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I learned from those kinds of resources myself, and while I came a long way, for the amount of effort I put into learning, I could have gone a lot further if my time were used more efficiently. That’s the problem that Math Academy solves.
Jul 7, 2024
There are many, many studies that measure variation in WMC vs variation in other metrics.
Jul 6, 2024
Challenge problems are not a good use of time until you’ve developed the foundational skills that are necessary to grapple with these problems in a productive and timely fashion.
Jul 5, 2024
If you start to flail (or, more subtly, doubt yourself and lose interest) after jumping into ML without a baseline level of foundational knowledge, then you need to put your ego aside and re-allocate your time into shoring up your foundations.
Jul 5, 2024
If you understand the interplay between working memory and long-term memory, then then you can actually derive – from first principles – the methods of effective teaching.
Jul 4, 2024
Hard-coding explanations feels tedious, takes a lot of work, and isn’t “sexy” like an AI that generates responses from scratch – but at least it’s not a pipe dream. It’s a practical solution that lets you move on to other components of the AI that are just as important.
Jun 28, 2024
Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly.
Jun 28, 2024
… and they should be treated as such.
Jun 27, 2024
Our AI expert system is one of those things that sounds intuitive enough at a high level, but if you start trying to implement it yourself, you quickly run into a mountain of complexity, numerous edge cases, lots of counterintuitive low-level phenomena that take a while to fully wrap your head around.
Jun 26, 2024
Jun 25, 2024
An idea for a paper that I don’t currently have the bandwidth to write.
Jun 15, 2024
If all the knowledge you show up with is high school math and AP Calculus, and you’re not a genius, then there’s a substantial likelihood you’re going to get your ass handed to you.
Jun 9, 2024
Download NeoServer: SSH Client|Terminal by Space-Time Transformation Technology Co., Ltd. on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and…
Jun 4, 2024
When you’re developing skills at peak efficiency, you are maximizing the difficulty of your training tasks subject to the constraint that you end up successfully overcoming those difficulties in a timely manner.
Jun 3, 2024
Students eat meals of information at similar bite rates when each spoonful fed to them is sized appropriately relative to the size of their mouth. (Note that equal bite rates does not imply equal rates of food volume intake.)
Jun 1, 2024
It’s the act of successfully retrieving fuzzy memory, not clear memory, that extends the memory duration.
May 23, 2024
To transfer information into long-term memory, you need to practice retrieving it without assistance.
May 22, 2024
There’s a cognitive principle behind this: associative interference, the phenomenon that conceptually related pieces of knowledge can interfere with each other’s recall.
May 21, 2024
It’s actually the opposite – to get students actively retrieving information from memory, while minimizing their cognitive load.
May 19, 2024
Learning is the incremental gain in your ability to perform a tangible, reproducible skill.
May 19, 2024
Perform the desired transformation on identity matrix to get a left-multiplier, and maybe transpose the output.
May 14, 2024
There are numerous cognitive learning strategies that 1) can be used to massively improve learning, 2) have been reproduced so many times they might as well be laws of physics, and 3) connect all the way down to the mechanics of what’s going on in the brain.
May 11, 2024
To love someone is to give them the freedom to become themselves, because they know you will be there if they fall.
May 9, 2024
Solving equations feels smooth when basic arithmetic is automatic – it’s like moving puzzle pieces around, and you just need to identify how they fit together. But without automaticity on basic arithmetic, each puzzle piece is a heavy weight. You struggle to move them at all, much less figure out where they’re supposed to go.
May 1, 2024
First, fun and exciting playtime. Then, intense and strenuous skill development. Finally, developing one’s individual style while pushing the boundaries of the field.
Apr 30, 2024
It highlights the aversion that people have to doing hard things. People will do unbelievable mental gymnastics to convince themselves that doing an easy, enjoyable thing that is unrelated to their supposed goal somehow moves the needle more than doing a hard, unpleasant thing that is directly related to said goal.
Apr 17, 2024
In general, when you feel yourself running up against a ceiling in life, the solution is typically to pivot and into a direction where the ceiling is higher.
Mar 22, 2024
Loosely inspired by the German tank problem: several witnesses reported seeing a UFO during the given time intervals, and you want to quantify your certainty regarding when the UFO arrived and when it left.
Mar 15, 2024
But in talent development, the optimization problem is clear: an individual’s performance is to be maximized, so the methods used during practice are those that most efficiently convert effort into performance improvements.
Mar 4, 2024
No matter what skill is being trained, improving performance is always an effortful process.
Mar 3, 2024
By periodically revisiting content, a spiral curriculum periodically restores forgotten knowledge and leverages the spacing effect to slow the decay of that knowledge. Spaced repetition takes this line of thought to its fullest extent by fully optimizing the review process.
Mar 2, 2024
The strongest people lift weights heavy enough to make them feel weak.
Mar 1, 2024
There’s only so much fun you can have trying to follow another person’s footsteps to arrive at a known solution. There’s only so much confidence you can build from fighting against a problem that someone else has intentionally set up to be well-posed and elegantly solvable if you think about it the right way.
Feb 27, 2024
Humans are not the last level of life’s fractal pattern. The Earth itself is becoming a sentient organism, a new stage of life, a species that exists on a sc...
Feb 26, 2024
The network becomes book-smart in a particular area but not street-smart in general. The training procedure is like a series of exams on material within a tiny subject area (your data subspace). The network refines its knowledge in the subject area to maximize its performance on those exams, but it doesn’t refine its knowledge outside that subject area. And that leaves it gullible to adversarial examples using inputs outside the subject area.
Feb 25, 2024
While there is plenty of room for teachers to make better use of cognitive learning strategies in the classroom, teachers are victims of circumstance in a profession lacking effective accountability and incentive structures, and the end result is that students continue to receive mediocre educational experiences. Given a sufficient degree of accountability and incentives, there is no law of physics preventing a teacher from putting forth the work needed to deliver an optimal learning experience to a single student. However, in the absence of technology, it is impossible for a single human teacher to deliver an optimal learning experience to a classroom of many students with heterogeneous knowledge profiles, each of whom needs to work on different types of problems and receive immediate feedback on each of their attempts. This is why technology is necessary.
Feb 23, 2024
Gamification, integrating game-like elements into learning environments, proves effective in increasing student learning, engagement, and enjoyment.
Feb 22, 2024
The testing effect (or the retrieval practice effect) emphasizes that recalling information from memory, rather than repeated reading, enhances learning. It can be combined with spaced repetition to produce an even more potent learning technique known as spaced retrieval practice.
Feb 21, 2024
Interleaving (or mixed practice) involves spreading minimal effective doses of practice across various skills, in contrast to blocked practice, which involves extensive consecutive repetition of a single skill. Blocked practice can give a false sense of mastery and fluency because it allows students to settle into a robotic rhythm of mindlessly applying one type of solution to one type of problem. Interleaving, on the other hand, creates a “desirable difficulty” that promotes vastly superior retention and generalization, making it a more effective review strategy. But despite its proven efficacy, interleaving faces resistance in classrooms due to a preference for practice that feels easier and appears to produce immediate performance gains, even if those performance gains quickly vanish afterwards and do not carry over to test performance.
Feb 20, 2024
Imitating without analyzing produces a robot / ape who can’t think critically; analyzing without imitating produces a critic who can’t act on their own advice.
Feb 20, 2024
When reviews are spaced out or distributed over multiple sessions (as opposed to being crammed or massed into a single session), memory is not only restored, but also further consolidated into long-term storage, which slows its decay. This is known as the spacing effect. A profound consequence of the spacing effect is that the more reviews are completed (with appropriate spacing), the longer the memory will be retained, and the longer one can wait until the next review is needed. This observation gives rise to a systematic method for reviewing previously-learned material called spaced repetition (or distributed practice). A repetition is a successful review at the appropriate time.
Feb 18, 2024
Layering is the act of continually building on top of existing knowledge – that is, continually acquiring new knowledge that exercises prerequisite or component knowledge. This causes existing knowledge to become more ingrained, organized, and deeply understood, thereby increasing the structural integrity of a student’s knowledge base and making it easier to assimilate new knowledge.
Feb 17, 2024
Associative interference occurs when related knowledge interferes with recall. It is more likely to occur when highly related pieces of knowledge are learned simultaneously or in close succession. However, the effects of interference can be mitigated by teaching dissimilar concepts simultaneously and spacing out related pieces of knowledge over time.
Feb 16, 2024
Automaticity is the ability to perform low-level skills without conscious effort. Analogous to a basketball player effortlessly dribbling while strategizing, automaticity allows individuals to avoid spending limited cognitive resources on low-level tasks and instead devote those cognitive resources to higher-order reasoning. In this way, automaticity is the gateway to expertise, creativity, and general academic success. However, insufficient automaticity, particularly in basic skills, inflates the cognitive load of tasks, making it exceedingly difficult for students to learn and perform.
Feb 15, 2024
Different students have different working memory capacities. When the cognitive load of a learning task exceeds a student’s working memory capacity, the student experiences cognitive overload and is not able to complete the task.
Feb 14, 2024
Mastery learning is a strategy in which students demonstrate proficiency on prerequisites before advancing. While even loose approximations of mastery learning have been shown to produce massive gains in student learning, mastery learning faces limited adoption due to clashing with traditional teaching methods and placing increased demands on educators. True mastery learning at a fully granular level requires fully individualized instruction and is only attainable through one-on-one tutoring.
Feb 13, 2024
Deliberate practice is the most effective form of active learning. It consists of individualized training activities specially chosen to improve specific aspects of a student’s performance through repetition and successive refinement. It is mindful repetition at the edge of one’s ability, the opposite of mindless repetition within one’s repertoire. The amount of deliberate practice has been shown to be one of the most prominent underlying factors responsible for individual differences in performance across numerous fields, even among highly talented elite performers. Deliberate practice demands effort and intensity, and may be discomforting, but its long-term commitment compounds incremental improvements, leading to expertise.
Feb 12, 2024
Active learning leads to more neural activation than passive learning. Automaticity involves developing strategic neural connections that reduce the amount of effort that the brain has to expend to activate patterns of neurons.
Feb 11, 2024
During practice, the elite skaters were over 6 times more active than passive, while non-competitive skaters were nearly as passive as they were active.
Feb 10, 2024
If you want to build principled software, avoid becoming VCware. Stay user-supported. It is now possible for tiny teams to build principled software that mil...
Feb 10, 2024