EDIT: I am canceling this contest because I feel that the structure of the incentives were poorly thought out (see gwern's comments). I will be posting a new better structured contest in the near future (now posted). If you feel this is unfair or otherwise feel slighted, please contact me at my username at gmail.com.
I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:
Spaced Repetition is often mentioned on on Less Wrong as a technique for remembering things. I've started using Anki and it certainly seems to be useful. However, I haven't seen a good summary of evidence on Spaced Repetition.
I hereby offer a prize to the first person to submit a good summary of the evidence on Spaced Repetition to the main page. The winner will get the prize, currently: $265 + 40 to charity (see comments)
The summary should address at least the following questions:
What spacing is best?
How much does spaced repetition actually help memory?
Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs?
Does the effectiveness vary across domains? How much?
Is there research on the kinds of questions that work best?
What questions do researchers think are most important?
Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on?
What, if any, questions do researchers think it is important to answer? Are there other unanswered questions that would jump out at a smart person?
What does spaced repetition not do that people might expect it to?
The post should summarize the state of current evidence and provide citations to back up the claims in the article.
If you think you would benefit from the result of this project, please add to the prize! You can contribute to the prize on the ChipIn page.
Whether the summary is 'good' will be judged by me. If there is a serious dispute, I'll agree to dispute resolution by any uninvolved party with more than 5k karma.
If you have suggestions, questions or comments, please leave them in the comments.
If you would like to work on this project, please say so in the comments below. Collaboration is encouraged.
This project is tagged with the 'project' tag and listed on the Projects wiki page.
It's funny you linked to my post on prizes, which brought me here, because I'm actually very interested in spaced repetition. In fact just a couple of weeks ago I mentioned it's potentially worth millions of dollars to me: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/132233.html
You guys need to get more rational about the value and importance of what you're doing in this community. You're arguing over trivial amounts of money here. I'd say that any post that's good enough to get voted up to the main page is worth tens of thousands of dollars to mankind. Easily.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is chipping in $100 for the new prize. [Edit. Hmm, I got a paypal receipt but the total on chipin hasn't changed. Maybe just need to wait for a bit.]
Finally, I'm only a sporadic reader, but allow me to express my deep gratitude and admiration for the community.
! You're Arvind? I had no idea. Gosh, the past few days have been interesting for me - first Piotr Wozniak tells me he's incrementally reading 8 articles mentioning or by me, then Danny Hillis replies to a comment of mine over at the Technium, and now here's Arvind Narayanan.
[...]
On one hand, I agree - if a main page post improves one high-value person's time, that alone is probably a few tens of thousands' worth. The other part of me is cynically remarking that Wozniak and psychologists in general have been advocating spaced repetition for the last >2 decades / centuries (respectively), the research is unassailable, and yet... So what's the marginal return on another literature survey?
A few comments:
* You mention creatine on your blog. Creatine only works in specific demographics; I don't know whether they include you.
* You mention dual n-back; the results seem to keep getting weaker since Jaeggi 2008, and Jaeggi 2011 seems extremely weak. I used to be extremely enthusiastic, but as the studies keep coming in... At this point, I'm not sure how much time is worth putting into DNB for just the WM benefits. Probably not much past D5B though.
EDIT: I am canceling this contest because I feel that the structure of the incentives were poorly thought out (see gwern's comments). I will be posting a new better structured contest in the near future (now posted). If you feel this is unfair or otherwise feel slighted, please contact me at my username at gmail.com.
I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:
I hereby offer a prize to the first person to submit a good summary of the evidence on Spaced Repetition to the main page. The winner will get the prize, currently: $265 + 40 to charity (see comments)
The summary should address at least the following questions: