What's your strategy for retaining knowledge from lectures, papers, textbooks, talks, etc?
Specifically, 1) Do you take notes? 2) Do you compile/rewrite notes? 3) Does spaced repetition work for you? 4) Do you have a methodology for extracting common themes/patterns across topics?
Thanks!
In tech this can be an obstacle when communicating because many engineers have an extremely fine-grained memory, seemingly all the time. I will hand wave different concepts as a black box that we don't need to know right now, where they are happy to explain them at length, in detail. But if it's not relevant, I just don't care. They will also expect me to explain concepts that (to me) aren't relevant to the problem, and I have to say "I don't remember."
You're a mapper, like me. The only reason I ever want to learn details is if they are important corner cases.
>In tech this can be an obstacle when communicating because many engineers have an extremely fine-grained memory, seemingly all the time.
Those folks are packers, they know all the corner cases, and worry incessantly about them.
Google "mappers vs packers" to learn more, far more.
[0]: http://programmersstone.com
This is a good habit. A technique I have been using in previous weeks is to initially do a superficial read (inspired by Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book"), not worrying if I understand every piece of information, highlighting along the way. The goal is to understand the overall structure and broad arguments of the text.
Since highlighting is ineffective for learning [0], these act as markers to focus on for creating flashcards as learning material upon a second, more in-depth read.
[0] Research paper [PDF]: https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...
When a child learns a new word, they may go around gratuitously using it for a while.
When you learn a new concept or technique, gratuitously apply it in every way you can think of. Having done that, you will be able to use it appropriately when the need arises.
For example, in music, if I learn or discover a new kind of chord substitution, I will gratuitously apply it to a bunch of chord progressions. Then I'm left (hopefully) able to apply it when that sound is what I want, or when it solves a voice leading problem.
The idea is you consume and apply, then quickly turn a combination of theory + practice into your own words which is proving to yourself that you understand it. The key point there is "you", you don't need to publish the written component to anyone. Its purpose is to force you to come up with unique thoughts to combine this new information into something coherent which I'm sure has some benefit in making your brain remember it (but I have no scientific proof of this). It can also be used as a personalized detailed reference in case you ever forget the details which IMO is much better than scattered notes you tried to quickly write while you listened to or read something.
I don't know if this is a formal way of learning something. It's something I've done for most of my life because it felt intuitive at the time and still does.
- don't take rigorous notes because it ends up replicating a lot of the material that I'm consuming anyway
- still write some notes if something interesting stands out; it's usually related to some core idea/explanation, not to technical details
- don't obsess over having "complete" notes or worry too much about organizing them
- try to write some relevant code alongside whatever I'm learning
- spaced repetition is for memorization; I'm not trying to memorize
This is different from how I used to learn for exams at school/university where I would repeatedly re-synthesize notes to a shorter and shorter format until I can reproduce the material from a cue.
I think the distinction between the two modes is important; it seems very weird to me to see knowledge workers putting so much effort to memorize stuff that they can look up anyway.
Only if you use it as such. SRS is a scheduler to help you optimize your time, to not spend time on things you probably don't need to refresh. The actual memory/learning part is orthogonal.
I use SRS to plan different practices of things (in my case programming languages or concepts). If I consider that I did one of them well, I mark it as such and won't see it for a longer time, if not, I mark it badly and I'll see it again sooner.
I’m curious. If you would be willing to share, could you demonstrate an example of a prompt? My learning items have almost always been questions and answers, and occasionally image occlusion (‘label this part of the diagram’) and cloze deletion (‘fill in the blank’).
[0] https://www.supermemo.wiki/en/learning/spaced-repetition
I strongly agree. In the learning blogs (e.g. SuperMemo wiki) and forums I’ve read (r/Anki), there is a bias to solve every learning problem with space repetition (very roughly, flashcards on a computer program scheduled in an optimized way).
I’ve seen users try to make it work for math and physics, and though it may work for some users, the approach was ultimately a distraction in my experience, from doing lots of practice problems.
I think memory plays a key role in learning and especially recognizing opportunity to use something I've learned.
When you start something new, all the symbols are "too close together" and it takes time and repetition to increase the "resolution" on that map so that you can put the symbols into position with more precision and not have them confused with one another. You don't yet have a good intuition for the significance of each symbol and it won't come from being told, because sources have biases - frequency over time and space is a much stronger signal. It's the same with connections between symbols.
Doing, rather than just reading, is important; you need to try and find that Goldilocks zone of growth, where if things are easier you're not learning but if they're harder you lose hope. Try something just beyond what you know how to do, page in new information on demand when you get stuck (from docs, people, source code, whatever it is).
Writing notes helps me personally creating the space for symbols and reminding myself of what I already heard about but I don't know that it's necessary for everyone, and I especially think I've found it more useful as I've gotten older (and know more stuff already). Sometimes when I learn something "new", I pin it close to a concept I already know, which dulls its novelty and I'm probably more inclined to forget it, until I'm reminded of it again. And this is down to that "creating mental space" idea again.
Repetition increases symbol salience, particularly when you're surprised by the divergence between what you thought something meant and what it actually means. The risk of simply reading, and not doing, is that you're not surprised often enough. Doing stuff keeps you honest.
That might be how you learn, which is a good thing to know, but the presentation of your personal understanding of yourself come off like “this is the way for all”, which gives me the yucks.
For me I need to re-formulate things in my own words (or my own code) until I understand which parts of a system I have blind spots on, then dig into those, then rinse and repeat.
If I can express it in simple language in a way that hangs together, and go into detail about complicated parts of the system, I’m getting somewhere.
The downside of learning a system of human invention fundamentally is that one invariably comes to understand that it is a Rube Goldberg machine that some yahoos figured out how to sell.
Not sure why you assume OP is speaking about his own personal experience?
I am unsure what OP background is, but I will assume he knows what he is taking about.
there are theories of the mind that actually supports this view.
It goes back to early attempts at AI [0], and different perspectives on this also caused a split amongst researchers.
> If I can express it in simple language in a way that hangs together, and go into detail about complicated parts of the system, I’m getting somewhere.
What you have said does not actually contradict what OP has, but rather could be used to support what he said.
Yet it seems you believe it contradicts him?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_symbol_system
The summary is that doing practice tests (e.g. creating flashcards in a question-and-answer format, or regularly doing practice problems) is highly effective, along with studying over a longer period of time instead of cramming. Switching between learning subjects ("interleaved practice") is also effective, along with creating explanations in your own words about a text, together with asking yourself questions about the text. In contrast, highlighting the text and rereading as a way to learn is relatively ineffective.
[0] Full text [PDF]: https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...
"There are four key steps to the Feynman Technique:
"-Choose a concept you want to learn about
-Explain it to a 12 year old
-Reflect, Refine, and Simplify
-Organize and Review"
[0] https://fs.blog/feynman-technique/
> It's like Charlie Munger once said about mental models: “All this stuff is really quite obvious and yet most people don’t really know it in a way where they can use it.”
The long and short of it is that you go through a cycle of Knowing, Doing, Assessing. Each of those has sub sucked and pieces but they fit together really well and work generally across different types of things you’re trying to learn (intellectual, skill,ms, physical).