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June 15 - July 5, 2021
Spaced-repetition software is an advanced flash card algorithm first developed by the Polish researcher Piotr Woźniak in the 1980s.4 Woźniak’s algorithm was designed to optimally time when you need to review material in order to remember
Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.
Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself.
Regionalization is a further extension of this effect, with certain high-performing companies and cities making outsized impacts on the economy. Superstar cities such as Hong Kong, New York, and San Francisco have dominating effects on the economy as firms and talent cluster together to take advantage of proximity.
True post covid?
The ability to distract or delude yourself has never been greater,
The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.
In practice, however, this usually isn’t a problem. There are three main ways you can apply the ideas of ultralearning, even if you have to manage other commitments and challenges in your life: new part-time projects, learning sabbaticals, and reimagining existing learning efforts.
The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness. Whether this happens on a full-time schedule or just a couple hours per week is completely up to you.
Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily. Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it. Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable. Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving
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Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be. You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation, and you’ll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems.
Ultralearning is a skill, just like riding a bicycle. The more practice you get with it, the more skills and knowledge you’ll pick up for how to do it well.
Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result.
Intrinsic projects are those that you’re pursuing for their own sake.
If you’re pursuing a project for mostly instrumental reasons, it’s often a good idea to do an additional step of research: determining whether learning the skill or topic in question will actually help you achieve your goal.
Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” “Facts,” and “Procedures.”
How are you going to learn it? I suggest following two methods to answer how you’ll learn something: Benchmarking and the Emphasize/Exclude Method.
good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.
Good for projects too
The benefits of ultralearning aren’t always apparent from the first project because that first project occurs when you’re at your lowest level of metalearning ability.
that they were proud of their accomplishments in individual projects but that the real benefit had been that they now understood the process of learning hard things.
The first problem that many people have is starting to focus. The most obvious way this manifests itself is when you procrastinate:
Why do we procrastinate? The simple answer is that at some level there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself, or both.
Which brings me to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.
You might even want to ask yourself which feeling is more powerful in that moment—is the problem more that you have a strong urge to do a different activity (e.g., eat something, check your phone, take a nap) or that you have a strong urge to avoid the thing you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating? This awareness is necessary for progress to be made, so if you feel as though procrastination is a weakness of yours, make building this awareness your first priority before you try to fix the problem.
What’s needed is a proper balance. To achieve it, fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks.
Rather, be aware of what environment you work best in, and test it. Do you actually get more work done with the television on in the background, or do you just like hearing the television and feel that it makes the work more bearable? If it’s the latter, you can probably train yourself to avoid multitasking and enjoy greater productivity. Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning, which requires concentrating your full mind on the task
Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in.
Though first covering the material is often essential to begin doing practice, the principle of directness asserts that it’s actually while doing the thing you want to get good at when much of learning takes place.
The answer is that learning directly is hard. It is often more frustrating, challenging, and intense than reading a book or sitting through a lecture.
Going into this environment can feel intense. You may feel as though you’re “not ready” to start speaking a language you’ve barely learned. You may be afraid to stand onstage and deliver a speech you haven’t memorized perfectly. You might not want to dive right into programming your own application and prefer to stick to watching videos where someone else does the coding. But these fears are often only temporary. If you can get enough motivation to start this method, it’s often a lot easier to continue it long term.
Another friend of mine decided to exhibit her photography as a means of pushing her skills and talent. Deciding in advance that your work will be viewable publicly alters your approach to learning and will gear you toward performance in the desired domain, rather than just checking off boxes of facts learned.
Learning in public with a high goal can be helpful.
This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically.
The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions.
Another explanation for why students opt for low-efficiency review instead of retrieval is that they don’t feel they know the material well enough to test themselves on it.
The idea of desirable difficulties in retrieval makes a potent case for the ultralearning strategy.
There will always be some things you choose to master and others you satisfy yourself with knowing you can look up if you need to.
Value in triaging knowledge
A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper. Free recall like this is often very difficult, and there will be many things missed, even if you just finished reading the text in question. However, this difficulty is also a good reason why this practice is helpful.
In his studies, Ericsson has found that the ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance.
This means that when seeking feedback, the ultralearner needs to be on guard for two possibilities. The first is overreacting to feedback (both positive and negative) that doesn’t offer specific information that leads to improvement.
Second, when it is incorrectly applied, feedback can have a negative impact on motivation.
Further Notes on Types of Feedback
Outcome - what was the result?
Informational - what was the result and why?
Correctional - why and how can you fix it?
Similarly, corrective feedback requires a “correct” answer or the response of a recognized expert. If there is no expert or a single correct approach, trying to turn informational feedback into corrective feedback can work against you when the wrong change is suggested as an improvement.
So common in career feedback
One important type of metafeedback is your learning rate. This gives you information about how fast you’re learning, or at least how fast you’re improving in one aspect of your skill. Chess players might track their Elo ratings growth. LSAT studiers might track their improvements on mock exams. Language learners might track vocabulary learned or errors made when writing or speaking.
Very clever - could do this with open source contributions? Lines of code written? Projrcts completed?
One of the pieces of studying advice that is best supported by research is that if you care about long-term retention, don’t cram.
I feel this
SRS was a major force behind Roger Craig’s Jeopardy! trivia memorization, and I used the systems extensively when learning Chinese and Korean. Although you may not have heard of this term, the general principle is the backbone of many language-learning products, including Pimsleur, Memrise, and Duolingo. These programs tend to hide the spacing algorithm in the background, so you don’t need to bother yourself with it. However, other programs, such as the open-source Anki, are the preferred tool of more extreme ultralearners who want to squeeze out a little more performance.
Many people I’ve known who have learned a language that I also speak but who learned it through years of formal schooling have much more impressive vocabularies or knowledge of grammatical nuances than I do. However, those same people may trip over fairly basic phrases, because they learned every fact and skill evenly, rather than overlearning the smaller subset of very common patterns.
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
“I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples.”
Rule 1: Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily
the latter method he came to understand it better. Feynman was a master at pushing farther on problems than others expected of him, and this itself might have been the source of many of his unorthodox ideas.
One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.
Good idea
