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Comment by OskarS | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but: of all the really brilliant people I've ever met, interacted with or learned from, I haven't heard of anyone that used techniques like this. Like, the way they learn things and become brilliant is the exact same way every brilliant person has done it for thousands of years: they read books, they discuss and debate with other brilliant people, they study their subjects and work hard. Like, true intelligence is very rarely about rote memorization of facts, it's about making new connections, being creative, and working really hard. There are no shortcuts, you have to put in the work. Aristotle, Leibniz, Einstein or whatever brilliant person you can think of didn't become who they are using cue-cards.

Spaced repetition always seemed like those schemes to get you fit or slim in 30 days that never work. There is exactly one way to get physically healthy, and it's super-unfun: diet and exercise. Same thing with your mind, you have to exercise it and feed it appropriately for months and years. Spend the time you would spend on spaced repetition reading books or watching lectures and doing exercises instead.

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How do you think that "working hard" bit works and produces results?

Repetition!

If you're learning a language and trying to learn vocabulary, a new alphabet, etc, anything that involves lots of recall being necessary, spaced repetition is an excellent aid because without the basic shit you can't do any of the rest.

Plus it's supposed to be consistent over a (very long) time, not a "quick fix" so it's actually really the opposite of the "get slim quick" type schemes.

It's probably not especially useful when you're not cramming stuff/trying to build up a base to stand on, which lets you actually get on with the actual meat of the learning.

Memory is associative. So if you study a topic from different approaches or read other tangential material, that has connections to the topic, you remember it a lot better, thanks to associations.

Repetition techniques simply ignore associations.

Learning new vocabulary works up until 200-300 words, then it's useless.

It's not all or nothing, you can combine approaches :)

And if you're learning an alphabet where before you know 1000-2000 unique characters, you can't reasonably read anything, it's still very useful!

Plus who says that repetition techniques can't include context (like sentences for instance?), Bunpro being a pretty good example of this for learning Japanese grammar

Obviously don't just use SRS all day, consume media, read books, etc.

Good point, they indeed have a flat and very large set of items, and they have few connections with anything outside the system.

> Aristotle, Leibniz, Einstein or whatever brilliant person you can think of didn't become who they are using cue-cards.

You aren’t Einstein, I presume. Neither am I. So first of all, you can’t say that with any certainty.

But more importantly, the vanishingly small top end of the bell curve does not hold useful lessons for the rest of us. Things that mere mortals have to expend effort on are not even a second thought for them, so they have nothing to teach someone who is working to learn things they never even tried to learn.

This is why great coaches are usually middling athletes. This is why great teachers are rarely great in the field they teach. This is why lessons from those who are great are often frustrating and filled with statements like “just…you know…do X.”

Are you sure this class of people don’t implicitly do spaces repetition via:

- “reading books” (coming across the same ideas in different books, tying new ideas to old books)

- “discuss and debate” (remembering and being reminded of previously learned things)

- “study their subjects” (?) (presumably restating the previous two? - Maybe original research, which is finding new facts or reinforcing old ones)

- “work hard” (??)

I also wonder if there’s something about the mental process of people who seem to “just get it” - is their mind subconsciously turning over stuff they’ve learned in the same way an external spaced repetition regimen would? They may be getting the benefit of spaced repetition, but from the outside it doesn’t look like they follow a study plan.

Spaced repetition is merely an optimal way of organizing repetition. All of the “brilliant” people you’ve met almost certainly study their topics constantly, and this daily exposure is itself a form of repetition.

This misconception is a common mistake by people that think Anki / SRS are equivalent to the spacing effect itself. That is not the case. The spacing effects exists independently of any particular software implementation.

I don’t think any one claims that memorizing a bunch of facts will make you a genius; rather that if you are aiming for optimal learning and memory, SRS is pretty much the gold standard and is backed up by tons of scientific research.

> Aristotle, Leibniz, Einstein or whatever brilliant person you can think of didn't become who they are using cue-cards.

Indeed, but I think that being relevant assumes that people using these techniques believe it will somehow make them brilliant/geniuses.

> Spaced repetition always seemed like those schemes to get you fit or slim in 30 days that never work.

I'm not arguing for spaced repetition, but the whole point is you do some amount every day (or as needed) for the rest of your life (within reason). So it's not equivalent to get fit/slim quick at all, it's more about disciplined improvement of yourself. If that isn't effective for you don't do it, but based on your comment it seems like you're coming at it from the wrong angle.

> I'm not arguing for spaced repetition, but the whole point is you do some amount every day (or as needed) for the rest of your life (within reason). So it's not equivalent to get fit/slim quick at all, it's more about disciplined improvement of yourself. If that isn't effective for you don't do it, but based on your comment it seems like you're coming at it from the wrong angle.

Fair enough, I haven't looked into spaced repetition deeply.

I just always got this weird vibe from people talking about it, like they think memorizing all the world capitals was a way to improve your intelligence. It's not.

Same thing with, like, "memory palace" stuff: being able to memorize a deck of cards is probably fun, and it's a nice parlor trick, but it will not help you solve real-world problems, analyze situations, make discoveries or be a better engineer. The way to do that is to just read books, study, work hard in your chosen field and keep up with the latest developments. That is the only way anyone has ever gotten good at anything.

Ahh got you. Yeah agreed on a lof of that. What I do is when I learning something that I think will be useful, but that I'll forget, I stick it in Anki.

Otherwise I know the fact will be written in the sand, it won't be there for me to use at the time when it would be useful. That's terminology from a book on memory I read a while back, which ironically I've now forgotten name of because I never put it in Anki.

Also should say I used to be much more scatter gun with what I put in Anki, but these days I combine it with Obsidian which I think is more managable.

Anyway not trying to sell Anki to anyone, if you don't need it don't use it for sure. I just know (think?) it's working for me, at least compared to the alternatives.

> they think memorizing all the world capitals was a way to improve your intelligence. It's not.

It definitely is. I don't understand the disdain for facts. If, when talking about a city, I know that it's a capital city, I am smarter than I would be if I did not know, and I have a better ability to participate in the conversation. If I know a bunch of constants (in whatever trade I work in) offhand, I can quickly do calculations in my head. Does knowing how many centimeters are in an inch make me smarter? Yes, it does. There was a reason why you memorized every letter in the alphabet.

> The way to do that is to just read books, study, work hard in your chosen field

Spaced repetition is literally just a way to study. You make the cards as you read books.

> Same thing with, like, "memory palace" stuff: being able to memorize a deck of cards is probably fun, and it's a nice parlor trick, but it will not help you solve real-world problems, analyze situations, make discoveries or be a better engineer.

> The way to do that is to just read books, study, work hard in your chosen field and keep up with the latest developments.

These are the same things, just a different form.

I mostly agree with you, I don't do SR myself, but I do think the benefit of spaced repetition is solid for medical students/researchers and language learners.

Also some people just find it fun to go through their Anki deck instead of doomscrolling while on the subway or waiting in line. Whether there's any real benefit for that person is debatable. It's “fun“ in the same way going to the gym, or drinking kale smoothie is fun.

The key for improvement is deliberate practice, and one component of that is "working really hard" which you've pointed. But this is still too vague to be helpful. For those interested in the science of expertise, I highly recommend Peak by Andres Ericsson.

> Also some people just find it fun to go through their Anki deck instead of doomscrolling while on the subway or waiting in line. Whether there's any real benefit for that person is debatable. It's “fun“ in the same way going to the gym, or drinking kale smoothie is fun.

I'm probably one of those people, but commuting is one of those examples where you have a small (hopefully) amount of relatively low value time, time that is somewhat interrupted. What else of value would you do in it? Maybe listen to a podcast, catch up on blogs. All fine, reasonable choices, but doing a bit of Anki is a reasonable alternative.

Only time I feel like I've wasted those periods is when I end up wasting it (just scrolling through social media or random videos). Anything else is I think a reasonable choice.

For those of us who aren’t brilliant, but want to learn well anyway, Anki’s (my preferred SRS) is a godsend when used in the right domains — foreign language vocabulary is the best example.

I don’t see spaced repetition as one of those get-fit-fast schemes. I see it as going to the gym as opposed to generally living an active lifestyle. Some gifted people can get very, very fit without going to the gym, just by playing sports and other physical activities. Gym isn’t that fun compared to playing soccer, and it takes a lot of time and consistency to be worth it.

That's an excellent way to put it. Personally, it allowed me to get excellent grades despite my post-concussion syndrome. It's miserable, but optimising your learning can really let you punch above your weight.

Also, you can fit Anki into parts of your day where "proper" learning is more difficult. I used to do it on the bus to and from school, where it was far to loud - and I was often too tired - to learn through other means.

The alternative was scrolling through HN... I did that a lot, too.

Would you mind outlining how you use Anki? I've had some memory issues lately and I think it would really help.

Specifically, when do you create cards, how do you make sure your cards are good quality, what are the scheduling settings, how is it organized (sub decks?). I feel like Anki itself is overwhelming...

I haven't used Anki for a while now. I've had an aversion to it since I completely burnt out after my A levels.

I primarily added Anki cards from Obsidian. I'd have a heirarchal note structure for the subject (e.g. physics -> paper 3 -> astrophysics -> stars -> star type categories). Then I'd have my plainly-formatted notes, and below it I'd have some flashcards. The Obsidian4Anki extension let me create cards from the markdown.

The cards would strictly be on the topic in the note, generally be written around the same time or a few days later, and would be Q-and-A or clozes.

So as an example, "What colour is an O class star::Blue" would be in my notes and turned into a matching card, or "A {1:type 1A supernova} always has an {2:absolute magnitude} of {3:-19.3}" would create three cloze cards.

At the top of each note I'd use a note property to specify the notes' place in the Anki heirarchy, and I'd use the first three parts of the Obsidian heirarchy. So I'd save it as Physics -> Paper 3 -> Astrophysics -> [many, many cards]. I always duplicated notes to make new ones, so I rarely touched this.

Generally I'd practice all the physics cards at once, but categorising them this way let me drop the paper 1 cards once I'd done it and focus on paper 2 and 3 etc.

Honestly, though, I first started this when I was fourteen. My notes and my Anki decks were a complete mess compared to when I stopped when I left school four years later. You'll find what works for you - and clean things up - as you go along.

Learning isn't only about becoming brilliant. For me personally, spaced repetition is one of the best tools to aid language learning. Classes and such are great for your main progression, but spaced repetition is the way to make the vocabulary actually stick.

Actually consuming content in any form is even better.

Obviously depends on your memory. I found that in the past I read voraciously, and spend a lot of time tinkering. Which was good and fun but I sometimes found I'd forgotten the stuff by the time it would have been useful, particularly when learning about topics I wasn't using day by day. Anki an SRS partially solves that.

It's a trade-off though, I now read less and tinker less. Do I regret that, you bet. But still Anki/SRS works for me, especially because I often do it at times when I wouldn't be able to effectively read/tinker (perhaps tired, or getting kids to sleep). That's a long way of saying, do what's effective for you, but there's no point of being so dismissive of what others are doing.

Does consuming content include watching movies/shows in the language? For me, I can state with high certainty that simply watching a lot of movies or shows in the language I was learning did absolutely nothing to help my vocabulary compared to using anki. If by consuming content you meant taking a specific movie/episode and breaking it down, studying it relentlessly, and moving on to the next after you've seen it 20 times and practically have it memorized, then maybe that would've helped? It would've meant I learned a different set of things than I studied though, which is not too useful come exam time (quite possibly more useful in real life though).

> Does consuming content include watching movies/shows in the language?

Yes. Assuming the content is around your level - contains words you do not know, but not too much. Obviously, if you know every single word in the movie, you wont learn new ones. And if you understand nothing of it, you wont learn either.

> If by consuming content you meant taking a specific movie/episode and breaking it down, studying it relentlessly, and moving on to the next after you've seen it 20 times and practically have it memorized, then maybe that would've helped?

That sounds like self torture rather then anything else. Why would anyone do that? What would be the point of watching the same thing till you memorize that thing?

The value of consuming content comes from seeing many different sentences in many different contexts. So you build more connections in your brain and you eventually learn to combine own sentences. Movies specifically have value of showing something more similar to "normal speech" in speed so that your brain wont have time to translate.

Memorizing segments goes against everything it is supposed to provide.

> I can state with high certainty that simply watching a lot of movies or shows in the language I was learning did absolutely nothing to help my vocabulary compared to using anki.

For me, each time I tried anki, it seems to work short term. And it completely fails to teach me new words. Flashcards seem to be the least effective way to actual learn words that are truly new. I keep forgetting words I have learned from anki much much faster then words I learned from elsewhere.

> Actually consuming content in any form is even better.

And going over pieces of said content in some sort of structured scheduled form isn't "consuming"?

Off the top of my head: John Carmack and Derek Sivers are Anki users.

I've met a ton of brilliant people at Olympiads who use Anki, and you'll find heavy usage from people who rank #1 in highly competitive exams (JEE Advanced, Cambridge Medicine etc...). I graduated top of my class, and I attribute this to consistent Anki usage

But, of course: there's a subset of truly incredible people who don't need it. I've met some people at 20+ languages, no Anki

----

Disclaimer: AnkiDroid maintainer. Did a bit of work on a new website today, so stats are top of mind.

My understanding is that Anki is pretty much used by every single medical student, at least in the U.S. It's the perfect applications for retaining massive amounts of information just long enough to pass med school and board exams. Look at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/ -- 166k followers.

We have a reasonable source for 70%[0].

There are a number of anti-Anki users (and to be honest, I don't blame them: there's 30k+ cards that they should learn in the 'meta' decks, and our onboarding is lacking). They've got an abusive workload.

The longer I'm US med-adjacent, the more jaded I become. There's continuing score creep, and this is due to the bar being raised[1], in order to maintain a failure rate.

I believe there's systematic academic misconduct due to the pressure to publish. The AVERAGE successfully matched neurosurgery resident has 37.4 research items (papers/presentations/abstracts)[2].

[0] https://www.cureus.com/articles/70371-an-analysis-of-anki-us...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gKKAZ5aO8E [mean score in 2022-3 was 248. This was a 99th percentile score in 1993-4. Mean student in 1993-4 would no longer meet the passing score, exams are not getting easier]

[2] https://medschoolinsiders.com/medical-student/how-many-publi...

> they study their subjects and work hard

And spaced repetition is a very efficient way of doing that.

Using cards for spaced repetition has always been common between top students. I would not be surprised if brilliant people used it in one way or another. Modern spaced repetition apps are just the paperless equivalent.

That is spaced repition, just with a bit of change in what they’re repeating

Fully agree.

Commenters who argue with you, suggesting that discussion is repetition, miss one thing: associativity of memory.

Discussing material, reading something tangential or in another aspect of the subject, all that makes more associations, not just simply repeat the same fact.

I had tried that 20 years ago learning a new language: after ~300 words, my brain could recall every word in the cards, but not in real text. At some point I looked a word in a dictionary, then vaguely remembered that I had looked it up earlier. And a minute later recalled that I had a similar word in the cards -- I browsed through them and found it, and guess what, repeating by the cards, I named it very easily (I guess, brain learns any cues, like cursive writing features, and cuts every corner). But this knowledge never transferred to the real language practice (at the time I was starting to write and say something sensible).

I remember taking driving exam, the theoretical test. You're given 20 questions with pictures and a question whether or not you can do a particular maneuver. Some groupmates just rote-repeated the entire 800-question set of last year's test multiple times (and learned the pictures rather than their meaning).

I instead did the homework: analyzed the entire rulebook, and where rules were irregular and chaotic, organized them in tables to bring any kind of system to this. And then I had no troubles remembering those single rules. Also, I made myself a checklist for the picture questions, what to look at -- are there lights (which have priority over signs), is there a tram (has priority, and changes passing order), and so on.

The pictures in the real test were re-drawn in different style, and sure some folks couldn't load the right answer from their brain and failed the test. One of them told me "You're so smart" (probably implying that I simply have much more RAM in the brain, which isn't true). That was pleasure to ears, but I didn't try memorizing the material at all, and knew very little of it beforehand.

it's a pretty narrow set of people that want or need to be able to memorize and recall a bunch of facts as efficiently as possible. mostly med school students and language learners, where this stuff obviously works.

Working in a fast changing but also wide and deep field like software I think being able to remember quite a few facts can be important.

it's doable I guess. I think it's more productive to learn a concept and be able to derive everything about the concept from first principles instead though

I'd argue that you should spend time just thinking. Reading can be a great way to get some new input into to think about, but just getting comfortable silently thinking is really helpful.

"There are no shortcuts, you have to put in the work." Spoken like someone who doesn't use an SRS system, then. They're actually extremely hard to use, because the focus is on feeding you the toughest possible version of every recalled card. Part of why people quit using them is because it's mentally exhausting!

You're right that nobody became brilliant through spaced repetition. But spaced repetition is not meant for that.

Spaced repetition is not meant for conceptual things or skills. It's meant for only the simplest of facts.

It's meant particularly for foreign language vocab, names and quantities in medical school, names of cases in law school, that sort of thing.

It has little to no relevance in math, physics, and engineering.

Just because it's not meant for all things doesn't mean it doesn't excel at some things.

> Spaced repetition is not meant for conceptual things or skills. It's meant for facts.

> It has little to no relevance in math, physics, and engineering.

That's one bit I disagree with. Engineering is full of facts/concepts, things you often need to know inherently to be able to apply them, or even to know to google them at the right time. So I think SRS can apply there too.

I disagree also. I have lots of formulae, proofs and more as mathjax in my Anki cards.

You'd be surprised how big of a help this actually is for college exams. Not only for cramming before exams but also to retain the facts after for follow up classes (I see other students constantly struggle with having to relearn whole subjects while I don't because Anki implicitly makes me relearn them every week).

> It has little to no relevance in math, physics, and engineering.

This is more a lack of imagination on your part than necessarily an issue with SRS.

It would be better to have a photographic memory and not need to repeat anything.

You are 100% right but have absolutely no point.

As someone actually on this end of the spectrum, I agree with you. The thing that I feel makes my brain and my methodology special is that I can make a single pass through a body of work and internalize just enough of the information.

This then ends up as something analogous to a table of weak pointers. I keep a sort of abstract digest of the information in the mental database and I use it to go look up hardcopy when it becomes necessary to actually reference.

The result is something akin to a vector database. I can look at a problem and apply many different approaches simultaneously. The mental machinery autonomously eliminates the worst paths through my knowledge graph and I'm left with a few pretty good options.

Actually memorizing all the information my mental database links to would be explicitly detrimental to the process. This pushes the signal/noise ratio way too low, and more importantly wastes time I could spend indexing a larger amount of information.

Perfect recall just isn't necessary for the way I solve problems. Reference books exist for a reason. every machinist ever has a copy of the machinist's handbook for a very good reason.

The process is all about knowing what is possible and drawing paths through the graph of possibilities. The details aren't relevant until the implementation stage when you'd be accessing reference materials anyway.

I find that spaced repetition does increase recall. I don't think that's in dispute. But better recall does not make you a better engineer. I don't think it's something even worthwhile in the general case, unless you're specifically trying to build a deep specialization.

People in general really dislike this notion. People want to believe that hard work and dedication makes an Einstein. The idea that it's just how some brains are is, I dunno, unfair?

But it's a tradeoff. There's a huge psychological burden involved. I won't get into it, but it's something Einstein spoke about. I'm also no use on my own. My abilities have led me to specialize deeply in generalism; I have no real specialization in any one field. If I had to operate on my own, it'd take me ten times longer than with a couple of specialists behind me. But with a good team, the amount of work we can put out is scary.

No, not everyone can learn to think and operate this way, sorry. My brain is wired different and you probably don't want it, it really, truly sucks. But that's a good thing. A healthy mixture of perspectives and abilities is what makes a successful team/company/project. You can't really get by with just a generalist or just a specialist. You need both perspectives.

> The process is all about knowing what is possible and drawing paths through the graph of possibilities. The details aren't relevant until the implementation stage when you'd be accessing reference materials anyway.

Well put. But in that case, couldn’t you utilize SRS to memorizing high level concepts (e.g., coarse characteristics of various algorithms as opposed to how they are actually implemented, etc)

Probably, but that's really only helpful if you need that piece of information regularly. In the way that I work, it's not necessary. If a particular problem domain pops up frequently enough that I'd need to drill on it, the act of working the problem provides the repetition.

In general, I don't find techniques like this helpful. My brain is just really good at holding the overall concept of what I read. Once I've digested the information, the abstract is logged in the database forever. But that's just the autistic nature of my brain, I think.

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