Does anyone have thoughts on Justin Sung? He has a popular video criticizing active recall and spaced repetition. The argument: if you use better strategies for initially encountering an idea and storing it in long-term memory, then the corresponding forgetting curve will exhibit a more gradual decline, and you won’t need to use flashcards as frequently.
I see some red flags about Justin:
clickbait video titles
he’s selling an online course
he spends a lot of time talking about how wild it is that everyone else is wrong about this stuff and he is right
he rarely gives detailed recommendations for better ways to study; this video has the most concrete advice I’ve seen so far
I could not find any trustworthy, detailed reviews of his course (e.g. many of the comments in this Reddit post looked fishy), although I didn’t search very hard
Nonetheless, I’m curious if anyone has evaluated some of his critiques. I think a naive reader could conclude from all the spaced recall hype that the best way to learn is “just do flashcards in clever ways,” and this sounds wrong to me. One intuition pump: does Terrence Tao use flashcards?
Does anyone have thoughts on Justin Sung? He has a popular video criticizing active recall and spaced repetition. The argument: if you use better strategies for initially encountering an idea and storing it in long-term memory, then the corresponding forgetting curve will exhibit a more gradual decline, and you won’t need to use flashcards as frequently.
I see some red flags about Justin:
clickbait video titles
he’s selling an online course
he spends a lot of time talking about how wild it is that everyone else is wrong about this stuff and he is right
he rarely gives detailed recommendations for better ways to study; this video has the most concrete advice I’ve seen so far
I could not find any trustworthy, detailed reviews of his course (e.g. many of the comments in this Reddit post looked fishy), although I didn’t search very hard
Nonetheless, I’m curious if anyone has evaluated some of his critiques. I think a naive reader could conclude from all the spaced recall hype that the best way to learn is “just do flashcards in clever ways,” and this sounds wrong to me. One intuition pump: does Terrence Tao use flashcards?