Error
Unrecognized LW server error:
Field "fmCrosspost" of type "CrosspostOutput" must have a selection of subfields. Did you mean "fmCrosspost { ... }"?Unrecognized LW server error:
Field "fmCrosspost" of type "CrosspostOutput" must have a selection of subfields. Did you mean "fmCrosspost { ... }"?
There are already websites like Master How To Learn and SuperMemo Guru, the various guides on spaced repetition systems on the internet (including Andy Matuschak’s prompt-writing guide which is presented in the mnemonic medium), and books like Make It Stick. If I was working on such a project I would try to more clearly lay out what is missing from these existing resources.
My personal feeling is that enough popularization of learning techniques is already taking place (though one exception I can think of is to make SuperMemo-style incremental reading more accessible). So I would be much more interested in having people push the field forward (e.g. What contexts other than book learning can spaced repetition be embedded in? How do we write even better prompts, especially when sharing them with other people? Why are the people obsessed with learning not often visibly more impressive than people who don’t think about how to learn, and what can we do about that?).
I’m open to the idea and I probably haven’t thought about it as much as you, but I’m skeptical about the way you discuss going about it in your post and also that the work of the experts that seem to have inspired you is impactful.
I suspect the techniques you’ve discussed will greatly improve your memory, but I’d guess that it’s often not worth the time to memorize something. Based on my experience working as a software engineer, my attitude has been you can’t learn everything . At least in software engineering, you need to adapt to new languages and frameworks frequently and I’d imagine other relatively new fields are similar. In software engineering (and maybe these other fields) the most (if not the only) important thing to remember is what you need to google.
Additionally, I’d also guess that a lot of the truly most impactful work comes from learning about new domains . This also can’t be learned through memorization. Even googling the right questions often won’t give you a quick answer. Haseeb Qureshi wrote a post about this type of learning, which he calls “unstructured learning” that I think is worth reading https://haseebq.com/the-hard-thing-about-learning-hard-things/
I’m aware that you said you mentioned you’re not targeting superstars, but as far as I know there’s no reason superstars would learn differently than anyone else. I’d also guess anyone can get a lot more out of themselves if they do their best.
I’d also guess that it would be hard to make your idea be much more than an incremental improvement over the Learning How To Learn course. I admittedly haven’t taken that course so take that with a big grain of salt.
Maybe it could be worthwhile to try to create a course or program that focuses on teaching unstructured learning. I don’t know how you’d go about it and I think there’s a high chance the course would be crap, but maybe its worth the risk?
Cheers for the reply! Some thoughts from your comment:
Target audience/ sectors where this would be most useful
I definitely agree that in general what I have in mind is academia/research-type fields as the sectors where this system would be especially useful, particularly in committing to memory new ideas from fields, research papers etc. Whilst I’ve had some success using flashcards to learn Python and some other comp sci-adjacent things, it’s definitely the case that in programming your learn primarily by doing. I think the flashcards still help a great deal in i.e. ensuring I remember the essentials of a particular Python library despite not having used it for a long time, but I’d definitely agree overall that it’s less useful in programming. I’ve also ran into the bad habit of making coding flashcards on things I a) haven’t fully understood or b) haven’t really needed, which has wasted time—these are some of the things to avoid that I’d definitely make sure to cover.
Unstructured learning
Unstructured learning is a new concept to me so I’m excited to check it out! This sounds like it could be something I’ve totally missed from my workflow that could introduce some really big gains.
Intellectual superstars
Re: not targetting superstars, I was more saying that I’ve found myself struggling with motivation when I consider the career path & potentially early opportunities or many of the most well-known EAs / 80,000 hours interviewees, and I think this has the utility of empowering more people who come to EA and being productive late (for example I squandered a large part of my teenage years playing video games) to make up for lost time. Superstar academics could also benefit from the techniques, but they’d be (naturally) less likely to need them due to their potentially early start in academia (I’m thinking of a Yudkowsky here) & incredible IQs.
Competing with/ differentiating from Learning How To Learn
Re: “Learning How To Learn”—I love that course but found it mainly focused on theory rather than a detailed step-by-step guide on what tools to use, use patterns and antipatterns etc. My aim here would be to collect everything useful in one place (whilst keeping it concise), whereas I think LHTL lays a great foundation but a) is relatively long (being a video course) and incomplete.
Utility of memorisation
A final point of the utility of memorisation: I’ve found that it’s not simply about memorising the correct answers to things, it’s about increasing the speed at which you can recall potentially relevant information (referred to as “fluency” in the literature), allowing you to think of potential solutions faster, or use some cross-disciplinary data etc. In the case of coding, this means reducing Googling-time, which may be a marginal gain as Googling doesn’t take long, but I found made coding more enjoyable. But this idea of fluency has far more profound implications in research, where absorbing and internalising information from textbooks and seminal papers allows you to draw more elaborate connections between ideas and fields, and engage more deeply with further research, including developing original research questions (a lot of this I’m getting from the Michael Nielsen piece linked in my post rather than my own experience but something I 100% stand behind). A big focus for me in this website would be getting across the diverse & powerful utility & profundity of memorisation i.e. disabusing people of the notion that it’s simply about rote learning, something Nielsen does really well.
A few relevant quotes from his piece here:
”With a few days work I’d gone from knowing nothing about deep reinforcement learning to a durable understanding of a key paper in the field, a paper that made use of many techniques that were used across the entire field “
”for creative work and for problem-solving there is something special about having an internalized understanding. It enables speed in associative thought, an ability to rapidly try out many combinations of ideas, and to intuit patterns, in ways not possible if you need to keep laboriously looking up information”
I think helping people be better at learning and working can be very impactful, but instead of a charity, why not make it a business? Corporations would definitely pay for this if it’s high quality. You could then do pro bono work for charities.
There are strong theoretical reasons against corporations investing optimal amounts in job-general training, fwiw.
I have considered this and set up a basic website with the idea of starting with free Zoom 1:1s (to iterate and learn), the moving to paid (for a low cost) 1:1s, then cohort, then one day corporations etc. My main dissuaders right now are startup cost, early investments, how to actually run a business etc. Definitely something I’m considering though!
Definitely want to do some research into the potential impact of a corporation vs non-profit as mentioned in Linch’s comment. I got briefly excited that “Charity Entrepreneurship” could provide a grant but they have specific problem areas—will look into other funding means for it as a non-profit venture...
I think most people who aren’t able to successfully run a business would also struggle to successfully run a charity—there’s a lot of overlapping skills required. If I were considering donating I would want to feel confident the founding team had the relevant skills and experience!
I want to second that there aren’t many people who I’d be excited to start a charity who can’t also start a business.
ETA: But they do exist, and EA should arguably encourage more people like them!
I like this project allot, and have a project with overlapping scope! https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1644960211