Numinous Productions

You could probably build a good Tree Language for flash cards. (random note: I own the domain http://www.leitnersystem.com/ b/c I am fascinated by the non-linear effectiveness of spaced repetition. I hired someone to write content for it but haven't touched it in a while. Also stumbled upon this recently, https://numinous.productions/ttft/, which I love, particularly this chart: https://numinous.productions/ttft/assets/dem_retention-2x.png)

Of course they are. By design the flash cards are small atomic pieces of knowledge that can be answered simply. If the grand overarching concept is a web of interconnecting ideas, then the flashcards are supposed to help you maintain that by making sure you don't forget the small ideas the structure is made of. It's also by design that some of the questions are, as you say, laughably simple. It's to catch people who aren't properly engaging with the text as early as possible. Nielsen and Matuschak are sensible to these sorts of critiques. Quantum country is part experiment after all and they've been learning, adjusting, and experimenting with what works best. If you want a bit of context of where they've come from and where they want to go, I recommend this: https://numinous.productions/ttft/

> Notebooks on the other hand are a god damned abomination. I completely disagree. Notebooks are an excellent way of doing literate programming, because they go beyond plain text, and integrate richly formatted text, tables, figures, videos with code. This is excellent where the human is following a line of reasoning, and offloading the computation to the computer. The reasoning is explained via the non-code, made concrete via the code cells, and its effects shown via the code cells. Of course, people can abuse the conveniences of the medium to write really bad code, and follow some really bad practices. But that doesn't mean the medium is bad. In fact, I think if you forced people to stop using notebooks, their productivity would drop by quite a bit. Notebooks are tool for thought [1]. The solution is to teach them better practices, and provide better tools within the notebook interface that will help people write better code. [1] https://numinous.productions/ttft/

In a more recent article Michael Nielsen and his co-author Andy Matuschak have adjusted their thinking somewhat: https://numinous.productions/ttft/ “One of us has previously asserted (Michael Nielsen, Augmenting Long-Term Memory (2018)) that in spaced-repetition memory systems, users need to make their own cards. The reasoning is informal: users often report dissatisfaction and poor results when working with cards made by others. The reason seems to be that making the cards is itself an important act of understanding, and helps with committing material to memory. When users work with cards made by others, they lose those benefits. Quantum Country violates this principle, since users are not making the cards. This violation was a major concern when we began working on Quantum Country. However, preliminary user feedback suggests it has worked out adequately. A possible explanation is that, as noted above, making good cards is a difficult skill to master, and so what users lose by not making their own cards is made up by using what are likely to be much higher-quality cards than they could have made on their own. In future, it’s worth digging deeper into this issue, both to understand it beyond informal models, and to explore ways of getting the benefits of active card making.”

This piece reminds me of another article musing on the necessity of manual memory: https://numinous.productions/ttft/#how-important-is-memory. That article articulated the reason slightly differently, arguing you need to hold multiple concepts in your head at the same time in order to develop original ideas. Still, I'm not sure you have to remember everything, but I agree you have to remember the foundational things at the right abstraction layer, upon which you are trying to synthesize something new.

This idea was the foundation for the Quantum Country book [0], which was essentially an experiment in combining reading with spaced repetition learning to let you do just that: understand a topic deeply. Anyone interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the idea can read about it in the blog post [1] the co-authors wrote. For anyone who objects to the idea that rote-memorisation can aide learning rather than simply let you mechanically repeat facts, you should read the paragraph "How important is memory, anyway?" [2]. [0]: https://quantum.country/ [1]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/ [2]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/#how-important-is-memory

I believe the root of the problem is a misconception of how humans function. The prevalent trends in related fields, from AI/Neuroscience [1] to PKM/TFT [2], are further entrenching this crude rational/willpower-based perspective. Perhaps the true (meta)rational perspective is to actually understand how to embrace the larger complexity of human experience (including sensibility/creativity/play...). Maybe the real willpower is to stop obsessing over this limited viewpoint (and the fears it produces) all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain [2] https://numinous.productions/ttft/

You may be interested in Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen's work on mnemonic media. - https://andymatuschak.org/ - https://withorbit.com/ - https://numinous.productions/ttft/

I'm not sure why this currently links to the PDF of the article [0], rather than the webpage, which includes an embedded animation of an interaction, and embedded YouTube videos: https://numinous.productions/ttft/ [0]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/print/TTFT.pdf

> Similar things can be said about the textbook and the lecture If you haven't yet, maybe look at Andy Matuschak's "Why books donʼt work" [1] and " How can we develop transformative tools for thought?" [2] which connect these same ideas to education in general. [1] https://andymatuschak.org/books/ [2] https://numinous.productions/ttft/

Hi, all. Author of the project here. Sorry to have caused some confusion: this is part of a research project, and it's not yet meant to be terribly legible to a public audience. In the near-term, this project is about augmenting written texts so that readers can easily remember the key details. See https://quantum.country for an example or https://numinous.productions/ttft for detailed background and discussion.

'just keep trying' is a straw man that nobody has mentioned until just now. Yes, it’s possible that there are some concepts we have yet to think of. See: https://numinous.productions/ttft/ The explanation of how hard it would be to come up with Arabic numerals if you didn’t already have them covers this. However the point here is that we can learn from this, and we now know a lot more about how to do hard things. ‘It’s too hard and we should give up’ (the countervailing straw man) is even less supported by history than ‘keep trying’.

The author is right there with you on this. If we consider books a knowledge transfer tool then the basic literacy training provided by most education systems lacks the information pipeline and tooling you describe, see Matuschak on transformative tools for thought [0]. The basic problem space is summarized as "books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it." [1] 0. https://numinous.productions/ttft/ 1. https://andymatuschak.org/books/

Authors explain background and motivation for spaced repetition and mnemonic media in this extensive article. May be helpful if you're seriously getting into this. https://numinous.productions/ttft/

quantum.country is actually a study in the effectiveness of spaced repetition. Andy and Michael have documented the results from Quantum Country here — https://numinous.productions/ttft/

I think it would be valuable, I've actually had this idea (but not the competence/bandwidth to actually build it, alas). It could become a platform for courses built around SRS, or learning materials like Michael Nielsen's mnemonic media: https://numinous.productions/ttft/ .

Michael Nielsen (with Andy Matuschak) also wrote about how Hindu-Arabic numerals enabled more powerful kinds of thinking (compared with Roman numerals.) https://numinous.productions/ttft/#how-to-invent-hindu-arabic-numerals > ...the Hindu-Arabic numerals aren’t just an extraordinary piece of design. They’re also an extraordinary mathematical insight. They involve many non-obvious ideas, if all you know is Roman numerals. Perhaps most remarkably, the meaning of a numeral actually changes, depending on its position within a number. Also remarkable, consider that when we add the numbers 72 and 83 we at some point will likely use 2+3=5; similarly, when we add 27 and 38 we will also use 2+3=5, despite the fact that the meaning of 2 and 3 in the second sum is completely different than in the first sum. In modern user interface terms, the numerals have the same affordances, despite their meaning being very different in the two cases. We take this for granted, but this similarity in behavior is a consequence of deep facts about the number system: commutativity, associativity, and distributivity