This document is being written incrementally. As of March 8th, this document represents my observations and reflections after 1 month of using Twitter. Check back later for more.
In my article on why the use of spaced repetition has not taken hold in creative domains and my article on the Future of Spaced Repetition, I suggested that lack of social proof was one of the major reasons that we do not see widespread use of spaced repetition systems like Anki and SuperMemo in creative domains. Not only are we yet to see a Nobel Prize winner scroll through their Anki decks or their SuperMemo collection during their Nobel Prize lecture, but it's difficult to find any examples at all of people using spaced repetition systems to assist them in their creative projects. The spaced repetition community seems to be fixated on meangingless goals and cramming for school, rather than writing books, doing academic research or starting businesses.
In small pockets of the spaced repetition community, the use of social media like Reddit, YouTube, Twitter and Discord has massively accelerated the spread of spaced repetition systems. You can see this particularly in the Japanese learning community where YouTubers who have attained extremely high levels of Japanese like MattVsJapan have popularised the use of spaced repetition systems to the point where it has become the dominant meta, the new "common sense" learning strategy.
I believe that SRS enthusiasts in creative domains could learn a thing or two from the language learning community: stop hoarding all of your nuggets of wisdom! Learn with the garage door up! Collaborate with others and raise the level of the community as a whole!
I also
My interest in Twitter was also driven by the desire to talk to interesting people thinking about . My experiences in the SuperMemo.Wiki Discord have taught me that having a core group of people who are obsessively interested in exploring niche topic creates a great environment for developing your ideas.
With this in mind, despite having a pretty low opinion of social media in general, I decided to start using Twitter to exchange ideas with people in the spaced repetition community, and to promote the use of SRS in creative domains.
Twitter for Scientists by Daniel S. Quintana provided the inspiration for me to record my experiences into this article. In the (free!) book, Daniel explains why early career researchers would benefit from investing time in Twitter. It essentially comes down to three main points:
An early career researcher has no reputation and no followers. All they have is their ideas and insights. Twitter is great because it democratizes the attention economy: it's possible to have your tweets spread far and wide based purely on their content, rather than how many followers you have.
Peer review is slow. Retweeting and commenting is fast. Twitter supports a sort of short-term asynchronous brainstorming: if people are interested in your ideas, they will add their own ideas and critiques into the mix which can help you improve whatever it is you are working on.
Discussing ideas with people on Twitter can create opportunites and open doors for you.
While Daniel's book is targeted at early career academic researchers, I think someone starting out doing public learning will likely find themselves in a similar position: without reputation or an existing following. Just like a young scientist, you need to find a way to "squeeze yourself into the attention cycle", to share your ideas with
This document intends to record real examples and experiences I have had to encourage people interested in doing projects similar to Experimental Learning to share their process and creative output on Twitter. I want to show you through my own experience how openly sharing creative projects can open doors for you and present many exciting, unplanned opportunities.
Finally, I don't think I can give more comprehensive advice for someone looking to ... than what is already available in that book. Go and read it! I am going to be focusing pretty much entirely on my own experiences rather than giving the more general and applicable advice available in Daniel's book.
Thanks again to Daniel for sharing the information that inspired this article for free.
My name is James. I run a YouTube channel and Wiki called Experimental Learning. I am pursuing a bunch of interesting projects from writing articles, to filming videos and writing software related to free learning and [spaced repetition systems]. Find out more about my projects here. If you are interested in supporting my work, click here.
The mere existence of this document suggests that I agree strongly with Daniel that Twitter is essential if you are interested in doing a public learning project. Here is a summary of the pros and cons of using Twitter for a public learner. Each point is hyperlinked to a paragraph later in the document that will expand upon the summary.
Overall I consider Twitter to be a really essential tool with a ton of upside, but there are some negatives that you should be aware of.
Joined: Feb 8th
Joined with a bunch of pals who were also interested in spaced repetition systems and free learning: Zander, , Naess, Fowl, Matt.
And there was a group of friends who had already been on Twitter for a while:
Raj, Guillem and Squid.
I was immediately surprised by the number of people specifically interested in discussing spaced repetition.
I found a small but pretty interesting group of spaced repetition system enthusiasts - Giacomo Randazzo, Lucca, who were talking about really interesting ideas and problems related to spaced repetition systems.
Found a bunch of cool threads and ideas, including ... .
Feb 10th
I read Twitter for Scientists. I recommend it. It made a very convincing argument for a researcher to use Twitter and all of the reasons given are generalizable to anyone working publicly on creative projects who wants to share their work. The core argument Daniel makes is that Twitter democratises the attention economy in a way I have not experienced before on other platforms. I really started to begin to see the potential to create big opportunities for my projects.
I retweeted Guillem's Tweet about the International Day of Education Freedom. I included a
"We need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoloy of the school" Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society https://t.co/TyggZouO8K
— Experimental Learning (@experilearning) February 10, 2021
The Paris Institute for Critical Thinking
I assume they found my post by searching Twitter for "Ivan Illich" and advertising their podcast to people who had written tweets mentioning him. Intrigued, I decided to listen to a couple minutes just to see what on earth it was. It turned out to be an EXCELLENT podcast on ... . I was really impressed by the eloquence of Evrim's arguments. In addition, Evrim mentioned Illich's "Learning Webs". This serendipitous connection was the final impetus I needed to ... .
This is a great example of Twitter's potential for idea generation.
It's also a great way to positively tune your "knowledge valuation networks" to certain ideas - if you see that many smart people are all raving about the same idea, then you know it must be something worth paying attentionn to. It is even more interesting when you notice that smart people from distinct communities are all converging on the same models.
--> Andy, Wozniak, PICT
--> Roam, Obsidian, SM, Anki, critical rationalists - incremental learning
--> Roam, Obsididian, SM, Anki, critical rationalists - spaced repetition for creativity
Feb 11th
I filmed my first Incremental Reading Commentary and posted a link to it on Twitter. Seemed to get some interest from a bunch of people. Including those in spaced repetition adjacent communities such as Roam / Obsidian.
Inspired by @andy_matuschak's note-writing livestream, @ArtirKel's live article writing video and @RobertHaisfield's Roam workflow vids, I decided to record an incremental reading session in SuperMemo while thinking aloud.
— Experimental Learning (@experilearning) February 11, 2021
Full vid 👉 https://t.co/uy8BgVzT0d
Preview 👇 pic.twitter.com/EjUYT0aTGK
By the way, the Twitter for Scientists book is where I got the idea to
Feb 12th
Part of the benefit of creating projects in such a niche community is that there is a real dearth of content. If people see what you are posting and they are even slightly interested, they seem to be much more willing than in a saturated community to go searching through your website / other social media accounts for more.
"The infamous Outstanding parameter becomes a form of religion. If it does not get down to 0+0, users feel like a failure." - Woz
— Experimental Learning (@experilearning) February 12, 2021
We can't let crude metrics like no. of cards, heatmaps and streaks control our learning. Coercion destroys the pleasure of learning, just like school https://t.co/Dl1oXstWpu
Feb 13th
Started to find amazing adjacent communities and accounts.
.@francis_miller's 91-page "Organizing Knowledge" is a tour de force, an absolute epistemological treat. https://t.co/DhLGgc3TLd pic.twitter.com/lINDGl9SP6
— Andrew Yu (@andrewcyu) October 8, 2020
Super cool ebook on Organizing Knowledge by Francis Miller. I used this as inspiration for some incremental art drawings.
In general I found the browsing feature of Twitter to be a net negative. It's just too easy to get sucked into the infinity pool, as I heard Raj refer to it as.
I don't know a good way to limit this. I tried blocking Twitter using /etc/hosts but I would find myself just undoing it.
Quickly get in touch with people working on projects in the real world
Found people working on things that
Feb 26th
Great example of the power of information spreading within Twitter
Nice video on the fact learning is pleasurable, and what’s happening when it isn’t:https://t.co/PhNBBmJnIg
— Lulie (@reasonisfun) February 26, 2021
Lulie retweeted my video which started to circulate it amongst the critical rationalist community. Then out of nowhere [David Deutsch] retweeted it?! Pretty nuts how things can rapidly spread between networks of communities you have never heard of. I think Twitter is pretty unique in this respect.
Popping Off
The retweet from David drew a bunch of attention to the video and the event we ran on the Sunday after the video went up attracted the largest group of people.
(By the way if these sorts of discussions sound interesting to you, sign up for my [newsletter]. I'll send an alert when there are big events planned.)
Bad parts?