Instead of reading a textbook with SRS and notes, skim more books (not just textbooks), solve problems, read wikis and papers, talk to people, watch talks and lectures, solve more problems from diverse sources. Instead of memorizing definitions, figure out how different possible definitions work out, how motivations of an area select definitions that allow constructing useful things and formulating important facts. The best exercise is to reconstruct main definitions and results on a topic you’ve mostly forgotten or never learned that well. Math is self-healing, so instead of propping it up with SRS, it’s much better to let it heal itself in your mind. (It heals in its own natural order, not according to card schedule.) And then, after you’ve already learned the material, maybe read a textbook on it cover to cover, again.
(I used to have a mindset similar to what the post expresses, and what it recalls, though not this extreme. The issue is that there is a lot of material available to study on standard topics, especially if you have access to people fluent in them and can reinvent parts of them on your own, which lets this hold even for obscure or advanced topics where not a lot is written up. So the effort applied to memorizing things or recalling old problems can be turned to better understanding and new problems. This post seems to be already leaning in this direction, so I’m just writing down my current guess at a healthy learning practice.)
I find that all of those activities enhance my SRS experience, and my SRS experience (sometimes dramatically) enhances all of those activities!
Particularly since I use SRS to capture concepts, intuitions, and rich relationships, not just isolated facts. Rote memorization doesn’t work very well with SRS anyway—as with everything, it works best when used to understand a topic in its full intuitive glory.
Instead of reading a textbook with SRS and notes, skim more books (not just textbooks), solve problems, read wikis and papers, talk to people, watch talks and lectures, solve more problems from diverse sources. Instead of memorizing definitions, figure out how different possible definitions work out, how motivations of an area select definitions that allow constructing useful things and formulating important facts. The best exercise is to reconstruct main definitions and results on a topic you’ve mostly forgotten or never learned that well. Math is self-healing, so instead of propping it up with SRS, it’s much better to let it heal itself in your mind. (It heals in its own natural order, not according to card schedule.) And then, after you’ve already learned the material, maybe read a textbook on it cover to cover, again.
(I used to have a mindset similar to what the post expresses, and what it recalls, though not this extreme. The issue is that there is a lot of material available to study on standard topics, especially if you have access to people fluent in them and can reinvent parts of them on your own, which lets this hold even for obscure or advanced topics where not a lot is written up. So the effort applied to memorizing things or recalling old problems can be turned to better understanding and new problems. This post seems to be already leaning in this direction, so I’m just writing down my current guess at a healthy learning practice.)
Why “instead?”
I find that all of those activities enhance my SRS experience, and my SRS experience (sometimes dramatically) enhances all of those activities!
Particularly since I use SRS to capture concepts, intuitions, and rich relationships, not just isolated facts. Rote memorization doesn’t work very well with SRS anyway—as with everything, it works best when used to understand a topic in its full intuitive glory.