Ask HN: Recommendations for Spaced Repetition (SRS) Beginners?

10 points

4 years ago

Someone posted a link to a Spaced Repetition article a few days ago [0]. I'd never heard of the concept before, and it sent me down a rabbit hole of different introductory and literature review articles [1-5], more in-depth discussions on how to adapt the method for more complex topics like mathematics [6-8], some previous HN discussions [9-11], various mainstream tools [12-15], as well as some tools currently being built by HN community members [16-18] (sorry if I missed anything important there). I've also gotten started and created and practized my first few dozen flash cards on some new topics I recently learnt, and the first experience has left me wondering a few things:

1. Are there downsides to this? Most reviews seem highly appreciative mentioning practically no downsides besides the time commitment, which supposedly pays off many times over, which just always makes me skeptical. Downsides I could imagine include eg: recent neuroscience suggests that forgetting & memory rearrangement are important elements of brain hygiene, related to decision-making, avoiding things like PTSD and others [19]. How sure are we that we're not messing with those?

2. It seems that the most recommended approach is to turn things you want to remember into a set of atomic questions that take <10s to answer. Are you aware of approaches that integrate better with note-taking? I wouldn't reviewing an interesting essay or reproducing an elegant proof in full, not just small tidbits.

2a. + Any approaches that integrate well with journalling? I wouldn't mind being reminded of a nice weekend trip with some pictures from time to time in a purely 'here's a nice memory' fashion, not questions like 'Who did you go on a trip with on Feb 9 2020?'.

3. So the basic workflow I could much rather see myself adopting on a long-term basis is something like: take 10+10mins each day to write down what you learnt or did in the past 24h that seems worth remembering, and review things from previous days (with some spacing algorithm behind it, and an option to remove things entirely). Do you know if there is a name for that / any science to it / tools that support it (it seems the Ilse notebook might be going in that direction)?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32381206

Introductions: [1] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition [2] https://andrewjudson.com/spaced-repitition/2022/06/03/spaced-repitition.html [3] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html [4] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ [5] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/

SRS for math: [6] https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics [7] https://cronokirby.com/posts/2021/02/spaced-repetition-for-mathematics/ [8] https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2011/03/10/space-math-repetition-repetition/

Previously on HN: [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895613 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24857437 [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833581

Mainstream tools: [12] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ - seems to be the most popular [13] https://super-memo.com/ - the OG [14] https://www.supermemo.com/en - web-app alternative to super-memo [15] https://mnemosyne-proj.org/ - OS alternative to Anki

HN community tools: [16] https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook [17] https://www.freshcardsapp.com [18] https://getpolarized.io/

Contrarian: [19] https://time.com/6171190/new-science-of-forgetting/

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