Neuroprosthetics is an interesting term.
It was the spring of 1955. I was finishing my second year of graduate physics at U.C.L.A…I changed my field of study from physics to mathematics…I attended classes and studied 50–60 hours a week, generally including Saturdays and Sundays. I had read about the psychology of learning in order to be able to work longer and harder. I found that “spaced learning” worked well: study for an hour, then take a break of at least ten minutes (shower, meal, tea, errands, etc.). One Sunday afternoon about 3 p.m., I came to the co-op dining room for a tea break…My head was bubbling with physics equations, and several of my good friends were sitting around chatting.
This is from a footnote, to me it seems that it’s taking less about spaced repetition of facts and more about taking breaks. “You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive….Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” - Richard Hamming, You and Your Research
In the literature, the benefit from spaced repetition is largest for simple tasks, but is still relatively large for complex tasks.
the research favors questions which force the user to use their memory as much as possible; in descending order of preference:
- free recall
- short answers
- multiple-choice
- Cloze deletion
- recognition
This seems relatively consistent with my own experience, minus free recall! I’m going to attempt to implement free recall cards in my own study, guided by this comment.
the most common mistakes with spaced repetition are
- formulating poor questions and answers
- assuming it will help you learn, as opposed to maintain and preserve what one already learned (It’s hard to learn from cards, but if you have learned, it’s much easier to then devise a set of flashcards that will test your weak points)
This seems consistent with my personal experience that I usually struggle to remember cards when I outsourced the creation of them (using shared decks or having an LLM generate a deck), but only when I am unfamiliar with the base material. When I am familiar with the base material, it works quite well.
The How Much To Add section is quite interesting. “[D]on’t use spaced repetition if you need it sooner than 5 days or it’s worth less than 5 minutes.”
I get all sorts of questions - now I’m trying to see whether a Haskell fragment is syntactically correct, now I’m pronouncing Korean hangul and listening to the answer, now I’m trying to find the Ukraine on a map, now I’m enjoying some A.E. Housman poetry, followed by a few quotes from LessWrong quote threads, and so on. Other people use it for many other things; one application that impresses me for its simple utility is memorizing names & faces of students although learning musical notes is also not bad.
SR software in general are just one of my favorite tools: it’s based on a famous effect discovered by science, and it exploits it elegantly and usefully. It’s a testament to the Enlightenment ideal of improving humanity through reason and overcoming our human flaws; the idea of SR is seductive in its mathematical rigor.
Overall a great post! On critiques, the writing (common to most of Gwern’s writing) is quite stiff but also flowery, in an odd way. The webpage itself is also frustratingly bespoke. But, the content itself was very useful.