Incremental Reading: A SimpleGuru Summary
¶ Summary
¶ Background
- Incremental reading was invented by Piotr Wozniak in 1999.
- SuperMemo was a pure spaced repetition system until 1999 when Wozniak added the ability to take extracts from article and create cloze deletion flashcards. ^u120l1h
¶ Main Nuggets
- Incremental reading is "cosmically inevitable".
- Incremental reading favors learning over short semantic distances and dendritic learning.
- Incremental reading is focused on converting passive texts to active flashcards to benefit from the power of active recall.
¶ Video
¶ See Also:
- Why would I need incremental reading?
- Inevitability of Incremental Reading.
- Advantages of incremental reading
- Disadvantages of incremental reading
- Incremental learning
¶ Incremental Reading is Inevitable
¶ Similar ideas
- Many tools and systems throughout history have used similar ideas to augment human cognition.
- Now more and more people are independently converging on the same principles.
¶ Commonplace books.
- Commonplace books were often kept by scholars during the Renaissance period and in the 19th Century to compile knowledge.
- These books acted as external memory storage devices.
¶ Newton's "Waste Book"
- Newton's Waste Book was like an artist's scrapbook containing calculations, observations and ideas.
- The commonplace book was not a journal: it was non-linear and arranged by subject and category rather than chronologically.
¶ See Also:
¶ Zettlekasten
- The Zettlekasten system was created by German sociologist Nicholas Luhmann.
- Luhmann was extremely prolific and wrote over 70 books and nearly 400 academic articles.
- Zettlekasten is like HTML hypertext on paper.
- Luhmann described following the links between the index cards as "engaging in a conversation with the system."
- The system consists of a network of interlinked index cards with ideas, concepts and notes.
¶ See Also:
¶ Similar Modern Systems
- Roam Research
- Obsidian
- Andy Matuschak's Evergreen Notes
¶ Convergence
- All of those systems augment the memory by acting as a store of your most important ideas and concepts.
- They all also support an incremental approach.
- They make reengagement with ideas, concepts and viewpoints a choice.
- They all create a kind of designed serendipity, where rather than passively relying on pure chance, you are actively setting up opportunities to generate new ideas.
¶ Caveman's Version of Incremental Reading
Here's an explanation of the system I was using before I found SuperMemo. It is so simple that it will make it easy to do a comparison with SuperMemo's incremental reading tools.
I kept a stack of textbooks on a coffee table and when I wanted to study, I'd go and just pick up the first textbook on the top of the stack and start reading.
If if came across something interesting I'd make a note in the margin. As soon as i saw something which just started to bore me or i just started to feel tired I would take the book...
...and instead of putting it back on the 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.
When I felt I'd come across something worth remembering I'd maybe make a highlight.
¶ Minimum Definition of Incremental Reading
- All of the systems described above are similar to incremental reading, but they still aren't really considered incremental reading systems.
- My minimum definition of incremental reading is a simplified version of the full definitition proposed by Wozniak.
- Read the full article if this section is important to you.
- Interleaving
- Extracts
- Cloze Deletions
- Priority Queue
- Spaced Repetition
¶ Interleaving
Interleaving is when you mix materials on multiple different subjects and from many different sources in the same learning session.
It's like in my simple version of incremental reading: rather than just reading through the entire biology book or the entire anatomy book i switched between them according to my interests and whether I felt tired or bored.
¶ SuperMemo Example
The implementation of interleaving in SuperMemo is very simple: You can start reading an article and as soon as you reach a point where you start feeling tired or bored, you can simply hit next repetition and get teleported to the next article.
¶ Extracts
Since the value contained within articles and books is generally not evenly distributed, an incremental reading system needs a way to break up parts of the text so you can allocate your time to them according to their expected value.
The highlights that I made in the anatomy book are similar to SuperMemo's extract function because they indicate that a certain part of the text is more valuable.
Likewise, the notes in the margin that Newton made in his Waste Book implicitly give a higher priority to the ideas within the main text.
¶ SuperMemo Example
In SuperMemo, you can extract arbitrary sections of text and prioritize them separately from the parent article.
¶ Cloze Deletions
Cloze deletions are a very efficient way of turning extracts into flashcard questions.
¶ Example
The section I highlighted:
"In humans, the heart is approximately the size of a closed fist."
To turn the extract into a flashcard, I could "cloze" the words "closed fist".
This would create the following flashcard
Question: In humans, the heart is approx. the size of a [...].
Answer: closed fist
¶ Priority Queue
¶ Queue?
The queue portion of the priority queue basically refers to your list of articles or books.
¶ Priority?
"Priority" refers to the notion that each article or book in your queue should be assigned a priority based on its expected value. Articles with lots of mission critical information should be allocated more time than articles on celebrity gossip!
In my primitive version of incremental reading the stack of books can be seen as a very simple implementation of a priority queue.
For example when I finished reading the tree biology for beginners book, rather than placing it back on the top of the stack I placed it at the bottom of the stack. If I wanted to give it a higher priority I could have placed it in the middle of the stack, and then I would see it more often than the other books over time.
You can see an example of implicit prioritization in the Zettlekasten system: because all of the index cards are linked together, 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 Zettlekasten system and you are following the links between cards to generate new ideas, what you'll find is that you'll end up allocating more time to those index cards with a higher number of links.
¶ SuperMemo Example
In SuperMemo, your daily learning queue is sorted in order of priority. That means that you will begin each day studying the most valuable material. That way, if you don't make it all the way through your queue, you don't miss out on as much value.
¶ Slot-In
We have a natural bias towards information that we can easily assimilate into our prior knowledge. In SuperMemo we tend to prioritize that sort of information more highly.
The time you spend in the system is allocated heavily towards new information that you can easily "slot in" to your prior knowledge.
The entire system is designed to help you make dendritic progress, gradually extending your understanding of the world at the frontiers of your prior knowledge.
¶ See Also:
¶ Spaced repetition
Spaced repetition is used to show you articles and flashcards repeatedly over time, allowing you to reenage with old ideas.
It allows you to maximize the amount of high priority knowledge that you have stored in your memory at a given point in time.
Spaced repetition is a fundamental part of an incremental reading system that most similar technologies miss out.
¶ Flow of Knowledge
¶ Converting passive to Active
In incremental reading, knowledge is gradually converted from passive text to active flashcards. Active recall is used to reconsolidate memories at each repetition. One of the benefits of using spaced repetition is that it maximizes the amount of retrievable knowledge you can keep in your memory, which has many benefits for the creative process.
¶ Creativity
¶ Associative Memory
Any creative process requires a great deal of inferential knowledge that you can call upon during problem solving.
¶ Mechanism of Creativity
Creativity can be thought of as a conscious and unconscious search process the brain does to find useful associations. It's important to remember that the mechanism underlying creativity is an internal process for the brain, so you can't rely on external memory stores to maximally assist the creative process.
¶ See Also:
Knowledge stored in the mind.
Knowledge stored in the external system.
The systems I mentioned earlier tend to treat the knowledge stored within the external system and the knowledge stored within the mind as separate.
On the other hand, SuperMemo emphasises the use of spaced repetition to maintain the highest value knowledge stored in the external system in the mind too.
Knowledge stored in the external system and the mind.