Comment by Alex-Programs

Comment by Alex-Programs 14 hours ago

> What's worse for motivation than taking longer?

Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it.

See the popularity of Duolingo vs Anki as an example! Or Quizlet vs Anki. Or the scores of students who revise by half-watching dopamine-ified youtube videos rather than doing past papers and flashcards. If you ask people, they'll often say they care for efficiency, but their revealed preferences say otherwise.

Doing large amounts (hours) of Anki day in day out is truly miserable, particularly when the alternatives can be quite enjoyable. And if you burn out before you achieve your goal, is the "efficiency" really worth it vs going slower but eventually getting there?

Plus, a lot of people want to learn e.g. a language because they enjoy the process as well as the end result. Making the process miserable in order to get to the end result faster isn't always a good tradeoff.

Which is what it's about. It's a tradeoff. I'm a big proponent of flashcards, but I think it's important to recognise that you're trading enjoyment for speed in most cases.

jldugger 13 hours ago

> Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it.

This is so well known that it was covered extensively in the book Make It Stick[1], that you might as well call it the "student fallacy." (And they might have; ironically, I've forgotten if they do or not!)

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...

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0xDEAFBEAD 14 hours ago

Maybe an 80/20 approach where you only create flashcards for the 20% of knowledge that's most useful? E.g. for a language, you could create 1000 flashcards for the 1000 most common words which allow for basic real-world communication?

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Alex-Programs 14 hours ago

My personal approach with A levels was to strictly learn content through classes, then organise things (which teaches you a lot on its own!) and make my own flashcards. Then I used the flashcards to keep it fresh till exam season. It was crazy, during revision lessons everyone else in the class would be going "uhhh I have no clue, that was two years ago" while I'd just know it.
I have tried different approaches, including using other people's flashcards (not as good - objectively they were high quality, but you gain a lot from writing your own + tailoring to your own way of looking at things) and learning from them (for my driving theory - terrible idea!). That hybrid approach is the best I've found, and the one I intend to use for my degree.

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- 0xDEAFBEAD 13 hours ago
  
  I appreciate you replying to my comments!
  I confess I'm interested to hear your thoughts re: the usefulness of SRS from a more holistic perspective.
  Gwern writes:
  >...if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it’s worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition. 5 minutes is the line that divides trivia from useful data.
  https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
  My sense is that there are very few facts I will spend more than 5 minutes of my life repeatedly looking up. And even then, many of those are facts that I will naturally end up memorizing regardless of SRS, since I'm using the info so often.
  I understand the utility of SRS for test takers or language learners. When Google is impractical or unavailable, memorization makes sense. But for everything else -- why not just Google it?
  
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  Alex-Programs 12 hours ago
  
  Honestly, I'm not sure I'm a particularly good person to ask about this. I've experimented with Anki for areas other than test taking and language learning, but it didn't stick.
  I used it for some geography stuff, and that was fine I suppose, I like geography, but I stopped after a while.
  I find it easy to remember things if I care about them. Ergo, if I care enough to put it in Anki, Anki is useless.
  Particularly with LLMs being a thing, you don't even need to concretely know what you're looking for - just give chatgpt a vague description and let it list out suggestions until it jogs your memory.
  When it comes to physics etc, you'll end up memorising everything relevant to the areas you actually use. In areas like "What is the star type of a star with a temperature of 6000K" - something that I memorised using Anki, and which took me a while - if I actually worked in that area of astrophysics I'd obviously learn that quite quickly.
  I suppose it could be useful for maintaining knowledge. Had I not been burnt out I would have kept up my flashcards through my gap year, which would've presumably been quite useful - I'm currently going through the slog of relearning how to integrate so I'm not totally embarrassed at uni!
  
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tikhonj 12 hours ago

Yeah, 100%. I worded my comment a bit awkwardly, but that's exactly what I was getting at too :)

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