I’m happy to see something about Anki here, but how are Sequences supposed to be SRS-able in any way? “Learning” them involves understanding, not memorization of text / facts.
Or is that the joke (“mysterious answers”) and I failed to see it?
That was my first reaction as well, until I noticed this phrase in the post which made me think:
I had read all the sequences before, but I have found that since I’ve started using the cards I’ve noticed the concepts coming up in my life more often
Likewise, I’ve read all the sequences many times over, but the skills described there just don’t come up othen in real life. Sure, it might be because they aren’t very useful. But also it might be because I compartmentalized them and keep forgetting to apply them when opportunities arise. It might be worthwhile to try out spaced repetition to test that hypothesis.
On the other hand, Schelling’s ideas stuck with me after reading the book once and I immediately started applying them, seeing conflicts and precommitment moves everywhere. So maybe Eliezer’s findings really are useless for mortals :-)
I think your concern is a valid one, but that there’s also a solution. I think reviewing the sequences with the mindset of trying to guess a password would merely reinforce the misguided idea of verbal behavior having inherent truth value. And that’s why I wouldn’t even really use the word “memorization” to describe what I’m doing.
I think the way to “learn” the sequences is to practice applying the concepts all the time, which is more easily accomplished if you’re primed to have them pop into your mind at the right moment. And my experience has been that SRS has helped enable that for me.
While using supermemo I found it useful to put the sequence posts into the system and use the built in process for progressively reading and extracting the most important elements of the text (key paragraphs and sentences) for more frequent exposure.
Reading complex material through multiple exposures is an effective way of understanding concepts that are multiple inferential steps away and the process of actively extracting the key messages ensures a more complete understanding. Having supermemo handle the process of prompting me with material from a large ‘to read’ list also does away with huge akrasia problems (by narrowing the bottleneck down to ‘use supermemo at all’).
The supermemo documentation supplies tips on how to go about absorbing large volumes of material, filtering them by priority, breaking them down into concepts worth learning and, when appropriate, breaking that down into individual facts or concepts that can be prompted. When they cannot be broken down further it can just be useful to have paragraphs pop up as a reminder. Just that much exposure will be enough reminder to keep the concept fresh in the brain.
When using supermemo to help learn material from a dense texbook that I happened to consider to be particularly worth memorizing I ended up creating diagrams of some of the concepts and the repetition questions consisted of partially redacted versions of the diagram that prompted recall of whatever bit was missing.
I note that Anki doesn’t necessarily support some of these applications. SuperMemo itself is abysmally ugly and a pain in the arse to learn but the feature set is clearly that of an application created by someone who wanted to personally optimise his learning over diverse set of situations. It will be extremely frustrating for me if I migrate to a more polished but more specialised system.
I’ve wanted to try incremental reading myself, but not enough to install Windows on my Mac. I’m glad to hear you find it useful though—that makes me more likely to make a greater effort to experiment with it at some point in the future.
I’m happy to see something about Anki here, but how are Sequences supposed to be SRS-able in any way? “Learning” them involves understanding, not memorization of text / facts.
Or is that the joke (“mysterious answers”) and I failed to see it?
That was my first reaction as well, until I noticed this phrase in the post which made me think:
Likewise, I’ve read all the sequences many times over, but the skills described there just don’t come up othen in real life. Sure, it might be because they aren’t very useful. But also it might be because I compartmentalized them and keep forgetting to apply them when opportunities arise. It might be worthwhile to try out spaced repetition to test that hypothesis.
On the other hand, Schelling’s ideas stuck with me after reading the book once and I immediately started applying them, seeing conflicts and precommitment moves everywhere. So maybe Eliezer’s findings really are useless for mortals :-)
del
I think your concern is a valid one, but that there’s also a solution. I think reviewing the sequences with the mindset of trying to guess a password would merely reinforce the misguided idea of verbal behavior having inherent truth value. And that’s why I wouldn’t even really use the word “memorization” to describe what I’m doing.
I think the way to “learn” the sequences is to practice applying the concepts all the time, which is more easily accomplished if you’re primed to have them pop into your mind at the right moment. And my experience has been that SRS has helped enable that for me.
While using supermemo I found it useful to put the sequence posts into the system and use the built in process for progressively reading and extracting the most important elements of the text (key paragraphs and sentences) for more frequent exposure.
Reading complex material through multiple exposures is an effective way of understanding concepts that are multiple inferential steps away and the process of actively extracting the key messages ensures a more complete understanding. Having supermemo handle the process of prompting me with material from a large ‘to read’ list also does away with huge akrasia problems (by narrowing the bottleneck down to ‘use supermemo at all’).
The supermemo documentation supplies tips on how to go about absorbing large volumes of material, filtering them by priority, breaking them down into concepts worth learning and, when appropriate, breaking that down into individual facts or concepts that can be prompted. When they cannot be broken down further it can just be useful to have paragraphs pop up as a reminder. Just that much exposure will be enough reminder to keep the concept fresh in the brain.
When using supermemo to help learn material from a dense texbook that I happened to consider to be particularly worth memorizing I ended up creating diagrams of some of the concepts and the repetition questions consisted of partially redacted versions of the diagram that prompted recall of whatever bit was missing.
I note that Anki doesn’t necessarily support some of these applications. SuperMemo itself is abysmally ugly and a pain in the arse to learn but the feature set is clearly that of an application created by someone who wanted to personally optimise his learning over diverse set of situations. It will be extremely frustrating for me if I migrate to a more polished but more specialised system.
I’ve wanted to try incremental reading myself, but not enough to install Windows on my Mac. I’m glad to hear you find it useful though—that makes me more likely to make a greater effort to experiment with it at some point in the future.