Comment by tikhonj
1 day ago
What's worse for motivation than taking longer?
Boredom?
Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial?
Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams?
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition a hard sell.
> What's worse for motivation than taking longer?
Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it.
See the popularity of Duolingo vs Anki as an example! Or Quizlet vs Anki. Or the scores of students who revise by half-watching dopamine-ified youtube videos rather than doing past papers and flashcards. If you ask people, they'll often say they care for efficiency, but their revealed preferences say otherwise.
Doing large amounts (hours) of Anki day in day out is truly miserable, particularly when the alternatives can be quite enjoyable. And if you burn out before you achieve your goal, is the "efficiency" really worth it vs going slower but eventually getting there?
Plus, a lot of people want to learn e.g. a language because they enjoy the process as well as the end result. Making the process miserable in order to get to the end result faster isn't always a good tradeoff.
Which is what it's about. It's a tradeoff. I'm a big proponent of flashcards, but I think it's important to recognise that you're trading enjoyment for speed in most cases.
Maybe an 80/20 approach where you only create flashcards for the 20% of knowledge that's most useful? E.g. for a language, you could create 1000 flashcards for the 1000 most common words which allow for basic real-world communication?
My personal approach with A levels was to strictly learn content through classes, then organise things (which teaches you a lot on its own!) and make my own flashcards. Then I used the flashcards to keep it fresh till exam season. It was crazy, during revision lessons everyone else in the class would be going "uhhh I have no clue, that was two years ago" while I'd just know it.
I have tried different approaches, including using other people's flashcards (not as good - objectively they were high quality, but you gain a lot from writing your own + tailoring to your own way of looking at things) and learning from them (for my driving theory - terrible idea!). That hybrid approach is the best I've found, and the one I intend to use for my degree.
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> Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it.
This is so well known that it was covered extensively in the book Make It Stick[1], that you might as well call it the "student fallacy." (And they might have; ironically, I've forgotten if they do or not!)
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...
Yeah, 100%. I worded my comment a bit awkwardly, but that's exactly what I was getting at too :)
Mastery by George Leonard touches on some of this; learners can fall into 3 categories during the learning process: Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers. Each one has strengths and weaknesses, but the core philosophy is that "mastery takes time". After 2-3 years of practice, you know all the moves in a school of martial arts, or all the chord progressions for an instrument. But its the "after" where you either continue to refine or move on to the next skill.
Anything advertising that you can learn X in Y days isn't addressing that "after" period. Once you've learned the skill, you need motivation toward applying it, which in turn refines your skills. Conversely, becoming hyper fixated can be detrimental to overall skill. "Jack of all trades, master of none" HOWEVER the rest of the quote goes "but often times better than a master of one"
Sometimes you gotta slog through the boring bits to progress.