Announcing an experimental new tool for thought
@michael_nielsen and I have been wondering: what happens if we take powerful ideas from cognitive science and deeply integrate them into explanations? Our first experiment in a new "mnemonic" medium:https://quantum.country/qcvc
-
Show this thread
-
Does this feel familiar? 1. You read a book and feel you understood it. 2. Next week, you try to answer a question about it. 3. Surprise: you don't remember the details at all! It's not just embarrassing at a cocktail party: it's a real barrier to learning complex new topics.
7 replies 37 retweets 210 likesShow this thread -
Happily, there's a way to remember anything almost effortlessly: spaced repetition. A few minutes each day—as much memory as you want. Magic. But few people use it. Textbooks don't leverage it. Tools for it desperately lack design. What if we fix it up and build it into a book?pic.twitter.com/808j9XjCsI
4 replies 53 retweets 210 likesShow this thread -
One reason books are hard is: readers run all the feedback loops. "Did I really get that? Should I flip back?" This demands attention to both the content and also the meta. We interleave prose and lightweight spaced repetition to take some of that work off the reader's plate.pic.twitter.com/vy7ewONxYh
9 replies 52 retweets 334 likesShow this thread -
Imagine you’ve just finished a tough section. We say: catch your breath; let’s take stock. We quickly flick through what we learned. Got it all? Great, we’ll review again later, when you've probably forgotten. Something slipped your mind? OK: we’ll review that bit sooner.
1 reply 4 retweets 32 likesShow this thread -
Something felt totally mysterious? You just learned that you left the stove on before you left the driveway. It doesn’t feel so onerous to read a section again on the spot. It would feel much more tiresome to realize that a few days later… so you might not reread the section.
1 reply 2 retweets 27 likesShow this thread -
One reader said: "There was a section where I tanked them all. I thought: wow, I clearly didn’t get whatever I was supposed to get. […] So then I went back and asked ‘why am I not retaining this?’ I’ve never had that with a textbook before: usually the problems are at the end."
1 reply 1 retweet 38 likesShow this thread -
That's the retrospective effect. The *prospective* effect is a feeling of safety. Once you’ve read a few sections, now you read each new passage knowing that you’ll have this quick check at the end. It's a save point every few minutes. You're not going to miss anything.
2 replies 1 retweet 35 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @andy_matuschak
But why read the text anyway? I’d jump straight to the quiz and learn there.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
It's a very interesting notion. I have a bunch of sketches trying quite hard to "invert" the medium in that way—to make the cards the primary element, and the prose light or absent. We couldn't make it work (yet). The prose still does several important jobs on the first read.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.