I can try to elaborate on the criticisms of the pages I linked. There hasn’t been any study of the long-term effects of spaced repetition. There are indications that it may be counter-productive and that it may act as an artifical ‘importance inflator’ of information, desensitizing the brain’s long-term response to new knowledge that is actually important, especially if one is not consciously aware of that.
About the pomodoro technique, it’s even less researched than spaced repetition and there’s very little solid evidence that it works. One thing that seems a bit worrying is that it seems like a ‘desperate measure’ adopted by people experiencing low productivity, indicating some other problem (depression/burnout etc.) that should be dealt with directly. In these cases pomodoros would make things far worse.
It could be said that none of these are criticisms of LW, but just criticisms of these specific techniques that arose outside of LW. However, if one is too eager to adopt and believe in such techniques, it betrays ADS-type thinking as relating to the idea that optimization of thought processes can be done through ‘productivity hacks’.
Can you unpack “optimizing thought processes”? Under some definitions the statement is questionable, under others trivially true.
Also, the articles you’ve linked to describe techniques that are very popular outside—so if they are overrated, it isn’t a LW-specific mistake.
I can try to elaborate on the criticisms of the pages I linked. There hasn’t been any study of the long-term effects of spaced repetition. There are indications that it may be counter-productive and that it may act as an artifical ‘importance inflator’ of information, desensitizing the brain’s long-term response to new knowledge that is actually important, especially if one is not consciously aware of that.
About the pomodoro technique, it’s even less researched than spaced repetition and there’s very little solid evidence that it works. One thing that seems a bit worrying is that it seems like a ‘desperate measure’ adopted by people experiencing low productivity, indicating some other problem (depression/burnout etc.) that should be dealt with directly. In these cases pomodoros would make things far worse.
It could be said that none of these are criticisms of LW, but just criticisms of these specific techniques that arose outside of LW. However, if one is too eager to adopt and believe in such techniques, it betrays ADS-type thinking as relating to the idea that optimization of thought processes can be done through ‘productivity hacks’.