Increasing Retention Without Increasing Study Time [pdf]

Someday you will die. Then you will die again when people forget you. Only the effect you’ve had on the world, including teaching others, who pass that along, outlives that second death.

So what’s this about efficiency? You should be more worried about effectiveness, not efficiency. Particularly in this profession.

What is consider efficient if it yields less best results?

I understand time constraints and end goals may prohibit the 'best' approach.

What I do not understand is how can you say something is more 'efficient' if the yield in understanding is less than what you would get with another method.

Hopefully this will clarify my thought process here:

If 'Best' is to teach others and requires 10,000 hours to yield 90-99% understanding.

In contrast, 'Efficient' method requires 2,500 hours to yield 30-40% understanding. However, there is diminishing returns meaning that doubling your hours to 5,000 does not return you with 60-80% understanding, rather maybe closer to 50-60% understanding. With 7,500 hours closer to 65-70% and 10,000 hours may around 75-89% understanding.

Here you've spent the same amount of time but did not achieve the same level of understanding. I think you may have a dynamic 'Best' vs 'Efficient' curve and to switch between those options to optimize maximizing your level of understanding in the least amount of time.

Efficiency and effectiveness are indeed different metrics. And I think balancing time and retention needs is key

Yes, possibly the most time consuming if you are thinking of writing a book.

How effective something is comes with what is best and compromise effectiveness for efficiency.

Yes, but there are plenty of exceptions. I know brilliantly knowledgeable and extraordinary clever people that are so socially awkward that they can't explain virtually anything.

To be people who also understand it

Adding a new smart person to the team is one of those golden moments for a team, IMO. You get a tiny window of watching them struggle until the tribal team knowledge seeps into them by osmosis. During that time they don't yet know who to ask the questions to directly so they will post to team slack channels or the lead directly.

One must capitalize on this brief period because smart programmers are flexible and adaptable. Very quickly they will acclimatize themselves to the mess that surrounds them and they will become as blind to the deficiencies as the rest of the team.

Nice. Somewhere I picked up the phrase "problem of assumed knowledge" for the phenomenon you describe.

But your phrase is spot on, well defined, and the subject of ongoing research.

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

Cheers.

Also try for other things that are difficult to grasp.

Sí

For language acquisition: find a partner who speaks the other language and wishes to learn yours, then converse with each of you using your L2, falling back to L1 only when circumlocution fails or to make corrections.

(then how do you practise listening to your L2? Eavesdropping, ancillary encounters, news, movies, etc. give plenty of opportunity, but speaking requires you to make an extra effort.)

A joke in American universities:

The professor is interrupted in the middle of his lecture by a student who asks about one of the previous week's problems:

— Could you please work an example for us?

— No problem!

The professor writes a problem statement, then scratches his head, tugs on his collar, rubs his chin, and at last scribbles a complicated integral on the board.

— There you go!

— Excuse me, professor, but could you please be a little more explicit?

— What do you want from me? I just did the problem 3 different ways.

I tried to help some dude understand integration by parts, which I’m not sure I’d understood myself. I warned him. But it was late, he was desperate, and I was just going to go play computer games anyway.

I figured it out, but I’ve no idea if I got him sorted out for his final.

Yes, monotasking is the way to go.

This is pretty much the current state of the art in learning research: https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/

The default algorithm in Anki, in case you don't know it

FSRS v5 is state of the art

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19288640-how-we-learn

The comment I wrote below is weird. What I mean to say is google for articles on writing good prompts. The rest matters less.

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Ignore this:

Spaced repetition, if you can stick with it, works. The details around schedules etc. don't matter as much as doing it in a way that you can keep up.

Also writing good prompts is important. I have yet to write more extensively about this but here is a start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126734

Dunlosky J, Rawson KA, Marsh EJ, Nathan MJ, Willingham DT. Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychol Sci Public Interest. 2013 Jan;14(1):4-58. doi: 10.1177/1529100612453266. PMID: 26173288.

Scott Young has a lot on this, including going deep on the literature and explaining it to populist student audience:

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/the-best-articles-on-learni...

For instance, on memory:

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/02/15/memory/

They don't teach multiplication tables anymore as far as I know. I didn't learn them and I was born in 1995

I would think that the opportunities to immediately "use" multiplication, instead of just practice it for tests, or some future numerate citizenship, would be omnipresent.

If you don't use something after you learned it, you miss out on:

1. Learning how it is actually applied

2. Discovering how the knowledge is useful for you personally, in ways you may not expect if you don't actually experience using it

3. Deeper understanding and mastery of the knowledge

4. Much much much better retention

It is worth creating some immediate use for new knowledge, even the smallest possible useful or creative project, for better retention alone.

learning a topic deeply as needed

That is the ultimate use-driven learning model.

As for non-sequential, I agree. The more we manage our own learning, the more it is a directed graph (i.e. prerequisites translate to many follow up paths), and eventually just graphs (many ways to order topics, and alternate combinations of prerequisites for each topic, in any complex area).

Basically all undergrad stuff is fundamentals and "optimized cramming" (we call it bulimic learning, because you stuff knowledge into you just in time to throw it back up in the test) means tons of people "achieve" degrees without being even dimly aware of the existence of the fundamentals afterwards. If you have a bachelor's degree in e.g. computer science, the idea of encoding data shouldn't be an unknown unknown to you.

This is great. Reminds me of the writings of Khatzumoto (All Japanese All The Time). On that note, do you know how to contact him? His site got deleted recently and I have an idea for restoring a static version.

The brain you lose in the name of practice, may save millions!

I think it was Ben Tilly and I think his user name is btilly. I also remember that comment you're referring too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818367 ?

He also later expanded it into a blog post: https://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebr...

I really appreciate HN. There aren't many public online forums were one could ask about a user comment made on a related post posted years ago and in less than 20 minutes get two different responses linking to the comment from 15 years earlier.

Perhaps it helps the topic was "increasing retention". :-)

I would counter, why are you spending time learning something you're not interested in?

Anki is only an expert's tool if you fall into the all too common trap of trying to optimize everything by microtweaking the settings.

I mean, sure, if that's your thing and you enjoy it, go for it. But it is not necessary, and (SM2 vs FSRS arguments aside), it works right out of the box with the default settings and algorithm.

Like anything, trying to get that last 10% optimization is WAY more work than getting the first 90%. But "using Anki" (in any way) is such a multiplier over NOT using it that just taking that step is enormous.

SRS software with a good UX.

This is a common complaint, but feels like a "delicate flower" argument. The UX is pretty spartan, but a fancy whiz bang UI isn't necessary to remember facts.

Not everyone needs all that, and the people that do (which is fine, btw), is a reflection of the person more than the tool.

Quizlet has a spaced repetition mode you can use, you might need to pay for it? I used it a few years ago for some stuff I needed to memorize in school.

I don't see how anki is an experts tool...unless you want it to be.

You can simply dump everything into a single collection, use basic 'front' and 'back' cards...and review. Yes, it may not be 'optimal' depending on how you mark cards, but for most people, it's good enough. Better than nothing, and probably an improvement as an addition to whatever they are currently doing.

If you want expert features, you can. You can drill, tag, organise, create different templates....but none of that is really necessary, or particulary pushed on you as something you should or have to use.

I'm not in a position to judge this author's work as a whole, as this is not my area of expertise.

I know this person as an author of "super memo" algorithms for spaced repetition learning, so yes, he most likely have a bias, probably even financial stake to some degree, although not sure, I don't follow him in any way, so don't know if this ever was or still is the case.

In the past, I've used some of his algorithms in particular, with quite interesting results - subjectively speaking, not in any scientific regime, And, obviously, those are just one of many. I also remembered this was his area of interest in general, so assumed his wiki to be of some interest in the context of discussed article.

Thanks for your critical opinion, it will contribute to my priors about his writing.

I enjoy browsing r/Anki from time to time, and that site is frequently mentioned there. Spaced repetition is definitely a real thing, but the rest of the SuperMemo site is a bit “crazy”. The author does have a “20 rules” for good card writing which is pretty good advice though. http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

Yes, many