Stats for nerds
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2025–2026years
100% recommend
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What Hacker News says
- Two really good modern books on how we actual learn are. 1. The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel L. Schwartz 2. How Learning Happens 2nd by Paul A. Kirschner & Carl Hendrick
I can really recommend them. Now back to flashcards and active recall. They are the secret sauce. People in the thread are saying that understanding is important, while I agree you should understand things its not THAT important.
Important is that you remember not only *facts* what something is. But also how to do something. If you stare at a blank page not being able to do something like writing a a simple typedef struct in C. But knowing what a typedef and struct is, you are missing procedural knowledge.
If you can only programming with an IDE giving you cues like autocompletion you will never form the memory for the actual symbol. Only when you active recall something it will be rememberd until it becomes automatic freeing your working memory from the load and reducing cognitive load overall.
I strongly believe that an AI rephrasing your backside and giving some additional knowledge from your own notes is helpful. You should still write your own notes and flashcards, an AI can help here too but just dont copy and paste them.
Learning can be so much, creating mental models and checking their validity, creating anecdotes, connecting new knowledge and ideas to already learned ones. Have fun!
There are many people that start using anki or flashcards only to stop doing them after a month.
Another interesting observation is that some people use flashcards to optimize for testing not learning. You can get good grades (really good ones) but it might hurt your actual learning. (What that actual means would be a longer topic)
- If you need to learn how to learn then you don't know how to learn. How can you learn to learn if you don't know how to learn?
Jokes aside I'm really into learning science and make youtube videos covering learning and learning papers + an ipad app. I keep a running list of my favorite learn-to-learn resources here:
https://www.ahmni.app/blog/learn-to-learn-resource-list
If I had to recommend only one resource it would be: The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them by Schwartz
