Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)

https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge

by swatson741 • 11 months ago

159 35 11 months ago

_qua2• 11 months ago

If I hadn't stubbled upon this essay and Anki, I think by way of a Wired article, I'm not sure I would have gotten into or passed medical school. They were eye opening and turned me from an average smart student into a leader of my class. I had planned to keep doing my cards after moving on to fellowship but alas, life gets in the way.

8s2ngy• 11 months ago

That's impressive! Would you mind sharing how you used Anki for your studies?

pessimizer2• 11 months ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/wiki/index

titanomachy• 11 months ago

You deserve some credit, though. Setting this up properly takes quite a bit of discipline and persistence. I only did it for certain memorization-heavy classes and I still found it to be kind of a chore. Mostly in college I just tried to understand things deeply and hoped that this kind of understanding/memory would be reasonably durable. That got me good enough grades for what I was trying to do, but it probably would not have been sufficient for a very competitive professional school like medicine.

_qua2• 11 months ago

That's how I did undergrad. Wasn't even much of a note taker, usually just paid attention during lectures and did the reading. That's not enough for the insane volume of information you have to learn in med school. There are certain subjects like physiology that are very conceptual but even there you need to know quite a bit of detail, and then of course the memorization heavy topics like anatomy, microbiology and others.

There's a reason Anki is used so heavily by med students these days.

greymalik• 11 months ago

It feels circular. How is learning different from understanding? How is understanding different from knowledge? I’m supposed to understand before I learn. How do I understand if not through learning? I’m supposed to understand to gain knowledge. Isn’t knowledge understanding?

dleeftink• 11 months ago

Enter: knowledge. It's a messy thing. Before you know it, it 'clicks'. That's the only thing worth chasing.

brian_spiering• 11 months ago

You are correct that those concepts are interrelated. It works well not to get caught up in precise definitions. Instead, reflect on your current level and take the next best step.

volemo• 11 months ago

How does one walk? To walk one needs to move their foot forward, to move their foot they have to lift it up, to lift a foot up they first have to place it down, and that requires moving it forward. It feels circular!

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.

aDyslecticCrow3• 11 months ago

Memorization is part of learning. Memorized knowledge is knowledge. But memorized knowledge isnt understanding.

You can fully understand something without being able to recall it perfectly later.

lemonberry• 11 months ago

Not sure if this will help (or if it's even correct), but Wilfrid Sellars in his essay "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" talks about the difference between "knowing that" to ride a bike one needs to put pressure on the pedals to rotate the tire and move the bicycle and rider forward and "knowing how" to ride a bike. To me the latter is indicative of understanding and the former is information or knowledge.

JeliHacker• 11 months ago

Mortimer Adler's How To Read A Book talks about "reading for understanding" a lot. By understanding, he means getting a holistic feel for the content. Grokking, if you will. An analogy is reading a newspaper article on what happened in Gaza yesterday versus reading a 500-page book on the history of Palestine and writing a report on it. In the first example you are reading for facts (knowledge), in the second you are reading for understanding

pessimizer2• 11 months ago

There is a lot of fetishization of this terminology in the spaced repetition community. It's really best to ignore it, it's not based in much.

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.

obbie3• 11 months ago

Understanding is prior to learning. Learning is required when prior understanding fails to extend/generalize/transfer. Understanding is a residue of learning.

directevolve• 11 months ago

Lack of understanding would mean you haven’t decided meaning from the words on the page. He gives the example of memorizing a German textbook without speaking German.

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.

sandspar• 11 months ago

If you've used AI to create flashcards then you've probably encountered many annoyances. For example, AI-created flashcards tend to be too wordy. Share this article with them and ask them to follow the rules. It makes for better flashcards.

joshdavham• 11 months ago

If you wanna go deeper, I’d recommend checking out https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Guru

It’s a bit of a treasure trove for us spaced repetition nerds!

nxobject• 11 months ago

Sadly, it seems to (as of 6 hours after parent post) intermittently produce "max connections exceeded" messages :( Poor old hug of death!

dang• 11 months ago

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)

hereme8883• 11 months ago

Too bad Piotr Wozniak (inventor of SuperMemo) is such a hermit and uncompromising of his lifestyle choices, that most of his life's work was eventually superseded by open-source solutions (Anki + FSRS).

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.

steve19774• 11 months ago

Last time I checked, Anki was nowhere near SuperMemo in regards to incremental reading features. Especially not with FSRS.

SuperMemo is actually almost the only reason I still keep a Windows VM.

gobr• 11 months ago

Do you use Incremental Reading? I've tried many times but I don't see the point in it, probably never got it.

Anki way makes more sense.

hereme8883• 11 months ago

"the only reason I still keep a Windows VM."

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.

melagonster• 11 months ago

But the whole Anki community is surrounded by his idea! Thanks for his effort; he makes learning possible for an uncountable number of people.

aDyslecticCrow3• 11 months ago

I have notes with me for anything of importance. rule 2 and beyond is of no concern to me.

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.

treetalker• 11 months ago

I always thought that point 1 is obvious (don't try to memorize Goethe in the original if you don't understand any German) and that point 2 is where it's at, and what most people underemphasize (learn the material before you try to memorize it). Granted, some types of learning and memorization go hand in hand; but for me the key point is to not try to use SRS to learn the material. Writing and rewriting notes; explaining topics out loud to myself and others; and using information to create something of my own — those are the ways I learn best. And at that point I've naturally memorized a lot already because I've "internalized" it; the spaced recall system becomes more of a repeating task list to remind me to practice recalling what I already learned, right before I would forget it. In that way it's similar to my OmniFocus lists of repeating maintenance tasks and chores, except that the repetition scheme varies with my forgetting curve instead of on a plain daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly schedule.

aDyslecticCrow3• 11 months ago

Writing and rewriting notes; explaining topics out loud to myself and others; and using information to create something of my own — those are the ways I learn best. And at that point I've naturally memorized a lot already because I've "internalized" it.

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.

Mars008• 11 months ago

Reimplementing it in 'proper' way with LLM assistance in development and functionality looks like a great project. Hold your breath...

Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)

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