Spaced repetition is the most efficient way in terms of time spent per item. That doesn’t make it the most efficient way to achieve a competitive goal. For this reason, SRS systems often include a ‘cramming mode’, where review efficiency is ignored in favor of maximizing memorization probability within X hours. And as far as musicians go—orchestras don’t select musicians based on who spent the fewest total hours practicing but still manage to sound mostly-kinda-OK, they select based on who sounds the best; and if you sold your soul to the Devil or spent 16 hours a day practicing for the last 30 years to sound the best, then so be it. If you don’t want to do it, someone else will.
That said, the spaced repetition research literature on things like sports does suggest you still want to do a limited form of spacing in the form of blocking or rotating regularly between each kind of practice/activity.
this feels like a simplistic model of what’s going on with learning an instrument. iirc in the “principles of SR” post from 20 years ago wozniak makes a point that you essentially can’t start doing SR until you’ve already learned an item, this being obviously for purely sort of “fact” based learning. SR doesn’t apply in the way you’ve described for all of the processes of tuning, efficiency, and accuracy gains that you need for learning an instrument. my sloppy model here is that formal practice eg for music is something like priming the system to spend optimization cycles on that etc—I assume cognitive scientists claim to have actual models here which I suppose are >50% fake lol.
also, separately, professional musicians in fact do a cheap SR for old repertoire, where they practice only intermittently to keep it in memory once it’s been established.
What about a goal that isn’t competitive, such as “get grade 8 on the ABRSM music exam for <instrument>”? Plenty of Asian parents have that particular goal and yet they usually ask/force their children to practice daily. Is this irrational, or is it good at achieving this goal? Would we be able to improve efficiency by using spaced repetition in this scenario as opposed to daily practice?
The ABRSM is in X days. It too does not care how efficient you were time-wise in getting to grade-8 competency. There are no bonus points for sample-efficiency.
(And of course, it’s not like Asian parents are doing their kids much good in the first place with that music stuff, so there’s even less of an issue there.)
Spaced repetition is the most efficient way in terms of time spent per item. That doesn’t make it the most efficient way to achieve a competitive goal. For this reason, SRS systems often include a ‘cramming mode’, where review efficiency is ignored in favor of maximizing memorization probability within X hours. And as far as musicians go—orchestras don’t select musicians based on who spent the fewest total hours practicing but still manage to sound mostly-kinda-OK, they select based on who sounds the best; and if you sold your soul to the Devil or spent 16 hours a day practicing for the last 30 years to sound the best, then so be it. If you don’t want to do it, someone else will.
That said, the spaced repetition research literature on things like sports does suggest you still want to do a limited form of spacing in the form of blocking or rotating regularly between each kind of practice/activity.
Thank you, this was informative and helpful for changing how I structure my coding practice.
this feels like a simplistic model of what’s going on with learning an instrument. iirc in the “principles of SR” post from 20 years ago wozniak makes a point that you essentially can’t start doing SR until you’ve already learned an item, this being obviously for purely sort of “fact” based learning. SR doesn’t apply in the way you’ve described for all of the processes of tuning, efficiency, and accuracy gains that you need for learning an instrument. my sloppy model here is that formal practice eg for music is something like priming the system to spend optimization cycles on that etc—I assume cognitive scientists claim to have actual models here which I suppose are >50% fake lol.
also, separately, professional musicians in fact do a cheap SR for old repertoire, where they practice only intermittently to keep it in memory once it’s been established.
What about a goal that isn’t competitive, such as “get grade 8 on the ABRSM music exam for <instrument>”? Plenty of Asian parents have that particular goal and yet they usually ask/force their children to practice daily. Is this irrational, or is it good at achieving this goal? Would we be able to improve efficiency by using spaced repetition in this scenario as opposed to daily practice?
The ABRSM is in X days. It too does not care how efficient you were time-wise in getting to grade-8 competency. There are no bonus points for sample-efficiency.
(And of course, it’s not like Asian parents are doing their kids much good in the first place with that music stuff, so there’s even less of an issue there.)