Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

Because it's not the most effective way to learn; it's the most effective way to not forget.

Here's an article by the person who discovered SR: https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...

To do it effectively, you'd have to have learned everything in advance and processed the knowledge in a format suited to SR. The processing itself makes it ineffective. For many things, 30% retention is good enough. It would cost more to read a book deeply with SR than to read several books shallowly without it.

If only there was a fix for that? Well, spaced repetition was designed to work in tandem with incremental reading. Which is you jump around topics related to your topic and extract the most relevant details.

People seem to have adopted only half of the pair, which is why it feels so inefficient. Supermemo was actually very efficient with this... except that it's reliant on Internet Explorer and now breaks on all modern OSes and doesn't even run on Mac. For some reason, people were able to rewrite SR into Anki, but not the incremental reading part.

However, AI seems to be taking on this role quite well. It's capable of not only incremental reading, but also processing the data into spaced repetition format. But I'll just wait for someone to build this.

Haha reading your comment felt like finding someone who speaks my language. I absolutely agree that the context of spaced repetition with incremental learning and reading is key, if you are to apply it.

Studying the psychology of learning, I happened upon the fact this is a real "Learning Loop" with another masters student who explained their problems studying effectively to me.

Basically, when you need to study for something, you often have loads of content. But you want to be able to manageablly learn it - and, in order throughout the learning process to be most effective - do so with spaced repetition/active recall. That requires the incremental reading or context you mention!

I built a way of capturing this reading-flashcards-reading-flashcards mangeable l op into a tool. Instead of just generating flashcards from PDFs and showing them one at a time, it first groups the reading (in this case, for a lecture, by slides covering each topic), and it shows you say the 7 relevant slides for that top, then it moves on to ask you 2-3 flashcard questions for each of those relevant slides (so lets say 18 questions). Crucially, it will keep track of you mistakes and progress on those chunks of flashcards with SRS later and the next day bring up those you forgot. As a learner you can then rotate back into studying via reading, addressing another incremental chunk.

It's so much better than trying to consume a whole lecture or chapter or large concept en masse! By actually contextualising and always feeling like the next bit is do-able, you have enough momentum to study well but also feel progress. This is why I like incorporating spaced repition, but contextually. For other psychology reasons related to study help in exam conditions, it also offers a free recall which tests at the harder end, beyond what most apps do, and does useful things with the results later on.

I do host that learning mode - "Learning Loop Mastery" - on my site, Revision.ai - which can turn lectures into those incremental learning loops via flashcards/reading sections if you want to try it. As of tomorrow it will be widely available (again).

Good points.

On not forgetting, the clear group here are students who will be tested. I'm expecting large changes in education in the next 10 years away from testing and more toward experiential learning with clearly defined outcomes, which are then graded/measured.

So while I use SR to learn and test myself, I'm trying to think through the use cases for a different future that isn't 100% likely to materialize.

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