B2D shows clear superiority of 1-1 over 1-many but I think it neglects something even better: 1 to self. IMO, issues with 1 to many teaching result from high semantic distance: teacher is either too far ahead of student or are teaching things the student already knows. Thus, they’re always stuck either frustrated or bored. 1-1 teaching eliminates that because a tutor knows what the student does or not know; they can teach with continuous low semantic distance that isn’t frustrating.
I think 1-self teaching goes beyond tutoring because:
1. you know what you don’t know so if you need some preceding information you can find that for yourself (in large part thanks to the internet)
2. teaching is centered around the idea that a teacher knows what you should know better than you do. In many cases, I don’t think this makes much sense. If I want to learn how to make x thing, getting a general education on the field x falls into (field y) doesn’t make sense. Learning a bunch of useless things in field y is a waste of my time. If I’m deciding what to learn by myself, I can make sure that I’m not only learning things efficiently but that I’m choosing what to learn effectively.
As a result, I think prioritizing large behavioral spaces where your daughter can make mistakes and figure things out by herself is better than any rigid system forcing her to learn things she doesn’t want to. (Note: you might think that having her educated in depth on some topic and having lots of knowledge is useful. Free learning leads to higher coherence which in turn makes knowledge more applicable and better retained. No matter how well your daughter is taught trigonometry, if she learns it independent of her own desires the ability will likely stick to being useful only for useless math problems.)
I highly recommend reading any of the articles in I would never send my kids to school; particularly the ones you find yourself disagreeing with the most.
I would also check out Sudbury or democratic schools, which are schools with high behavioral space and very low in coercion.
The people at the bottom here mentioned in further reading could also be helpful.
I’m vaguely trying to work on looking at 1-self learning as a means for solving B2D (thanks for the acronym by the way) better than 1-1 learning. I have no formal science background but I’ve started talking with a professor who found it very interesting. Hopefully we can find something concrete though I have no idea how we’d test it right now.
Unfortunately, I’m too confident in my own views and there are a lot of priors I’m guessing we don’t share that might make some of this not make sense. Please bring them up and I will try to answer them though most answers could probably be found in some way on supermemo.guru.
1. you know what you don’t know so if you need some preceding information you can find that for yourself (in large part thanks to the internet)
2. teaching is centered around the idea that a teacher knows what you should know better than you do. In many cases, I don’t think this makes much sense. If I want to learn how to make x thing, getting a general education on the field x falls into (field y) doesn’t make sense. Learning a bunch of useless things in field y is a waste of my time. If I’m deciding what to learn by myself, I can make sure that I’m not only learning things efficiently but that I’m choosing what to learn effectively.
This is the approach advocated by Scott Young in the book Ultralearning. You build out a learning project for the thing you actually want to learn, learn by doing, and you fill in obvious gaps that are ‘rate-limiting’ to the learning ‘reaction’ as you go along. Learning by working on the end result that you actually want directly also sidesteps the issues with transfer learning—students are typically able to apply the abstract classroom skills they’ve been taught to real world situations.
I see you link to SuperMemo and ask about it a lot. Do you use that software, and do you generally subscribe to Wozniak’s ideas?
Interesting about ultralearning, I will need to skim that in more detail some point. Without spaced repetition/incremental reading, that looks like the best method of learning to me. I get the feeling this is why my generation (2000s onwards) lack practical skills, we almost never learn for a purpose so we end up lacking the notion that we can do things yourselves. There are plenty of things I really wanted to do (like building a table from scratch [I really love big tables]) that I never did because I had no experience and had never had any experience that would tell me where to start.
Regarding SuperMemo, yes, I use the software and incremental reading extensively (if you have an interest in learning it, I would happily teach you). I would go insane learning without it, especially because I have ADHD and incremental reading makes managing what to learn easy.
I also subscribe heavily to Woz’s ideas. I like them because they tend to be much closer to global maximas (e.g. free running sleep) because societal/academic norms do not restrict his views.
A lot of them, especially about learning, really changed my life. Though I also love what he has written about sleep, stress, ADHD, addiction amongst other things.
Interesting about ultralearning, I will need to skim that in more detail some point. Without spaced repetition/incremental reading, that looks like the best method of learning to me.
His book touches on spaced repetition (he’s a big proponent of the testing effect) and other things. It’s really about how to put together effective learning projects, from the research phase, through execution.
Regarding SuperMemo, yes, I use the software and incremental reading extensively (if you have an interest in learning it, I would happily teach you).
I am interested in IR, but I don’t have a windows machine (MacOS/Linux) and don’t think the overhead of maintaining a VM would be worth it. Do you IR everything you read online, or do you reserve it for materials in your field? I mostly take notes in roam, and add particularly salient things that I think I’ll want to remember to anki.
I also subscribe heavily to Woz’s ideas. I like them because they tend to be much closer to global maximas (e.g. free running sleep) because societal/academic norms do not restrict his views.
Noted. The SuperMemo wiki has always seemed quite unwieldy to me, but I’ll take closer to what he says to say on topics outside of spaced repetition.
His book touches on spaced repetition (he’s a big proponent of the testing effect) and other things. It’s really about how to put together effective learning projects, from the research phase, through execution.
Oh I didn’t know that. Raises priority a bit then.
I am interested in IR, but I don’t have a windows machine (MacOS/Linux) and don’t think the overhead of maintaining a VM would be worth it. Do you IR everything you read online, or do you reserve it for materials in your field? I mostly take notes in roam, and add particularly salient things that I think I’ll want to remember to anki.
If you use IR well, in my opinion it would increase long-term potential by at least 1,5-2 times. If you don’t trust me and take my claim at say 1.2 times, I think even then it’s worth the time investment of trying a VM and trying SM for a while to verify the claim (I don’t think there are any other interventions that would improve long-term potential as much as SM).
I’m actually using it on a Mac in parallels and it works pretty well. VMWare on Linux is also mostly good though in the end I ended up switching from Linux because VMWare has this weird behavior where it exists fullscreen everytime you change workspaces. It drove me crazy. You can run SM through wine with this with a few constraints. I haven’t tried it personally though.
I don’t have a particular field (I am in university but I don’t care about it very much), I learn based on what I find interesting and applicable. I’ve found a lot of golden nuggets I otherwise would never have with incremental reading. I tend to just import everything I see that looks shiny but it’s still manageable because of SuperMemo’s priority system. I’ll probably never get to all the things I import because of the rate of new things vs. rate of review but I’m slowly making peace with that. At the least, priority system makes it possible to import as much as you want but still be certain that you focus most of your time on the things that matter more.
Roam seems pretty nice to me and I really wish there was an SM plugin to replicate graph connection functionality. I write a lot in SuperMemo and while it is extremely useful to be able to write things incrementally, graph view would be likely a better way to work on things.
Noted. The SuperMemo wiki has always seemed quite unwieldy to me, but I’ll take closer to what he says to say on topics outside of spaced repetition.
For SuperMemo documentation, I would definitely agree. It is not fun figuring it out on your own. From recent experiences teaching people, I think being taught 1-1 is a far easier way to get started with it. I can generally teach people in 1-2 hours what it took me around a fair while (at least a month) to figure out.
For other subjects on supermemo.guru blog, I think the articles are pretty good though not many people seem to be aware of them which is unfortunate.
An umbrella term for this style of learning (and systems that support it) is “self-directed education”. You can find places that practice this low-coercion and self-directed style here. There are a small handful of places in Central Europe that might fit the bill.
These places often serve as a refuge for kids that don’t fit in the conventional school model, so you often encounter a high rate of neuro-atypicality. There are lots of kids that might have earned themselves a diagnosis in a school setting who are thriving in an environment that can bend to their needs.
I think your last point about lack of shared priors is a big one here. The OP seems intent on designing/engineering the perfect education, when the answer from this perspective will require a lot of letting go.
Thanks for the tip and links. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show much in Prague (but still gives me a hint about what to look for even if some school isn’t registered in the linked project).
The OP seems intent on designing/engineering the perfect education, when the answer from this perspective will require a lot of letting go.
Hm… I don’t think I would have issues of having to do so. I am trying to understand how to think about this, and this simply didn’t occur to me before. In fact, it seems that me and my girlfriend are currently rather at the side of trying to figure out how to do this in self-directed-way, but it’s still in early stages.
Hey Raj. Thanks a lot for an insightful post, it’s definitely that sort of things I was looking after, regardless if I immediately agree with them or not.
1-self learning: How I read it so far is that instead of selecting “the way” first and optimizing it later, instead it might be a good idea to focus on learning how to learn by yourself first, recognizing what’s the most effective in any given case, be it via internet or an actual human resource such as a tutor.
By the way, my solely main motivation for her to know English was the access to much better materials so she can learn by herself.
I would also check out Sudbury or democratic schools, which are schools with high behavioral space and very low in coercion.
A quick search shows that there are some very reasonably priced democratic schools around. So great to see there are some options like this (at least, I will be able to get some references or even visit them myself)
there are a lot of priors I’m guessing we don’t share that might make some of this not make sense. Please bring them up and I will try to answer them though most answers could probably be found in some way on supermemo.guru.
I think your post does make sense to me on this level. I think I have to first go through the linked material, which will surely take some time to process (thanks!).
1-self learning: How I read it so far is that instead of selecting “the way” first and optimizing it later, instead it might be a good idea to focus on learning how to learn by yourself first, recognizing what’s the most effective in any given case, be it via internet or an actual human resource such as a tutor.
Sort of, though this is mostly my vague theory. I think the ultralearning thing that Panashe mentioned could be a useful framework though I’m not super familiar with it. People like Peter Gray who are experts on homeschooling/self directed learning could also be worth looking into.
By the way, my solely main motivation for her to know English was the access to much better materials so she can learn by herself.
Yeah, that’s a pretty important long-term skill. It would be really challenging to have be able to freely learn whatever you want without access to the English internet.
A quick search shows that there are some very reasonably priced democratic schools around. So great to see there are some options like this (at least, I will be able to get some references or even visit them myself)
Awesome. One thing to be careful of is that people think schools are important for socialization. I like Seymour Papert’s answer to that:
Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities
I’ve found the above criticism fairly true for my experience with school. I ended up with a lot of not great socialization habits that took a long while to unravel.
It feels like I’m going on a bit too much but one other heuristic to consider: try to do for your daughter what you would have liked as a child rather than what you as a parent think you should do. It’s very easy to assume that you know better than your child, and you do, but coercion is really bad. Trying to influence choices by making them appealing is far healthier than forcing things which I think younger you probably would have appreciated too.
B2D shows clear superiority of 1-1 over 1-many but I think it neglects something even better: 1 to self. IMO, issues with 1 to many teaching result from high semantic distance: teacher is either too far ahead of student or are teaching things the student already knows. Thus, they’re always stuck either frustrated or bored. 1-1 teaching eliminates that because a tutor knows what the student does or not know; they can teach with continuous low semantic distance that isn’t frustrating.
I think 1-self teaching goes beyond tutoring because:
1. you know what you don’t know so if you need some preceding information you can find that for yourself (in large part thanks to the internet)
2. teaching is centered around the idea that a teacher knows what you should know better than you do. In many cases, I don’t think this makes much sense. If I want to learn how to make x thing, getting a general education on the field x falls into (field y) doesn’t make sense. Learning a bunch of useless things in field y is a waste of my time. If I’m deciding what to learn by myself, I can make sure that I’m not only learning things efficiently but that I’m choosing what to learn effectively.
As a result, I think prioritizing large behavioral spaces where your daughter can make mistakes and figure things out by herself is better than any rigid system forcing her to learn things she doesn’t want to. (Note: you might think that having her educated in depth on some topic and having lots of knowledge is useful. Free learning leads to higher coherence which in turn makes knowledge more applicable and better retained. No matter how well your daughter is taught trigonometry, if she learns it independent of her own desires the ability will likely stick to being useful only for useless math problems.)
I highly recommend reading any of the articles in I would never send my kids to school; particularly the ones you find yourself disagreeing with the most.
I would also check out Sudbury or democratic schools, which are schools with high behavioral space and very low in coercion.
The people at the bottom here mentioned in further reading could also be helpful.
I’m vaguely trying to work on looking at 1-self learning as a means for solving B2D (thanks for the acronym by the way) better than 1-1 learning. I have no formal science background but I’ve started talking with a professor who found it very interesting. Hopefully we can find something concrete though I have no idea how we’d test it right now.
Unfortunately, I’m too confident in my own views and there are a lot of priors I’m guessing we don’t share that might make some of this not make sense. Please bring them up and I will try to answer them though most answers could probably be found in some way on supermemo.guru.
This is the approach advocated by Scott Young in the book Ultralearning. You build out a learning project for the thing you actually want to learn, learn by doing, and you fill in obvious gaps that are ‘rate-limiting’ to the learning ‘reaction’ as you go along. Learning by working on the end result that you actually want directly also sidesteps the issues with transfer learning—students are typically able to apply the abstract classroom skills they’ve been taught to real world situations.
I see you link to SuperMemo and ask about it a lot. Do you use that software, and do you generally subscribe to Wozniak’s ideas?
Interesting about ultralearning, I will need to skim that in more detail some point. Without spaced repetition/incremental reading, that looks like the best method of learning to me. I get the feeling this is why my generation (2000s onwards) lack practical skills, we almost never learn for a purpose so we end up lacking the notion that we can do things yourselves. There are plenty of things I really wanted to do (like building a table from scratch [I really love big tables]) that I never did because I had no experience and had never had any experience that would tell me where to start.
Regarding SuperMemo, yes, I use the software and incremental reading extensively (if you have an interest in learning it, I would happily teach you). I would go insane learning without it, especially because I have ADHD and incremental reading makes managing what to learn easy.
I also subscribe heavily to Woz’s ideas. I like them because they tend to be much closer to global maximas (e.g. free running sleep) because societal/academic norms do not restrict his views.
A lot of them, especially about learning, really changed my life. Though I also love what he has written about sleep, stress, ADHD, addiction amongst other things.
His book touches on spaced repetition (he’s a big proponent of the testing effect) and other things. It’s really about how to put together effective learning projects, from the research phase, through execution.
I am interested in IR, but I don’t have a windows machine (MacOS/Linux) and don’t think the overhead of maintaining a VM would be worth it. Do you IR everything you read online, or do you reserve it for materials in your field? I mostly take notes in roam, and add particularly salient things that I think I’ll want to remember to anki.
Noted. The SuperMemo wiki has always seemed quite unwieldy to me, but I’ll take closer to what he says to say on topics outside of spaced repetition.
Oh I didn’t know that. Raises priority a bit then.
If you use IR well, in my opinion it would increase long-term potential by at least 1,5-2 times. If you don’t trust me and take my claim at say 1.2 times, I think even then it’s worth the time investment of trying a VM and trying SM for a while to verify the claim (I don’t think there are any other interventions that would improve long-term potential as much as SM).
I’m actually using it on a Mac in parallels and it works pretty well. VMWare on Linux is also mostly good though in the end I ended up switching from Linux because VMWare has this weird behavior where it exists fullscreen everytime you change workspaces. It drove me crazy. You can run SM through wine with this with a few constraints. I haven’t tried it personally though.
I don’t have a particular field (I am in university but I don’t care about it very much), I learn based on what I find interesting and applicable. I’ve found a lot of golden nuggets I otherwise would never have with incremental reading. I tend to just import everything I see that looks shiny but it’s still manageable because of SuperMemo’s priority system. I’ll probably never get to all the things I import because of the rate of new things vs. rate of review but I’m slowly making peace with that. At the least, priority system makes it possible to import as much as you want but still be certain that you focus most of your time on the things that matter more.
Roam seems pretty nice to me and I really wish there was an SM plugin to replicate graph connection functionality. I write a lot in SuperMemo and while it is extremely useful to be able to write things incrementally, graph view would be likely a better way to work on things.
For SuperMemo documentation, I would definitely agree. It is not fun figuring it out on your own. From recent experiences teaching people, I think being taught 1-1 is a far easier way to get started with it. I can generally teach people in 1-2 hours what it took me around a fair while (at least a month) to figure out.
For other subjects on supermemo.guru blog, I think the articles are pretty good though not many people seem to be aware of them which is unfortunate.
Just a note that 1-self only works for people with:
Enough call-it-willpower (many people need an outside motivator to do hard things)
Enough general intelligence/knowledge to be able to generate ideas like “I could look this up by typing XYZ into google”
See my response below about unknown unknowns.
An umbrella term for this style of learning (and systems that support it) is “self-directed education”. You can find places that practice this low-coercion and self-directed style here. There are a small handful of places in Central Europe that might fit the bill.
These places often serve as a refuge for kids that don’t fit in the conventional school model, so you often encounter a high rate of neuro-atypicality. There are lots of kids that might have earned themselves a diagnosis in a school setting who are thriving in an environment that can bend to their needs.
I think your last point about lack of shared priors is a big one here. The OP seems intent on designing/engineering the perfect education, when the answer from this perspective will require a lot of letting go.
Thanks for the tip and links. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show much in Prague (but still gives me a hint about what to look for even if some school isn’t registered in the linked project).
Hm… I don’t think I would have issues of having to do so. I am trying to understand how to think about this, and this simply didn’t occur to me before. In fact, it seems that me and my girlfriend are currently rather at the side of trying to figure out how to do this in self-directed-way, but it’s still in early stages.
Hey Raj. Thanks a lot for an insightful post, it’s definitely that sort of things I was looking after, regardless if I immediately agree with them or not.
1-self learning: How I read it so far is that instead of selecting “the way” first and optimizing it later, instead it might be a good idea to focus on learning how to learn by yourself first, recognizing what’s the most effective in any given case, be it via internet or an actual human resource such as a tutor.
By the way, my solely main motivation for her to know English was the access to much better materials so she can learn by herself.
A quick search shows that there are some very reasonably priced democratic schools around. So great to see there are some options like this (at least, I will be able to get some references or even visit them myself)
I think your post does make sense to me on this level. I think I have to first go through the linked material, which will surely take some time to process (thanks!).
I’m happy to hear that!
Sort of, though this is mostly my vague theory. I think the ultralearning thing that Panashe mentioned could be a useful framework though I’m not super familiar with it. People like Peter Gray who are experts on homeschooling/self directed learning could also be worth looking into.
Yeah, that’s a pretty important long-term skill. It would be really challenging to have be able to freely learn whatever you want without access to the English internet.
Awesome. One thing to be careful of is that people think schools are important for socialization. I like Seymour Papert’s answer to that:
Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities
I’ve found the above criticism fairly true for my experience with school. I ended up with a lot of not great socialization habits that took a long while to unravel.
It feels like I’m going on a bit too much but one other heuristic to consider: try to do for your daughter what you would have liked as a child rather than what you as a parent think you should do. It’s very easy to assume that you know better than your child, and you do, but coercion is really bad. Trying to influence choices by making them appealing is far healthier than forcing things which I think younger you probably would have appreciated too.