Robert Sobolewski writes about learning techniques, especially Anki spaced repetition, along with category theory, statistics datasets, and problem solving.
HN commenters link his Anki tips and 10,000-card write-up as useful for studying, and cite his post on the effectiveness of checklists.
I built an Anki deck to study for the FAA instrument written test and the oral exam portion of the instrument practical test.
Tips and best practices:
* Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge[0]
* A list of Anki tips and suggestions that [a medical student] wrote[1]
* Anki Guide for Medical Students[2]
* How to make high quality Anki cards quickly[3]
* Anki Tips: What I Learned Making 10,000 Flashcards[4]
[0]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4ocdyb/a_list_of_anki_tips_and_suggestions_that_i_wrote/?st=iwlfns6h&sh=945cacd4
[2]: https://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical-students.html
[3]: https://managingmedicine.org/2013/05/14/how-to-make-high-quality-anki-cards-quickly/
[4]: http://rs.io/anki-tips/
Oh--just that I couldn't understand the first chapter in Stepanov fully on first reading, so I need to read it again (and again, and again).
The Feynman reference is
Well, I asked him, “How can I read it?
It’s so hard.” He said, “You start at the
beginning and you read as far as you can
get, until you are lost. Then you start at
the beginning again, and you keep working
through until you can understand the whole
book.”
—Joan Feynman, Richard Feynman’s sister,
recalling a discussion with her brother
From https://rs.io/feynman-reading-difficult-things/
I've used it for 8 months, and did not observe any negative side effects in the nature of those you mention.
One thing that I would consider somewhat of a disadvantage of an explicit repetition system is that you need to really take care of how you engineer the questions to match the way you would normally encounter the knowledge they refer to in real situations.
For example, read the section on "Two-way connections" of this article, also linked somewhere else in this thread: http://rs.io/2014/04/05/anki-10000-cards-later.html
My friend and I have been using this for years. My friend took it pretty serious this year:
http://rs.io/2014/04/05/anki-10000-cards-later.html
It's really useful for courses in college, especially Language, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics for definitions, pronunciations, systems, etc.
Math and Computer Science is a bit hard since a lot of that requires practice and it takes time to figure out how to structure those cards.
Anyways, highly recommend them.
Some good resources for beginners:
https://mullenmemory.com/
http://artofmemory.com/
You can't just imagine something and remember it forever, combine mnemotechniques with:
http://www.retrievalpractice.org/
https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules
http://rs.io/anki-tips/
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Checklists" (https://rs.io/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-checklists/) comes to mind.
When I was younger I would have though the same. Now that I have more humility and less working memory, I think differently.