Thread by @FioraAeterna

i cant guarantee it works this way for everyone but there's one bit of advice i've found super useful when trying to learn stuff (i don't remember where i first read it)

basically: "to learn things, you need immediate feedback when you are wrong"

because if you have anything *less* than immediate feedback, your brain is reinforcing the mistake merely by doing it, and you need to (as fast as possible) stop yourself from having that happen, so you don't lay down the wrong wires

so the learning techniques that tend to work best (at least for me) tend to be interactive methods that arrest the mistake as quickly as possible

similarly, if you can't remember something, wracking your brain for 5 minutes to try to remember it can be counterproductive because you're laying down a ton of mental wires in doing so (which may all turn out to be wrong)

just give up, mark it as wrong, and study it again

basically, the learning process is "study, spaced-repetition reviews, don't spend a second longer on repeating mistakes than you have to"

btw, isn't it the worst? when you remember "this is a thing i keep getting wrong, but i can't remember which one the right answer is"?

i've had good luck with this sort of technique: when i encounter one of these, try to create a new memory 10 times bigger than the old one so i don't confuse the two

https://twitter.com/phLaul/status/1156594961770356736