I appreciate the input, truly, but I can confidently state that’s not the case in my situation. This happens even on the simplest questions that I know cold, and is a problem with mental fatigue, monotony, and reading. After the 100th card, I would expect similar results from “what color is the sky” occasionally. I highly doubt I am dyslexic, but I might be a little ADHD. Once again, I do not presume everyone has similar results, but when I did 150 cards per day (and lord help me if I missed a day), easy cards posed a significant drain on my time and mental energy.
ancientcampus
Karma: 373
Frankly, because at the volume I was running, it was far too great an investment of time. When I stopped, I had about 75-100 scheduled (learned) flashcards per day if I added nothing the day before, though I usually added 60-some every day. The cards would take me 1-2 hours, and the amount kept building as I was adding to it faster than I was pushing them “out”.
Additionally, here our mileage may vary, but even with easy flashcards I occasionally find myself staring dumbly at it for ten or more seconds before I realize what it’s asking and smack my head. So I end up trimming out the stupid-easy ones, but that starts to defeat the purpose. Thus, for myself personally, I won’t duplicate in flashcards what I’m already memorizing elsewhere.
I know that everyone is different, so this is just my experience and what I have observed in other people. If others continue to have success with SRS, then far be it from me to insist they fix what isn’t broken.
It’s encouraging to see so much interest! I’ll try to pull something together in the next few weeks.
A great point. I can confidently say mine is at least “average”, likely above average. I consider myself a “visual learner,” with good “story memory” and I agree that as such memory palaces are a particularly good for me. However, when I use the technique, I’d say it’s mostly non-visual. I’d guess it’s 20% me “seeing” the room, 10% “everything else” (texure, sound, smell, emotion, all of which I find much harder but make deliberate effort to employ), and 70% conceptual “The spaceship is crashing through the door, sending shards of wood scattered across the bedroom”. That is one of the many “secrets” that make the technique so useful to me: most every object should perform an action that would in real life permanently damage or alter the room. With tricks like that, I think it is helpful for most all people, even those not visually inclined.
For what it’s worth: I have no data on this myself, but my study coach posits that everyone can do it, some have more trouble than others, but when done well it’s so effective that most everyone should benefit. He says most of his students are resistant, but almost all of them profess loving it once they develop the skillset to use it.
Truthfully: I tried and failed miserably when I tried shorter articles (eHow, wikipedia, etc). My study skills coach taught me; his name is Ryan Orwig and teaches medical professionals around the country; he’s talked with memory champions and has ~10 years refining the technique specifically for medicine (but it works with any large body of facts, I think it would help with Law too). So, unfortunately there’s no resource I can point to. I can’t share his powerpoint, but I can make and share my own, which I will do when I have time.
That said, I just skimmed Brienne’s presentation in Ben_LandauTaylor’s link, and it seems to hit many of the points I like. I’ll listen to the whole thing later to see what I have to add.
Link to Ryan Orwig’s class, his travel schedule is on the right: thestatprogram.com
Great question. It’s been a long transition from flashcards. I developed the picture technique myself over a year and a half ago. If I learned a fact a year ago, if I studied it using the picture technique, I have about 70% recall if I reviewed it once 6 months ago. If I used flashcards for a month, I have 5% recall now. If I used flashcards continuously (~1-2 hrs per day) for 6 months then stopped using the deck 6 months ago, I have about 10% recall.
(I did a very cursory self-test, then approximated these numbers. It’s very far from perfect, but I didn’t pull them from a hat. For the memory palace numbers, this is pulled from what I’m currently studying, so is reliable.)
I am still in the honeymoon phase for memory palaces. If I reviewed them once a week after creating them, I have about 90% recall one week following that. I currently have 100% recall for the 4 lists ~10 items long that I made last month and have reviewed 3 times each, but haven’t reviewed in the last week.
You are absolutely correct; this is a hair worth splitting. I meant “spaced repetition flashcards”, and I have only seen formal spaced repetition algorithms applied to flashcards. In my particular case, I end up with 30 or so “pages” of related information, as opposed to 500 flashcards. I agree that using spaced repetition algorithms to tell me when to study which page is likely better than alternative methods, though I haven’t found an algorithm optimized for that sort of thing, and at the moment my intuition of “when I’m forgetting” is sufficient for the low number of separate objects to study.
[For this comment, I will use the term “page” to mean any collection of related information, be it a list, table, memory palace, notes on a single topic, etc.]
To be explicit: I vote against using spaced repetition (of any sort) to identify specific facts within a “page” of information. When reviewing a page, of course you can go quickly over the parts you know well and dwell on the parts you don’t, but I would encourage the student to not completely ignore the other details “until it’s time.”
As an example: I have a collection of facts that can be represented as a large table or as individual facts. If I study it in a table, then I get the advantage of keeping the “big picture in mind”, plus I can activate spatial memory as well as rote. If I study it as separate facts: the Pro is I can use spaced repetition to greater effect, not reviewing the parts I know better, but the loss of the picture and the spatial memory makes it not worth the cost. (Note that the “big picture” isn’t a single sentence I can write down; it’s noticing trends in the data, how column A and B are similar except in in key areas, etc.)
As always, my experience is only in high volumes of information that can be organized vaguely hierarchically. (That said, I think if you look hard enough, you can find categories or hierarchies for any large volume of information, outside of truly random things like the sequence of a deck of cards.)
Caveat #2: “self testing” is really important! So if you are quitting flash cards, make sure you find some new way to quiz yourself, don’t just read passively.
Conclusion: -Spaced repetition algorithms might be viable, though I don’t know any suitable to my needs -I claim that spaced repetition flashcards are not useful for large volumes that have categories and/or relationships between facts. -benkuhn rightfully points out that my vendetta is mostly against flashcards, or any method focusing on “terminal facts” in random order without also studying closely related facts.
Life application: 1) If you see a table, don’t vaporize it into your flashcards. Rather, study the table. 2) If you see a mass of new data: ask yourself if you can organize it in a way meaningful to you, then study it in the structure you built.
Very nice article! Regarding the benefits of alcohol: for those curious, it is well established at this point that alcohol is actually protective against arterial plaque; it just has all sorts of other problems. This is just for kicks mostly, but I read a publication that said that for people who have ALL the following criteria:
Male (No women because alcohol increases risk of breast cancer)
45 years Does not smoke No family history of addiction or substance abuse No personal history of addiction or substance abuse “Occasional drinker” (has a couple drinks a month) Never binge drinks No history of liver, pancreatic problems, or several other problems I can’t remember
They said it is likely tat 1-2 drinks per day, no more than 2 per day, and no more than 10 per week, will actually increase life expectancy.
Additionally, it’s just alcohol in general that helps. Red Wine had no significant impact over other alcohols.
A vote against spaced repetition
I recently built a set of pegs (number/image pairs), myself, and love it. I don’t use it for lists, but I find it helpful for memorizing numbers in general—it gives me a way to encode numbers and pin them to objects (say, someone’s birthday, or the dose of a certain drug)
I know this feels obvious on paper, but when I look at people arguing for evolution or vaccines, it doesn’t look that way. I want to stress again that most people don’t go outright and insult people. Rather, arguments from the pro-vaccine, pro-evolution, etc. camps often have a subtle context of, “this is obvious, why are we even still talking about this?” When summed up across countless conversations, though, it constructs a trope of “people who don’t believe in evolution are ignorant savages.” It’s then really hard to keep that subtext out of your conversations.
True. I think hardly anyone on either side would use the term “anti-science”. The terms aren’t important, but rather the article is referring to the “us-vs-them” mentality.
Also, I like the term “competitor priesthood.”
Good article, thanks! I especially appreciated the “story”. Just some feedback, I would have benefited from a conclusion paragraph summarizing the verdicts.
Publication: the “anti-science” trope is culturally polarizing and makes people distrust scientists
Using “Startpage.com″ (which runs anonymous google searches—useful for getting non-personalized results), I got:
Alicorn—results #9 and #10 (behind lots of My Little Pony) Luminosity—result #4, which is pretty good given the brain-training game of the same name.
That’s… kind of extreme, but also sounds very effective. I’ve tried lesser methods against bad habits that aren’t quite as harmful as cigarette smoking, but they haven’t worked. I’m going to try your trick.
Seconded; all the above statements are true for me too.
Wow, that’s a big help to me. I can never remember the pentatonic scale, so that alone acts as an easy reference no matter what key I’m in.
Thanks for this! I remember in a previous discussion (a few months back), someone mentioned AMF not yet being tax-deductible in their area. I just noticed that it is indeed tax deductible in the US presently, so I thought I would say so. Hurrah!
I gotta say I like the philanthropy discussions on LW.
Excellent question; I’d like to know too.