Joel Liu's Library tagged flashcard → View Popular, Search in Google

Sep

2011

Hacker News | Ask HN: Are you an information addict?

Retain knowledge

news.ycombinator.com/item

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flashcard information Distraction

Yes. I find myself consuming more and more material that contains information that is more and more trivial.
Today's haul: found out the name and life story of the guy who played "Hoss" on Bonanza. Read an essay on tax policies in a state several hundred miles from my own. Went through an extended interview (linked from here) about life in North Korea. Researched various types of pulse oximeters. And that's just in the last couple of hours.
At one point in my life I would have thought "I have a voracious appetite for new knowledge. This is a good thing" But lately I'm seeing this in not-as-flattering terms. I'm more or less picking up little shiny things simply because they glitter. There's no depth or follow-through. There's no long-range goal of acquiring knowledge in any one area. It's all just stimulus-response.
I read so much and retain so little. Everything new pushes out something old. Jason Calcanis might be a dick. I'm still working on my conclusion about that.

Hacker News | Think You Know How To Study? Think Again

news.ycombinator.com/item

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flashcard learning education

As a professional student, I will save you all some time. The secret of studying is encompassed in three programs:
* Anki[1] (spaced repetition[2])
* SelfControl[3] (avoid procrastination, block websites)
* Pink Noise[4] (block noise to study anywhere, anytime)
[1]: http://ichi2.net/anki/
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
[3]: http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/
[4]: http://simplynoise.com/
philfreo 334 days ago | link

Would love to get your thoughts on Quizlet http://quizlet.com/
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1 more annotation(s)...
- philfreo 333 days ago | link
  
  Point taken on the "default subjects" on the homepage - they were just meant to show off some of the most common stuff we have, but with 3 millions flashcard sets it's not easy to show it all :)
  LaTeX, SRS, and study reminders are all three on our ideas list. We're making a big development push on audio first, and then are going to look more into these.
  Our "Learn Mode" keeps track of what you know and what you don't - but only in the short term. We'd love to have better ways to help you remember things long-term.

Aug

2008

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

www.wired.com/...ff_wozniak

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memory psychology algorithm Learning education flashcard

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
10 more annotation(s)...
- It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.
- In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.
- As a student at the Poznan University of Technology in western Poland in the 1980s, Wozniak was overwhelmed by the sheer number of things he was expected to learn. But that wasn't his most troubling problem. He wasn't just trying to pass his exams; he was trying to learn. He couldn't help noticing that within a few months of completing a class, only a fraction of the knowledge he had so painfully acquired remained in his mind. Wozniak knew nothing of the spacing effect, but he knew that the methods at hand didn't work.
- If students nonetheless manage to become expert in a few of the things they study, it's not because they retain the material from their lessons but because they specialize in a relatively narrow subfield where intense practice keeps their memory fresh.
- The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false. "The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory.
- Their results were impressive: The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet — as Neisser might have predicted — that insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.
- Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there's a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals change.
- For Wozniak, these misfires were less a product of scrambling than of an inevitable clash of goals. A person who understands the exact relationship between learning and time is forced to measure out his hours with a certain care. SuperMemo was like a genie that granted Wozniak a wish: unprecedented power to remember. But the value of what he remembered depended crucially on what he studied, and what he studied depended on his goals, and the selection of his goals rested upon the efficient acquisition of knowledge, in a regressive function that propelled him relentlessly along the path he had chosen. The guarantee that he would not forget what he learned was both a gift and a demand, requiring him to sacrifice every extraneous thing.
- The failure of SuperMemo to transform learning uncannily repeats the earlier failures of cognitive psychology to influence teachers and students. Our capacity to learn is amazingly large. But optimal learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.
- As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular — or supremely practical — replies. Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.

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Hacker News | Ask HN: Are you an information addict?

Hacker News | Think You Know How To Study? Think Again

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

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