It’s a bit of a treasure trove for us spaced repetition nerds!
Learning is circular. You do it step by step, one bite at a time: you learn a fact, you understand its connection to other facts you know, you gain a little knowledge, you repeat.
Rules of formulating knowledge in learning (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22524122 - March 2020 (2 comments)
Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18404150 - Nov 2018 (17 comments)
Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13047576 - Nov 2016 (35 comments)
Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10785221 - Dec 2015 (1 comment)
I had tons of material in SuperMemo for years. Gave up and fully switched to Anki.
At least I'm thankful for his spaced-repetition algorithms. Also, his articles restored my love for learning and helped me confirm that school was an insane waste of time and resources.
You can fully understand something without being able to recall it perfectly later.
I got through uni on entirely point 1, and only relied on accidental memorization from the process of understanding.
I find alot of study advice under-emphasise point 1, and over-emphasise memorization techniques.
There's a reason Anki is used so heavily by med students these days.
I think their mental metaphor is that cards allow you to memorize nodes, and understanding is having a feel for the entire graph. But cards also help you to memorize links between nodes, subgraphs, overviews, principles, etc...
I also think it's mostly a ready made array of excuses to read off to somebody who is having a crisis of faith about whether a Anki is helping them or not: you're holding it wrong. You haven't put in the work. Are you making your own decks, you can't use other people decks because making your own decks = understanding (for mysterious reasons, do you really understand something you can't remember?) Are your facts atomic enough? Basically direct or indirect paraphrases of the Supermemo wiki.
Supermemo didn't discover anything, he computerized something that desperately needed to be computerized, and at that point wasn't restricted to the algorithms that could be executed by shuffling around physical cards, such as Leitner boxes (which are awesome, still, by the way.) His analysis is great to read and often insightful, but is no more profound than many others and often far less scientifically grounded. People just are addicted to parasocial relationships with self-improvement gurus.
When I need to read and learn, it needs to happen within a timeframe. Not "some day" when it shows up in my queue again.
Another key point: its dependencies on native but very outdated Windows libraries.
No plugins, no way to modify or improve anything. Fully closed source. Feature request? Wait months until your email shows up in Dr. Wozniak's queue for incremental-reading of his emails. And one year until maybe the next version of SuperMemo. Or write the request on his wiki, to be debated by community members. It's so impractical.
Memorization without learning means that you don’t know the relationships between individual facts that give them meaning and relative importance that lets you make wise decisions about what to memorize and what not to for your purposes.
So: make sure you understand what the words and phrases you’re reading mean (understanding). Look up terms and definitions. Identify the main points of the sentence, paragraph, page and chapter and why they matter (learning). Then memorize those main points, starting with the most important basics.
Yes precisely. That's generally where i end it. If I've understood the topic well enough to reason about it, rephrase in a compact form, or explain it to someone else, i consider the process done. Doing so during university always made me pass reliably.
Flash cards & repeated practice always felt like a cheat to memorize parts i had not sufficiently understood or learnt. Memorization techniques are a great way to pass exams and get grades, but terrible way to learn in the longrun. Any details that would truly require memorization techniques (numbers or large lists of terms) are things i would want to look up to be sure of in the real-world anyway, so why try memorize them.
Whenever i look up "study advice" i often see memorization techniques, but very rarely see plain old; "read the book slowly page-by-page, Write down any questions, summarize whenever you feel you understood the section, go back to previous chapters when confused, cross check with other sources or explanations if not sufficient, try practice problems to check if you've understood correctly"
This article leans in that direction as-well; 1&2 are mentioned briefly, but encompass the vast majority learning process. All the rest of the points are memorization aids that i would consider footnotes to the learning process at best.
This video [1] is the second step of the process, the first would be making that extract from an article or larger chunk of text imported. Often, I read a little bit of the text and just delete the whole entry if it turns out not to be good/interesting/useful to me.
You can check my YouTube channel, 'Pleasurable Learning', for a course and many videos on how to get started with incremental reading.
If you have deadlines for certain knowledge, then this can still be managed; it just requires some manual overruling via 'advance' or subset reviews.
You can also put stuff in something called "pending queue" and then just pull it from there once you're ready for it.
Only for the subsequent repetitions the algorithm will take over. This is like reviewing notes basically.
Also, you can manually advance repetitions if needed, for example before an exam.
It works very well for me and I constantly have to (and want to) learn lots of stuff.