Almost everything I ever studied was promptly forgotten after the exams period. How do you read a book and make it stick? Spaced repetition being the solution for everything memory-wise doesn't sound very appealing.
How To Study?
Almost everything I ever studied was promptly forgotten after the exams period. How do you read a book and make it stick? Spaced repetition being the solution for everything memory-wise doesn't sound very appealing.
thats what it is. Ideas need to bounce around in your head for a bit in order to stick as you sit down again to rereview. Cramming is doing just the first step and then stopping, you dont' actually learn
So, the options are either rereading books/notes somewhat often or being so interested in a subject that you're always seeing something about it? Ok.
why would you study something you aren't interested in?
I feel ashamed by not knowing world history and geography, specially considering the content I consume has people talking about it all the time.
well yeah you become well read by reading well :O)
>His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." "But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.
Now who would you rather be? A brilliant Sherlock who only learns what's fascinating and useful to him, or a moronic Watson who is the 'broadly educated' turbo-midwit
These need a lot of mnemonic structures and brute force to learn it well. If you aren't interested in history or geography just pay attention to what the people are saying and they will say the same things over and over again, as the study brain will make it easy for you by pacing you field of awareness. History has a lot of applications of things you might be interested you could approach it more from history of MY INTEREST lens than from top down. When people are talking about geography you can just have a map open, you don't gain any insight from knowing geography except maybe knowing about racial distribution.
He is also israeli btw
But basically if you think things through it helps A LOT. And if you rewrite things and think them through it helps even more. Check out his video explaining how he reads philosophy and it gets kinda obvious.
He basically thinks things through with an "accumulator" (a "reduce" if you are familiar with functional programming concepts).
I am currently working on an AI tutor that uses GPT to ingest documents (e.g scientific papers, textbooks etc.) and convert them into "entities". It then progressively teaches you these entities (through interactive chat and Q/A, as you might have with real tutor) and remembers which ones you had trouble with, scheduling them for future review using the SM2 algorithm. My hope is that it will eventually replace software like anki, obviating the need to make flashcards while preventing overfitting to those cards.
>I am currently working on an AI tutor that uses GPT to ingest documents (e.g scientific papers, textbooks etc.) and convert them into "entities". It then progressively teaches you these entities (through interactive chat and Q/A, as you might have with real tutor)
so, uh, you're programming ChatGPT to work like a chatbot about things?
No, I'm working more on the long term memory side of things and entity extraction.
sounds like your entity problem won't ever really be solved until GAI. Min-maxxing bayesian slop won't take you where you want to go.
lol I already have the entity extraction working (GPT itself is pretty good at it if you prompt it right). Right now I'm just working on detecting similar entities to avoid repeats and setting up the scheduling with SM2
>lol I already have the entity extraction working (GPT itself is pretty good at it if you prompt it right
so, like I said, you're programming chatGPT to be chatGPT
Yeah, sure. Not sure why this innocuous project inspired so much hostility on a thread about studying, but that's IQfy for you.
it's just been me
ok
Please abandon this degeneracy while you still have your soul
Very cool hope I can find one day and use it
I learn best by having lots of different associations to the subject I want to understand. First read about the subject, and then poke around it via footnotes and other sources. The more "that reminds me of" / "that's kind of like" paths you have for something the better it seems to stick.
Read a mind for numbers and the book "make it stick", there's a lot people don't know about learning, most people do it completely the wrong way.
Try to explain the arguments to your friends. If it's just information/ facts try to understand why the author chooses to use these specifically. You need to be combative when studying in order to understand.
I study philosophy, and I've pretty much found out that I will simply not remember what I study unless a) I find it extremely brilliant (to the point where it becomes a staple in my philosophical thought), or b) I discuss it with someone else.
The discovery of b) was really important to me. If you know you have to discuss some author with someone else, and if you dont want to end up making a fool of yourself by offering your misreadings to other people, you'll end up being way more careful about what you're reading. Furthermore, the desire to be right is often enough to make you care (in a rigorous way) about the text, even if without that confrontation you would have not cared one bit about it.
I'll add that b) tends to work even if instead of a discussion you're writing a paper about it. Once you actually have to ascertain wether you trust, say, a secondary source on a text/argument you're commenting, you'll end up becoming much more discerning, and this helps a lot when it comes to remembering what you're studying.
Finally, summarising whatbyoure reading can help too, but only if you check your notes multiple times in the span of 1-2 weeks, or even more. Just writing them down is not enough unless you have a really good memory.
I hope this helped
Care about it. Think about it a lot and consider the implications it has on what you already believe. Write out the material again from memory.
Forgetting definitely does happen but I noticed that after years I actually do remember a bunch of weird stuff. I think your brain stores relevant information in clusters, so you don't recall that information instantly, you actually have to placed in a situation where that information is relevant. So you learned everything for the exams. I bet if someone gave you an exam tomorrow, you would remember a surprising amount of it.
So knowledge arises in the situation that the application of that knowledge has been trained for. If you're doing the dishes, then you aren't thinking about or doing like kung fu moves, but if you're in a fight, your body might recall how to defend itself. Ha HA
OK. Jeffery