Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:00
hello guys so today i'm going to be doing a presentation on incremental reading which is a set of techniques developed by piotr wozniak aimed at massively increasing the speed fun and creativity of learning if you're interested in learning more about
00:00:12
incremental reading i recommend that you join our event on this sunday we're going to do a discussion about incremental reading whether you're just a beginner or a seasoned veteran whether you use anki supermemo memzine whatever i strongly recommend that you check out
00:00:24
the voice chat because they're a lot of fun so before we dive into super memos implementation of incremental reading why don't we first take a look at some of the ideas that preceded it and influenced it so the first one that i'd like to take a
00:00:37
look at is isaac newton's waste book it's an example of a commonplace book which were often kept by mathematicians and philosophers during the renaissance period you can see that in the margin he has a bunch of notes and calculations
00:00:50
and here he's writing observations and ideas and they were basically used as an external memory aid so that he could develop his ideas incrementally over time the important thing to remember here is that this was not a chronological
00:01:03
journal but rather arranged by subject and then incrementally updated and developed over time by isaac newton another idea that's pretty popular and related to incremental reading is settle casting zero casting was
00:01:16
developed by a german sociologist by the name of nicolas lumen he would create all of these physical paper notes and link them together and he would describe his note-taking and writing practices as engaging in a
00:01:28
conversation with the system because he was able to use these interlinked system of notes to generate new ideas which massively helped him in his writing and there are many other examples of systems and note-taking practices that
00:01:40
share a lot of overlapping ideas with super memos incremental reading rom research obsidian and animatics evergreen notes are just three examples so a common thread running between all of these systems is that they all augment the
00:01:53
memory by acting as an external store of knowledge all of them support an incremental process in some sense they allow you to re-engage with ideas over time they all create a sort of design serendipity where rather than passively relying on
00:02:06
pure chance you're actively setting yourself up to generate new ideas i think the best way for me to introduce what incremental reading is especially to a beginner is to give my own experience of the system that i was personally using before i came across
00:02:19
super memos incremental reading you can sort of consider it a caveman's version a very primitive version of supermemo's incremental reading so essentially what i did is i had this stack of textbooks that i kept on a coffee table
00:02:30
next to a chair and every day i'd get up go and sit in the chair and just pick up the first textbook on the top of the stack and start reading so basically i just read through until i got to something i thought was interesting
00:02:43
maybe i'd make a note and then as soon as i saw something which just started to bore me or i just started to feel tired i basically take that book and instead of putting it back on the
00:02:56
top of the stack i'd put it at the bottom and then move the rest of the stack of books on top of that book and then basically i just continue the process i would just take the next book off the top of the stack this time
00:03:08
human anatomy and i would read through and then when i felt i got to something that was worth remembering i'd maybe make a highlight so while all of these systems overlap with incremental reading they
00:03:21
still can't really be considered incremental reading systems so what is incremental reading based on an article from piotr wozniak called the minimum definition of incremental reading i've chosen
00:03:32
a few of the major features that i consider to be essential to any incremental reading system and i'm going to step through each of them and show you some examples in super memo of how they're used and what their purpose is so the first feature that is
00:03:46
essential to any incremental reading system is interleaving to understand interleaving we can very simply go back to the examples i gave in my own experience essentially rather than just reading through the entire biology book
00:03:59
or the entire anatomy book i switch between them according to my interests and whether i felt tired or bored you can also imagine isaac newton switching between doing these very lengthy calculations and then moving on to his study of
00:04:12
optics and drawing some diagrams the point here is that rather than simply doing one thing you're switching between different subjects combining new and old knowledge interleaving different materials and sources so the implementation of
00:04:25
interleaving in supermemo it's very simple i can start reading an article for example this article on the brain and as soon as i reach a point where i start feeling tired or i'm just bored of this article or whatever
00:04:39
i can simply hit next repetition and i'll be teleported to the next article on trees so what are extracts well essentially extracts are used to designate that a certain part of the text has a greater value than the rest
00:04:54
of the text it's extremely rare that an article has all of its value distributed evenly across every single sentence and paragraph instead certain paragraphs or sentences will contain 90 of the value and extracts are
00:05:06
essentially a way of separating those really valuable sentences and paragraphs from the rest of the text and giving them a higher priority in my primitive version of incremental reading you can consider the highlights that i
00:05:18
made as being analogous to super memos extracts and in isaac newton's wastebook you can consider the notes he was making in the margin as giving a higher priority to the ideas that were contained within
00:05:31
the main text here's an example of taking extracts in supermember so imagine that i was reading this article on tree roots and i came across this paragraph and i decided that this
00:05:44
paragraph in particular contained a lot of really useful information about trees that i wanted to study in the future what i could do is select the entire paragraph i could use alt x to extract that
00:05:57
paragraph now that is added as a child under the parent article on roots now i can go to this child extract and
00:06:10
i can increase the priority so setting a lower number in this percent uh text box will increase the priority so perhaps i could set it down here and essentially what that means is
00:06:23
on the day when this extract is scheduled i will see it earlier in my queue the third essential feature of an incremental reading system is the ability to make closed deletions and close deletions
00:06:36
are a very simple way of turning extracts into flashcard questions i'll use this paragraph that i highlighted in the anatomy book as an example in humans the hearts is approximately the size of a closed fist
00:06:49
if i was to apply a closed deletion to this paragraph i might get something like this in humans the heart is approx the size of a and then this part is the closed deletion and this would show up as the
00:07:01
answer closed fist on the flash card so here's an example of a closed deletion in supermemo say that i have this extract about the roots of a tree and what they actually do
00:07:13
i could take this part of the extract and use alt said to close it and then we can look at what that's created it's basically created a flash card so
00:07:27
the something of a tree serve to anchor it to the ground and gather water and nutrients to transfer to all parts of the tree then the answer is roots and what that will look like when you come across it in your queue when you're doing your
00:07:39
repetitions is like this and then you show the answer and you can give it a grade whether you remembered or not so the next important part of any incremental reading system is the
00:07:51
priority queue the queue portion of the priority queue basically refers to your list of articles or books and the priority part refers to the notion that each article or book in your queue should be
00:08:04
assigned a priority based on its expected value in my primitive version of incremental reading the stack can be seen as a very simple version of a priority queue
00:08:15
for example when i finished reading the tree biology for guinness book rather than placing it back on the top of the stack instead i placed it at the bottom of the stack if i wanted to give it a higher priority i could have placed it
00:08:27
for example in the middle of the stack and then i would see it more often than the other books over time you can also see an example of implicit prioritization in the zetter cutting system because all of these index cards are linked together
00:08:40
what you'll find over time is that you'll have hubs in the network that have many more links than the other cards when you're writing an article with your settle casting system and you're following the links between cards to generate new ideas
00:08:52
what you'll find is that you'll end up allocating more time to those index cards with a higher number of links i think the priority queue system in supermemo is much easier to understand let's take a look so here you can see a
00:09:04
sorted list of all of the articles in my collection the highest priority ones those with the lowest priority number come right at the top and then i have the lowest priority
00:09:15
articles right at the bottom and each day when i open supermemo and i want to do incremental reading the queue will automatically be sorted for me so that i will allocate most of my time to the
00:09:28
most important articles and if i don't get to the ones at the bottom then that's not a big deal because they contain less valuable information i want to briefly mention one more really interesting point about the priority queue we have a natural and desirable bias
00:09:41
towards information that we can easily assimilate into our prior knowledge in supermemo you tend to prioritize that sort of information more highly meaning that most of your time in this system is allocated towards effortlessly slotting in new pieces of
00:09:54
knowledge into your prior knowledge the entire system is essentially designed to help you make dendritic progress gradually extending your understanding of the world at the frontiers of your prior knowledge
00:10:06
this contrasts very strongly with forms of linear learning such as in the traditional education system where the semantic distance between your prior knowledge and the thing that you want to learn is too long and so you're just not able to assimilate it into your prior
00:10:19
knowledge an incremental reading system can't really be considered complete without spaced repetition with space repetition you are repeatedly shown articles and flash cards over time so that you're able to
00:10:30
re-engage with old ideas and concepts it also allows you to maximize the amount of high priority knowledge stored in your memory at a given time this is probably one of the most important features of incremental reading and i think it's one of the features
00:10:43
that most of the other systems that i mentioned before lack so each day the super memory algorithm is going to try and show me those flash cards that it thinks that i might forget and by recalling the answer of each
00:10:57
flash card it's going to reconsolidate the memory and strengthen it and that will mean that that piece of information can last for a longer period of time in my memory before it needs to be refreshed again
00:11:13
okay finally let's link everything together and look at the flow of knowledge through an incremental reading system so here you can see an example of me going through my learning cue for the day and supermemo is going to interleave
00:11:27
flashcards articles and materials from many different subjects so straight away you can see that supermemory is showing me some flashcards to make sure i remember this information about trees
00:11:40
now it's showing me an article and i found these two paragraphs to be especially interesting so i extracted them finally i found this interesting sentence and i created a closed deletion card so that i can be
00:11:57
reminded of that information in the future so essentially the entire purpose of the system is to efficiently convert passive articles books and extracts into flashcards that use active recall
00:12:12
to maximize the amount of knowledge that you can store in your memory at a given point in time this is essential because knowledge stored in the mind forms the backbone of human creativity any creative process requires a great
00:12:25
deal of inferential knowledge that you can call upon during problem solving when you're writing a book starting a business and so on to emphasize this point i want to quickly review the mechanism of creativity in the human brain
00:12:38
you can basically think of it as a kind of search process and its goal is to find useful associations that you can use in problem solving an important point is that the mechanism of creativity is an internal process for the brain that depends on prior
00:12:49
knowledge stored inside your memory interestingly the mechanism of creativity can be both conscious and unconscious it can be conscious for example when you're actively trying to solve a problem and thinking about what the next step
00:13:02
to solve the problem could be but it can also be unconscious for example during sleep to link this back to the systems that i showed you at the beginning of this presentation for example the zettel custom system and isaac newton's commonplace book they
00:13:14
both take a similar approach in that there's a dividing line between the knowledge stored within the brain of the human and the knowledge stored within the external system this for me is really the
00:13:26
critical difference between super mario's implementation of incremental reading and the other systems that i described earlier rather than treating the knowledge stored within the learner's mind and the knowledge stored
00:13:37
within the external system as separate super memo emphasizes the use of space repetition to maintain the knowledge stored within the external system inside the learner's mind given that a large body of influential knowledge
00:13:50
underlies many different creative processes and given the efficiency of the space repetition algorithm this creates an extremely well optimized process to support learning and creativity so that's it for my introduction to
00:14:02
incremental reading a reminder to join the discussion on sunday if you have time and tweet at experia learning on twitter with any feedback thanks guys
End of transcript