Variability, not repetition, is the key to mastery

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/10/26/variable-mastery/

by maksimur • 4 years ago

222 49 4 years ago

Seems to be an argument more for spaced repetition and incremental reading.

"If your collection combines knowledge pertaining to different subject domains, the stream of new ideas and unexpected associations coming to your mind may surprise you" https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning

maksimur• 4 years ago

Spaced repetition and incremental reading don't have to be a conscious effort or implemented with flashcard systems, in fact it might be better not to, depending on your goals.

After extensive practice with such systems (talking years between physical flaschards, supermemo and anki), I found it leads to shallow understanding and bad linking between knowledge bits, even though I make sure I understand before committing something to spaced repetition. The valuable part looks like to be in the effort of understanding, thinking deeply and widely and summarizing. If you frequently read, practice and revise your knowledge and see how it interlinks, you will approximate spaced repetition at the very least.

All in all flashcard systems taught me how to study effectively by being forced to understand and "atomize" knowledge, so it wasn't useless.

throwamon• 4 years ago

Spaced repetition and incremental reading don't have to be a conscious effort
The valuable part looks like to be in the effort of understanding, thinking deeply and widely and summarizing.

Which part of this is not conscious effort? You just made a stronger case for such automated systems, especially for people who don't have good memory or abnormal levels of discipline and motivation.

tsumnia6• 4 years ago

After extensive practice with such systems (talking years between physical flaschards, supermemo and anki), I found it leads to shallow understanding and bad linking between knowledge bits

The issue with flashcard style practice is that it doesn't offer much in "application"-learning, which may help explain the shallow understanding. Spaced repetition needs to be repetition of applying the concept, not reviewing it. I know that its not easy to do for all domains, but if you look at musicians (as another poster described), actors, artists, athletes, and martial artists (to borrow the article's reference), their spaced repetition is more about applying their craft to build muscle memory as well as create "a-ha" moments of insight.

lhuser123• 4 years ago

To me is more about the balancing act. Memorization + understanding. Find the right combination that works for you.

abudabi123• 4 years ago

Learning and earning to teach is one shortcut.

noelwelsh• 4 years ago

Hmmm ... I'm a fan of differential learning and other techniques for variablity of practice. Was just reading through https://perceptionaction.com/vp/ earlier today. However I'm not convinced motor learning research transfers to all learning, which seems to be the basis for the claim made in the blog post. My own experience is motor learning is quite different to learning symbol manipulation tasks like maths and programming.

tsumnia6• 4 years ago

I'd actually disagree and my current research in CS Education is attempting to incorporate sport pedagogy into the learning process! I do plan to read through your link more thoroughly later tonight so thanks for that.

In a nutshell, we knock that CS1 courses have a high number of drop/fail/withdrawals due to several different factors. These include course difficulty, time management skills, and not feeling welcomed in the community (lack of representation, assuming CS students must love video games, etc). I don't focus much in inclusivity (though a number of faculty at NC State do), but I'm looking for methods to reduce difficulty. My thesis stems from methodologies I've used while teaching martial arts - specifically focusing on lower-level "build blocks" practice.

We can represent different learning activities by the amount of "creation" a student must engage in - Passive (watching lectures) require no creation, Active is repeating solution steps, Construction is critiquing steps, and Interactive is a co-creation process between the student and another student, instructor, or system. These form the ICAP framework by Mickie Chi. My arguments are that if a student is struggling with an Interactive exercise, like a traditional coding problem, then they should "downgrade" their practice to something lower level like self-explanation or debugging. However, if THOSE activities are still difficult, we can downgrade to an even lower-level of having them simply repeat (the mindless 'copy the dictionary' activities modern education hates).

My rationale again looks at how technical skills, like martial arts, are learned. Typically we start with warm ups, a brief demonstration on a few movements from the instructor, and then students are asked to pair up and drill the moves. Then the instructor builds on the moves with another demonstration, and then students repeat their process. Eventually, students spar (or apply the technique in a live problem). I argue that traditional coding problems are analogous to live sparring because students need to incorporate writing code, problem solving, debugging, code tracing, etc. If they struggle with some of those skills, they struggle in the activity. Rather than having them learn all the skills "in situ" while coding, maybe lower level deliberate practice targeting a single skill can help strengthen their overall foundation.

_tom_• 4 years ago

specifically focusing on lower-level "build blocks" practice

This has been my experience with teaching math and CS.

The biggest causes of failure is not identifying and teaching prerequisite skills.

The key point is prerequisite. Many times the skills needed to pass a math or CS class are not part of that class's curriculum.

Students who have encountered the building blocks already tend to do well, students who have not, tend to fail - no matter how much the class goes over the material in this class - because the problem lies before that material.

tgv2• 4 years ago

That doesn't make sense. There always is some overlap between tasks somewhere, but learning to program is generalization, and learning martial arts is motor control. There's no reason for them to be connected. That words like "active" can be applied to both, doesn't mean much. Should you find that your method works better than an existing method, that doesn't mean the metaphor for your method has any basis in reality.

MrVandemar• 4 years ago

I don't know if this is relevant but I found it fascinating.

I saw a documentary, long ago, about primary school students in China with abacuses. They used the abacuses for mathematics, and they were blindingly fast with them.

And then they stopped using the physical abacuses and just sort of mimed the actions with their hands. And then, later, they stopped using their hands.

So, as far as I could see, they were training themselves to do maths via their muscle memory, and it seemed terrifyingly effective.

tgv2• 4 years ago

Of course they differ. If they didn't, the best athletes and musicians would also be the best physicists, writers, and politicians. Planning skills may overlap, and possibly transfer, though.

freemrkt8• 4 years ago

Such an idea has been discussed for centuries. Adam Smith warned division of labor would lead people to become “…as stupid and ignorant as it is for a human creature to become.” by repeating the same career behaviors for too long.

IMO this explains a great deal about current society stuck on the idea re-training is a waste, the habit of re-electing politicians for decades being one outcome of living life “on the career escalator.”

Such an inner monologue becomes a default state of being.

Accepting simple memes like “will work for money” become the norm and “will work to acquire knowledge” becomes vulgar language.

gre• 4 years ago

A common tactic in practicing music is to play a passage slowed down, sped up, with varying rhythms, up/down an octave, etc, with the idea that if you have complete mastery you can also play it the way it's written.

hammock• 4 years ago

Interesting that this works on piano but is not practiced in singing.

lloeki• 4 years ago

Not my experience. I'm learning to sing, my spouse is a pro singer, she told me "pick a song, preferably one you don't know well so as not to be biased, sing it a thousand ways over and over, try it right, try it wrong, try whacky stuff, try nonsense stuff, talk it, rap it, twist it, warp it around, then do it all over again a thousand times, and finally, sing it your way."

josyulakrishna• 4 years ago

Indeed this is a very common practice in Carnatic Music too, the student is made to sing the same rhythm at different speeds of "Tala"(Beat)

RajT88• 4 years ago

Playing it on different instruments as well, in different configurations using different accessories (plectrum, bow, etc.).

If you can rock it on a total garbage instrument, it is going to be beautiful on a fine instrument.

bitwize• 4 years ago

When I took kung fu I was told "Do it slow, do it fast, do it normal." Slow and normal helped you refine your technique; fast helped you commit the technique to muscle memory so you don't overthink it. Training for speed also adds power.

kzrdude2• 4 years ago

We know "practice makes habit". So it's important to not flub it by doing it too fast in practice, then we form bad habits.

RHSman2• 4 years ago

Play it enough so you can’t forget it.

tetha• 4 years ago

I was about to bring an example from my own musical journey as well. Picking up a second instrument (from an E-Bass to an E-Guitar) has made learning music theory easier and more interesting. It's all the same, but you're looking at it and use it from different angles with different instruments.

bandyaboot• 4 years ago

Bruce Lee is reported to have said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” With all due respect to Mr. Lee, he might have been wrong about this one.

Yes, Bruce Lee must be wrong, because obviously it has to be one end of the spectrum or the other /s. How about the man who has practiced 100 kicks 100 times each? Maybe he’s the one to fear.

naet• 4 years ago

I think a better metaphor for the main point of the article might be the man who has practiced one kick in 10,000 different ways.

If he practiced it 10,000 times in the exact same spot on a punching bag he wouldn't have the same understanding of it that he would if he practiced it high, low, with the other leg, in a tournament bout, on the sand, eyes closed, after a punch, etc.

ckcheng• 4 years ago

The use of the Lee quote in the article is strange.

Of all people, Lee would never say to practice 10,000 times in exactly the same way ... and definitely wouldn't suggest doing so 10,000 times on a punching bag, seeing as Bags Don't Hit Back [0].

Lee obviously meant "the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times" in varying conditions, with varying timing, energy, and motion ... not in a single dead pattern.

[0] https://youtu.be/3zRsgsUWYks?t=10

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

At the risk of being a little tactless, duh.

An easy comparison is take a driver who's had three months of experience driving versus somebody with three years, they'll be a huge gap in proficiency. Now take the three-year driver and compare them against someone who's been driving for three decades, you're fine surprisingly there's very little difference in ability.

Our brains are ruthlessly efficient and the moment that they can optimize away learning, that's when you're no longer acquiring skill.

V__• 4 years ago

This sounds very much like differential learning (see Wolfgang Schollhorn) to me. In my personal experience it is a very potent training method when it comes to learning motor skills, and having observed two children learn to crawl and walk it also seems to be a "natural way" to learn for us.

I also observed myself learning non-motor skills better when applying this method in some form. I think most people here know about the yearly Advent of Code challenge. Often people use it to try out a new language and have fun. I believe one of the key reasons for its success (besides the fun) are the frequently similar, but slightly different, problems. Forcing people to approach it from slightly different viewpoints and trying out small variations, thus resulting in a deep understanding and learning effect.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

In my own experience, it has required both repetition, and variability.

I learn something new, every day, but what I learn, and how it is implemented, is highly dependent upon the phase my project is in.

Right now, the project I'm working on is in the "home stretch." There's still a lot more work needs doing, but it's fairly predictable, well-practiced stuff.

Getting to this point, though, has involved two years of researching alternative approaches, strategic and tactical designs and decisions, pivots, backpedalling, and bug-fixing.

And every day, I have been writing Swift code. Most of the time, I'm using the same techniques as I was yesterday, but, every now and then, I try something different. Sometimes, that becomes a new habit.

In my personal opinion, there's really nothing like developing and releasing shipping applications to provide a rich experience in both repetition, and variance.

begueradj• 4 years ago

The article's title is itself a clickbait. Starting the article to invalidate Bruce Lee's quote shows how much unworthy to read the rest. He spent all his life studying the body and mind and practicing dozens of martial arts to create and improve his own style, your fat pale narcissist ass dares to say that ? I hate it when people speak about subjects they have no clue about.

westurner• 4 years ago

Over how many generations?

Genetic algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

Mutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_(genetic_algorithm)

Crossover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossover_(genetic_algorithm)

Selection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_(genetic_algorithm)

...

AlphaZero / MuZero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero :

MuZero was trained via self-play, with no access to rules, opening books, or endgame tablebases.

Self-play algorithms essentially mutate and select according to the game rules. For a generally-defined mastery objective, are there subjective and/or objective game rules, and is there a distance metric for ranking candidate solutions?

galaxyLogic• 4 years ago

I think it has something to do with "Memory Palace". You solve the same or similar problem in different contexts. There is something similar and something different about the problem in all these different contexts. While seeing the different parts you also see the similar parts and can see how those are connected other by the dissimilar parts.

It is like seeing a 3 dimensional object from multiple viewpoint. Some things change some stay the same. You understand and thus remember the thing better because you know it's "essence", what is the same about it always.

henrydark• 4 years ago

This fits with the literature on block vs random order exercise in learning motor skills, where random order mostly outbeats block.

For example see [1]

[1] https://best-essays-service.org/essays/health/the-effect-of-...

kqr• 4 years ago

Also when practising throwing stuff, practising at varying distances yields better results than practising only at the single distance that is used to compare performance.

baxuz• 4 years ago

With anything physical, repetition is the prerequisite for variability.

I'd argue that it's the same for non-physical things as well.

otikik• 4 years ago

I have never done anything twice exactly the same way.

At the very least, on the second one I was a little bit older :)

To me It’s not variability, it’s repetition plus attention (which is much easier to get if you enter The Zone)

elefantastisch• 4 years ago

Highly recommended book on this topic:

https://www.retrievalpractice.org/make-it-stick

Variability, not repetition, is the key to mastery

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