I'm a casual tourist, who likes to pick up some rudimentary language skills before travel. There are many of us; we understand the importance of smiling at our hosts and getting the words out while more formal learners are stalled in self-induced aphasia.
For us, the design of spaced-repetition systems misses a crucial point: We don't care about measurable process while stockpiling some language skills before a trip, and we certainly don't have time to sit around studying once we're on a trip. The goal is to ingest as much content as we can, in some form that sticks, to recall more flexibly as we struggle to speak in-country.
For this purpose, memorizing a radio play as if one is an actor is more effective than spaced repetition. For example, just the Pimsleur dialogs, edited from audio files one owns. The words are there, slow to access but quicker than opening up a phrase book. Within a week traveling, one's mind reorganizes access to the language one actually uses.
The dig on learning a radio play is one doesn't know the words out of sequence. Yeah, that's why one can learn them so efficiently. For those of us of a certain age, it's the "next song on the album" effect. What did Knuth say about premature optimization? Learn the words one actually needs out of sequence, on the ground, in use.
(On the other hand, Pimsleur is great, and taking a systematic approach to "100%ing" the "core" of a language is probably a great idea.)
Based on reader feedback, only a special kind of reader reads a programming book cover to cover. 90%+ people who read substantial parts of a programming book, dip into the parts that interest them after, perhaps, reading the first few chapters to figure out how to navigate the book.
Online, you have the freedom to do better and to publish similar material in multiple modes, from passive and linear, to self-paced interactive to human-guided. There isn't one answer, which the post touches on in several places including regarding spaced repetition.
LLMs are likely to have an impact on the value of pedagogical techniques like spaced repetition because spaced repetition is a tool for overcoming human impediments to acquiring and navigating huge, difficult, knowledge bases. Then using that knowledge requires enormous effort and aptitude. That's where humans competing with LLMs are like pick-and-shovel miners competing with a giant dragline at mining coal.
The next time you want to get something from a book do some new things with it.
1. Skim it first.
2. Find some interesting entries in the index if it has one and jump there to check it out.
3. Ask questions while you read. Write them down the book.
4. Reread the book (spaced repetition). It will go faster because you e built a structure with your notes the first time.
5. Don’t waste time on bad books.
A good analogy is pitching. The pitcher is the writer, the ball is the knowledge and you are the catcher. Nothing works if the pitcher can’t throw or if the catcher can’t catch. Likewise if there’s no ball to throw.
So it is you’ll get nothing out of the book if the writer can’t deliver or has nothing to say. But a well crafted book stuffed with knowledge won’t to any good if you receive it.
So "reading" a math textbook misses most of it.
I wrote it to explain the techniques I use to compete as a technical guy who dropped out of high school.
It’s actually not very hard to compete if you see education as an ongoing process of personal construction, rather than some plug of knowledge that an expert gave you (along with a certificate).
I collect books and papers which I ignore until I have a relevant problem, at which point I go into a process of intensive inquiry similar to that describe in the post.
While it’s certainly even better suited to hypertext, it also works well for most non-fiction (e)books, at least for me.
Stupidest title I've seen in some time. Maybe there's some additional context I'm missing.
People are different, you know.
I don't suggest you should learn Python _only_ with python.cards. I assume every python.cards user will be doing some online course, or working with Python, and my decks will just boost their knowledge of the language.
I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Python is not their main occupation. These people struggle to accumulate knowledge, because they may encounter concepts or APIs only from time to time, and by that time they already forgot.
Also, I want to cover some "unorthodox" topics for which spaced repetition may be specially well suited. For example, I'm building a deck called "A tour of the standard library", where you can learn all the modules that are available, just so you know what is out there, without going deep into it.
Another idea is to have decks to learn all the built-in exceptions by heart, or the nomenclature. I think this helps build a mental model of the width and depth of the language so you can better integrate all the knowledge you find while coding, searching online, or reading code.
Unfortunately, hard disagree. The best way to learn a Lisp is to write Lisp. You can look at code all you want, but you won't get used to the syntax/parens until you start writing it. Same applies to non-Lisps.
> I think a lot of people program in Python but programming in Python is not their main occupation. These people struggle to accumulate knowledge, because they may encounter concepts or APIs only from time to time, and by that time they already forgot.
This is a great point. Static typing is great for API discovery, which Python sadly lacks. However, I wonder how much LLMs are eating this "low-code" market. Also, if Python is non-critical to their jobs, I suspect that they won't feel motivated to explicitly study Python over the long term. Doing spaced repetition is famously hard, and non-motivated people will likely give up and just do "JIT learning".
> Also, I want to cover some "unorthodox" topics for which spaced repetition may be specially well suited. For example, I'm building a deck called "A tour of the standard library", where you can learn all the modules that are available, just so you know what is out there, without going deep into it.
FWIW I'm learning Rust, and to "learn what's out there" I've just been binging random Rust videos on Youtube at 2x over lunch. Granted I'm an experienced dev and I have an intuition as to what "should" be out there, so perhaps this story is of limited use.
Which is why we built https://www.munkle.it the way we did and focused on speed of review.
I used to not like the feeling that spaced repetition did (it's always in that slightly hard stage) but apparently that's what helps you remember.
You mention you focused on "speed of review". How did you do that?
There are apparently no hotkeys? (My speed of review is therefore lower than Anki, due to needing to use the mouse.)