Synchronous Learning

Last year, Michael Nielsen wrote an essay outlining some of the problems faced by current spaced repetition software and ideas about new experiments and potential improvements to try. One question from that article that has been on my mind recently is how spaced repetition apps can be made more social.

Excerpt from Michael Nielsen’s essay Building a better memory system

Part of the reason I’ve been thinking about this is that I’ve been finding it tough to find people in real life who are interested in chatting with me about things like spaced repetition systems or doing mini projects together. It’s rare for me to meet people who use flashcards for things other than school, and I can’t exactly walk down the street and expect to run into geeks like Zander who’ll spend months deliberating the intricacies of flashcard formulation with me. Online it’s different - no matter how niche your hobby, it’s pretty much effortless to find others interested in the same thing.

So something I’ve been trying recently is reaching out to people and inviting them to do synchronous learning sessions together, inspired by a blog post called “Synchronous Reading with Friends”.

Reading synchronously means reading the same thing together at the same time. Read out of the same physical book or share screen on Zoom. Only flip to the next page when both of you have finished. Read silently, but interrupt each other if you don’t understand something or have a comment. - Synchronous Reading with Friends

This was something I used to do quite often during the COVID years with people I met in the SuperMemo Discord. We would take turns going through our flashcard queues, reading snippets of papers, textbooks and articles together. This turns out to be way more fun than you might expect. Doing reading and flashcard reviews collaboratively introduces an extra creative element because there’s an additional brain helping you search for novel associations. The observer can also argue with you about why your flashcards are incorrect or poorly formulated. If one person knows more about a particular subject than another, they can break down the text into simple terms the other person can understand, or the person less familiar can watch more passively and interject from time to time with questions. It even works when one person is a complete novice and knows little about the content the other person is learning because they can still comment on aspects of the learning process.

Here’s a great example of synchronous learning in action courtesy of Andy Matuschak and Dwarkesh Patel:

Beyond being a great way to get to know someone and their current interests, synchronous learning also helps you uncover tacit knowledge and workflows that aren’t typically shared publicly. There are plenty of polished “My Workflow for <thing> in <note taking tool>” videos on YouTube, but there isn’t much raw footage of people just learning. It’s probably because it’s hard to make this kind of content engaging for the audience, especially if you are recording it solo because learning often requires long periods of concentrated silence. Videos like the above are much more watchable because the person observing can interrupt and get the learner to explain their process aloud.

There are some more examples of this kind of footage. For programming you can find lots of raw footage from George Hotz’s streams. But while the Twitch audience plays somewhat of a role, they are too easy for the person being recorded to ignore. It’s not as interactive as a synchronous learning session where the observer can directly interject and demand an explanation! Similarly, me and Soren have made a couple of videos about how to read a book and make flashcards in RemNote and how to use RemNote to learn math. But I think they would be improved massively by having an observer there during the video asking questions like Dwarkesh.

There was a cool project I stumbled across in a language learning server ages ago where they were encouraging members of the community to share their sentence mining workflows in a more organised way. They wanted to use the wisdom of the crowd to converge on an optimal workflow for sentence mining. I’d be curious to see something similar for learning workflows involving SRS outside of language learning.

One final thought I had about synchronous learning is that it’s a great replacement for reading groups. The big problem with things like reading groups and tutorials at university is that no one wants to schedule time to do the reading in advance. Synchronous learning is a similar solution to what Bezos implemented at Amazon for meetings.

In a typical meeting, we'll start with a six-page narratively structured memo and we do study hall for 30 minutes - we sit there silently together in the meeting and take notes in the margins and then we then we discuss… We could say that we would like everybody to read these memos in advance but the problem is people don't have time to do that and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe having not read it at all… it's better just to carve out the time for people so now we're all on the same page we've all read the memo and now we can have a really elevated discussion.

Next Steps

Let’s do some synchronous learning! DM me on Twitter if you want to find a time that works :)