Gizmo is a startup on a mission to make learning so easy and fun that anyone can learn anything. We're aiming to help 1 billion people learn by building Duolingo for Anything - a fun gamified way of learning anything!
We’re an early stage well-funded startup that's grown 11X in the last year. We're run by a former Google marketer & Amazon machine learning researcher, a former teacher, and a database specialist who became best friends while studying at Cambridge University. You'd be one of our first hires and an incredibly important part of the team.
My understanding of Plato's cave is that it is about the disparity between the ideas in our head and reality. For example, you know what a triangle is, but there is no such thing as a triangle in the world, only imperfect shapes with three sides that approximate a triangle.
This means that it is not "most people stay in the cave" - it is, "we all stay in the cave because it is impossible to bridge the gap between theoretical construct and lived experience, but we all know about both".
Firstly, in terms of the distinction between learning and knowing -- the thing that matters most is the strength of the encoding in the brain. If you just memorise something with 0 understanding, the connections in the brain aren't as strong -- so they disappear. Whereas if you know something thoroughly, the connections are much, much stronger.
These strong connections are why when you go back and look at it, you recognise it and you know how to apply it - because you still have some of the residual memories from this strong encoding. But in the meantime, you probably haven't been able to apply it in an analogy for example.
Secondly - there's a classic on the topic of Spaced Repetition written by Gwern.[0] Gwern calculated that, given the average amount of time you spend testing yourself on something, and the exponential increase in how long you remember it, if you would spend more than 5 minutes per 10 years looking something up, you should use spaced repetition to remember it.
> Firstly, in terms of the distinction between learning and knowing -- the thing that matters most is the strength of the encoding in the brain.
I'd vote for the ability to perform a skilful epistemic analysis of the retrieved information being more useful. I prefer this because it can overcome any natural immutable shortcomings in the underlying process.
The problem is that if you don't commit information to long-term memory you can't use it reason effectively in other contexts, and you have to add it back to your short-term memory every time you look it up -- so outsourcing your memory to a knowledge bank is limiting the complexity of the tasks you can handle.
So there might be more information you're expected to know in modern jobs -- but if you spend a bit more time consolidating rather than acquiring new information, you can build the foundations on which more advanced skills can rest.
A key point here is that our brains don't work like computer hard drives. Our brains are a lot closer to how, in biology, a single cell stores the entire DNA "data" that's needed to replicate but just using a few base pairs.
We likely store information more in some type of loose graph structure, where we recall / "remember" something by re-creating links to that piece of information. There seems to be very very little "storage cost" for the billions of pieces of information we keep in our brains.
yes, we need understanding - the best way to get things into memory is to make connections between neurons through understanding. And this keeps it in memory for longer than if you just memorise it — and it will enable you to deploy the information in new contexts.
My takeaway from this article is that if you only focus on understanding (and so do not commit it to memory), you cannot reason using this information in unfamiliar contexts later on, once you've forgotten it.
So the best thing to do is to:
1. Make sure you understand something thoroughly
2. Test yourself on it using spaced repetition to ensure you keep it forever
For transparency: I'm one of the cofounders of Save All (linked site) alongside Petros the author
I'm Robin, co-founder of Save All. Save All is a spaced repetition app that uses machine learning to help people remember everything. After telling us what you want to remember, we generate multiple choice quizzes that test you in the right way at the right time to get the information into your long-term memory and keep it there. Unlike other flashcard apps, you don’t need to structure the input, you just write in a sentence.
Me and my co-founders have been avid users of spaced repetition apps for several years, after doing the Coursera course, Learning How to Learn [1]. We were particularly struck by the fact that without recall practice, you forget 90% of what you learn within a week[2]. We applied what we learned on this course, and went on to use it to be really successful at various university courses we did as mature students. One of us came top of his year in the machine learning masters at Imperial College London.
Save All is unique amongst spaced repetition apps because it uses machine learning to generate multiple choice quizzes of your information. This lets us verify whether you know the information without relying on you telling us, meaning we can better optimise your learning and make it feel like a game.
If you wanted to do Cloze questions, you can use saveall.ai (a tool that I built) to generate them automatically from fragments of texts. We also plan to work on automatically generating questions from a larger chunk of text, but it is very difficult. Some people have had some success with GPT-3 but it's unreliable
What's weird about the above comment is that this course specifically talks about spaced repetition and active recall as the only ways to learn effectively. I took this course and it revolutionised my life - but mostly because I started using Anki afterwards.
I just checked the course. Spaced Repetition is listed in the glossary of terms, so you're right that it's in there somewhere. I don't remember it as being a primary topic, whereas active recall is primary.
This course also revolutionized my life, but I find spaced repetition to introduce too much pointless overhead. Instead I focus on aggressive active recall until I understand the content and then I move on.
Gizmo is a startup on a mission to make learning so easy and fun that anyone can learn anything. We're aiming to help 1 billion people learn by building Duolingo for Anything - a fun gamified way of learning anything!
We’re an early stage well-funded startup that's grown 11X in the last year. We're run by a former Google marketer & Amazon machine learning researcher, a former teacher, and a database specialist who became best friends while studying at Cambridge University. You'd be one of our first hires and an incredibly important part of the team.
Apply for backend (https://apply.workable.com/gizmo/j/1E47C074B1/ or frontend roles (https://apply.workable.com/gizmo/j/8CEB76AEBD/) or just email robin [at] gizmo.ai with a CV