On improving at LearnedLeague
It appears I will not soon find time for a mega-post about taking trivia up as a hobby again, so I'll instead make some smaller posts about it.
I had thought it was just obvious that there is a reliable way to improve at trivia: use spaced repetition, find reasonable sets of things to study, and keep ramping up as time permits. Here is chess expert and poker guy Greg Dyer talking about his journey; here is movie enthusiast Andrew Lobo doing the same; there are others.
But, when you are immersed in something and have read many "I used spaced repetition intensively to do X" posts, you tend to overestimate how much the average person knows about the technique. Even in trivia circles, it is not much.
So here's my contribution to the "I use spaced repetition and it's working" genre. Here are my LearnedLeague results by season (total correct answers out of 150):
LL92: 66
LL93: 73
LL94: 75
LL95: 75
LL96: 77
LL97: 91
LL98: 100
LL99: 95
LL100: 108
LL101: 101
LL102: 121
LL103: 101
LL104: 113
LL105: 104
LL106: 115
LL107: 118
I've made and kept current on approximately 50,000 new flashcards during that interval.
So here's one more data point: spaced repetition, besides being fun, very much works.
P.S.: I'm interested in Andrew Lobo's claim (in the second link above) that he went from 105 to 135 correct answers by learning "10,000 new things." By comparison, the 10,000 next flashcards I made after being at approximately 105 correct answers per season probably got me something like 10 more correct answers, not 30. What accounts for the difference? Candidate explanations:
- My cards are more granular than his, so one of his "things" corresponds to more than one of my cards. My estimating how long it's taken him to learn these 10,000 things (it seems like multiple years?) is more evidence for this.
- He is better at choosing what to study for trivia than I am.
- He is better at retaining things than I am. (Don't underrate this explanation. Spaced repetition people usually emphasize how anyone, or nearly anyone, can learn efficiently with SR. This is a great and democratic thing to emphasize, but it does seem to me that some people are simply better at retaining facts than I am.)