Self-programming through spaced repetition

26 [deleted] 25 May 2011 12:02AM

Spaced repetition software is a flashcard memorization technology based on the spacing effect. Personally, I think of it as a way of engineering dispositions, a form of self-programming. More concretely, I find that spaced repetition is helpful for
  • internalizing knowledge 
  • compressing recent experiences 
  • conditioning specific future behaviors 
  • making analogies 
  • laying the groundwork for future insights 
  • confusion identification 
  • concept clarification 
  • reconciling models 
  • creating new representations 
  • creating examples 
Below I give some principles, tips, and examples that aim at helping you get the most out of SRS. This post is compact, and I think it will be helpful to re-read it periodically as you use SRS more.
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Anki deck for biases and fallacies

20 phob 12 January 2011 03:34PM

Followup to: Spaced Repetition Database for A Human's Guide to Words

 


 

There's a great list of cognitive biases and fallacies on Wikipedia.  For those who wish to aid their learning with some Anki cards, I've shared a deck.  Just search "biases" in Anki.

For those who use a different program, here are the cards in a tab-separated file.

I'll soon update it to also contain the list of memory biases.

Spaced Repetition Database for A Human's Guide to Words

34 divia 10 January 2011 12:21AM

Followup to: Spaced Repetition Database for Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

I've updated my Anki database for the Less Wrong Sequences to include cards from A Human's Guide to Words. I've been trying to put less information on each card, and I relied on cloze deletion more for the newer ones.  Feedback is much appreciated. You can download them by opening up Anki, going to Download > Shared Deck and searching for Less Wrong Sequences.

I probably erred on the side of making way too many cards, but it seemed really important to me to internalize this stuff, since I think it has quite a lot of practical value. I can tell learning this deck has improved the quality of my thinking and my conversations with people because I'm better at noticing when I'm making one of the 37 mistakes and changing my course. I hope other people find it useful too!

Cheat codes

36 sketerpot 01 December 2010 09:19PM

Most things worth doing take serious, sustained effort. If you want to become an expert violinist, you're going to have to spend a lot of time practicing. If you want to write a good book, there really is no quick-and-dirty way to do it. But sustained effort is hard, and can be difficult to get rolling. Maybe there are some easier gains to be had with simple, local optimizations. Contrary to oft-repeated cached wisdom, not everything worth doing is hard. Some little things you can do are like cheat codes for the real world.

Take habits, for example: your habits are not fixed. My diet got dramatically better once I figured out how to change my own habits, and actually applied that knowledge. The general trick was to figure out a new, stable state to change my habits to, then use willpower for a week or two until I settle into that stable state. In the case of diet, a stable state was one where junk food was replaced with fruit, tea, or having a slightly more substantial meal beforehand so I wouldn't feel hungry for snacks. That's an equilibrium I can live with, long-term, without needing to worry about "falling off the wagon." Once I figured out the pattern -- work out a stable state, and force myself into it over 1-2 weeks -- I was able to improve several habits, permanently. It was amazing. Why didn't anybody tell me about this?

In education, there are similar easy wins. If you're trying to commit a lot of things to memory, there's solid evidence that spaced repetition works. If you're trying to learn from a difficult textbook, reading in multiple overlapping passes is often more time-efficient than reading through linearly. And I've personally witnessed several people academically un-cripple themselves by learning to reflexively look everything up on Wikipedia. None of this stuff is particularly hard. The problem is just that a lot of people don't know about it.

What other easy things have a high marginal return-on-effort? Feel free to include speculative ones, if they're testable.

Spaced Repetition Database for the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions Sequence

46 divia 25 June 2010 01:08AM

I'm a big fan of spaced repetition software.  There's a lot I could say about how awesome I think it is and how much it has helped me, but the SuperMemo website covers the benefits better than I could.  I will mention two things that surprised me.  First, I had no idea how much fun it would be; I actually really enjoy doing the reviews every day.  (For me this is hugely important, since it's unlikely I would have kept up with it otherwise.) Second, it's proven more useful than I had anticipated for maintaining coherence of beliefs across emotional states.  

I've tried memorizing a variety types of things such as emacs commands, my favorite quotations, advice about how to communicate with children, and characters from books.  One of my more recent projects has been making notecards of the lesswrong sequences.  I tried to follow the rules for formulating knowledge from the SuperMemo website, but deciding which bits to encode and how is subjective.  For reference, I asked my boyfriend to make a few too so we could compare, and his looked pretty different from mine. 

So, with those caveats, I thought I might as well share what I'd come up with.  As Paul Buchheit says, "'Good enough' is the enemy of 'At all'".  If you download Anki, my favorite spaced repetition software (free and cross-platform) and go to Download > Shared Deck in the Menu, you should be able to search for and get my Less Wrong Sequences cards.  I also put them up here, with the ones my boyfriend made of the first post for comparison.

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, so I think my experiment has been useful.

Let me know what you think!