嘘とワンダーランド

You know, I’m pretty lazy. I don’t want to do anything. I’d be happy to just read cracked.com and tvtropes.org all day. But I’m also a megalomaniac. I wanna know everything. And I mean everything. I wanna understand about the Great Vowel Shift, the colonization of Australia, the evolution of the influenza virus, the performance of text matching… everything. Unfortunately, for now at least, the human brain can’t know everything. You can’t just pour stuff in until you run out of it. Upload Wikipedia and be done with it. You need to actually work for it and study. Slowly, painfully and did I mention slowly?

Sure, you can use a SRS to manage information so that you don’t forget the stuff again. You only learn it once and then do your daily repetitions so it stays in your brain. That’s pretty cool already, but there are two drawbacks: it’s a little boring and, worse, tiring. It’s in fact so tiring that I had to give up an otherwise pretty neat sleeping schedule. I read a few articles and forum posts on this and everyone seems to agree – you can do about 200 repetitions per day, maybe 300. More than that is too tiring, too time-consuming, too boring and maybe just plain impossible. Sure, for a few days you can do more, but I never saw anyone maintain this. You just burn out. (But you can study more, just not via SRS.)

Of course, old repetitions and new facts compete for resources. You can’t just add and add facts. Soon your daily repetitions surpass 200 and you will forget them anyway. But what is the optimal course of action? Is it better to add facts slowly to minimize the risk of burn-out? Soon, university starts again and I’ll have to study for exams. That means adding facts I don’t really wanna learn that much (at least right now), but I’m also learning other things (2 languages, for example). So on one hand, I want to learn as comfortable as possible, but on the other hand, I need to get done in time, so I’d better be fast.

What do you do in such a situation? You run a simulation, of course! I expanded my handy SRS simulator and tested a few possible configurations. I’m just going to show you the 3 most interesting ones:

amount of daily repetitions for 200 days

new facts remaining each day

A few short notes first.

I set the amount of facts to learn to 3400. That’s my current number of new, unseen facts. Don’t ask how I got that many (*shame*, *shame*), but it’s not unusual for many learners. Of course, if you are learning basically forever, there won’t be a “last new fact” – you’ll constantly add new ones. In this case, just look at the first graph and find the plateau for each curve. You will never drop below this.

The 3 configurations are:

• A -> a maximum of 100 repetitions per day; add up to 50 new facts
• B -> a maximum of 200 repetitions per day; add up to 50 new facts
• G -> a maximum of 200 repetitions per day; add up to 200 new facts

The maximum is only respected when adding new facts, not when doing due facts.

Ok, now let’s have a look at the actual graphs.

The first and most obvious thing is that G totally fails at it’s goal. After about a week, the due cards explode right in your face and you’ll have to face up to 350 repetitions per day. And this continues to happen all the time, so you are pretty likely, at some point, to just give up. You feel so bad about the extreme and unexpected workload you’re facing that it becomes counter-productive. So to just “fill up” until you hit your maximum number of comfortable repetitions a day is a really bad idea.

Furthermore, we can see that both A and B are pretty good at keeping the maximum under control, A is pretty inefficient at it. You have lazy and busy days in a pretty regular pattern, but you never max out. Not really that good, but workable nonetheless. However, what you can see is that if you are working through a fixed amount of facts, B gets you into the “lazy phase” much sooner. A has many lazy days, but on average it is actually more work than B, not less.

The second graph shows us how fast we are progressing. It takes G about 50 days to work through all facts, B needs about 80 days and A about 150. Sure, G is pretty fast, but actually not much faster than B, at only about 40% less time. However, it is quite clear that A really is slow. It needs at least twice as long to work through the same amount of facts than the other two approaches.

Conclusion

I think the data allows us to make two important conclusions.

First, do not add facts like crazy. Trying to just add facts until you fall asleep might work for a few days, but very soon you hit the point where all those repetitions burn you out. They would demand up to twice the amount of work you were capable of just a week ago, so most likely, you will just fail to do them and forget everything again. Basically, you end up really tired, demotivated and not much smarter than before. A good waste of your time.

Second, to be lazy, work harder. It might sound counter-intuitive at first, but it makes sense. If you try to be lazy early on by working below your actual threshold, you will, on most days, actually have to work more than you expected. You will learn much slower and spend a lot more time on your repetitions. The reason for this is that you are spreading out your early repetitions, which are by far the hardest. If you work a bit more and get those early repetitions over with, it will get much easier later on. If you work consistently at your threshold, it wil be easier to make a routine out of it and your progress will be faster.

Finally, the simulation allows me to pick some more useful values. If you have another look at the second graph again, you can see that A and G look a bit like stairs, but B is smooth. This means there is an optimal value of new facts per day to pick that consistently maxes out your workload by looking at the slope of the curve. This optimal value, interestingly enough, is about 42. I do not believe this to be a coincidence.

If you start with a bad assumption, you will invariably reach bad conclusions and constantly delude yourself about that fact. The only way to fix this is to regularly question your own basic assumptions about things. The scientific method provides a neat way (in fact, the only way) to do just this. Ask yourself: Is there a different explanation? On what data do you base your decision? Does another interpretation fit, too?

I don’t just claim this, but actually live this way. I want to demonstrate this by changing my opinion about sleep. Frustrated with polyphasic sleep, I have reëvaluated my own assumptions and checked the data. I read more studies and biology texts, looked through my own records and re-read a few polyphasic blogs. And I must conclude that polyphasic sleep, by and large, doesn’t work.

Let’s start at the opposite end – what does work? Well, polyphasic sleep is the best (known) option you have when you can’t have more than 2-4 hours per day of sleep. If you must sleep that little, for example because you are into solo sailing or your newborn child and 2 jobs keep you up all day, than polyphasic sleep is right for you. It minimizes the damage this kind of life will do, but you will still be worse off. You will still be sleep deprived.

Ok, having acknowledged that, let’s start with the criticism. In fact, it’s a very simple criticism because it only involves one point.

Polyphasic sleep destroys your memory.

Sure, you are awake more (if you are lucky, most people aren’t and delude themselves to the fact), but you can’t use the time in any meaningful way. You can’t learn more, in fact, you’ll learn less. All existing studies show that performance is slightly below normal levels, which means you have 4-6 more hours of waketime, but you are actually performing worse than if you had slept them all. Great job. That’s like taking a shortcut, only to drive slower so that you arrive even later.

Why is there not a single polyphasic scientist? No, Tesla was not polyphasic, he crashed regularly. Edison lied about his schedule and, while being mostly polyphasic, didn’t save any time (and he was not a scientist). Buckminster Fuller only slept polyphasically when touring, for the reason I mentioned above.

Why is there not a single polyphasic polyglot? You’d think that someone who is learning multiple languages at the same time would be glad over every single hour per day he can get. Yet, not a single one of them is documented to be polyphasic. Some have tried (mostly early polyglots), no one was happy with it.

Why does no military or space agency advocate polyphasic sleep? There are several studies researching it, but they all document a severe loss of performance and they all advise against it, except when external circumstances force you to be polyphasic, as mentioned earlier.

Why does all data collected via SRS, like for example Supermemo, show that sleeping in big chunks correlates with good performance? If there are working examples of polyphasic sleepers, no one of them has ever demonstrated this via their SRS statistics, and Supermemo captures a lot of those. There isn’t a single example of someone sleeping 4 hours or less per day and still getting a normal retention rate for the same amount of data learned.

There is a simple answer to these questions: Because polyphasic sleep doesn’t work. It’s bullshit. For all the claims of “superhuman” feats, there hasn’t been a single bit of evidence for it. Proponents have made all kinds of claims and assurances, yet have presented nothing. Most of them don’t even seem to be capable of grasping the importance of empirical evidence. It is pseudoscience.

Conclusion

If you don’t care about your memory and you don’t care about being able to learn, sure, go right ahead. If you also keep in mind that the majority of people drop out of polyphasic sleep after a month or less, I would recommend a better alternative: Amphetamines. It has exactly the same amount of advantages (awake at all costs), is easier to use and fucks you up just the same.

I’m now recanting all my previous posts and claims about polyphasic sleep. They are wrong. I have marked the posts accordingly. Don’t sleep polyphasically, yo. If you still think that it works, prove it. And no, “I’ve been doing this for months and I’m fine!!1!” isn’t proof. Get some real data. A SRS is a good starting point. Show that learning for 8 hours or more per day works as least as well as normally and doesn’t destroy your sleep. You won’t be able to, but try all the same. Hint: just log your exact sleeping times and do a few standard performance tests. This alone will probably demonstrate that you are deluding yourself.

So what’s the real alternative? This.

No, seriously. I mean it. I am the Manifestation of Indifference. The Avatar of Doesn’t-Give-A-Shit. Wherever I go, all motivation ceases to be. Hopelessness follows me. My future will not be a bright one.

You want proof? I have proof.

1. Karlsruhe

I started noticing it here, about one year ago. I’m studying computer science in Karlsruhe since 2007 and my year is, by far, the laziest, as far as students are concerned. The year[0] of 2004 has[1] an internet forum, www.unika04.de/forum, with:

35,222 posts. When I’m looking for information, that’s where I go. The year of 2005 has one, too -  www.info.sptotal.de. They have:

15,270 posts. Still alright. The next one, year of 2006, of course has another forum. It’s at info.php-4.info. They have:

15,866 posts. My year, year of 2007, well… it was at www.uka07.de, but right now, it:

.

It had maybe a hundred posts, top, before it closed down. But this is not a case of general dumbing-down. The next year, 2008, has a forum again - info08.de. They already have:

3,605 posts, and the hard courses, the ones in need of discussion, are only just beginning for them.

2. Berlin

Before going to Karlsruhe, I lived and studied in Berlin for a year, namely religious studies and quite a bit of archaeology. The whole field is pretty well represented there, having its own buildings all over the place and quite a bit of money to spend, considering how little attention it generally gets. When I moved there, religious studies and several branches of archaeology had just gotten their own degrees and were not considered something you only minor in. However, students of my year were so disinterested that it was canceled just a year later and got demoted to a minor course again. But only religious study. Egyptian archaeology, for example, is still doing fine.[2]

There was never any organization and nothing got done. Ever.

3. School

But it even goes back to school. My family moved quite a bit and I went to a total of 5 different schools, but my curse becomes most evident at my last school, the OHG in Landau. (Don’t google it.) I got there in grade 8 and basically, what happened is, the teachers had the brilliant! idea of taking all the problematic kids and putting them in the same class. My class. It became quite a bit of a legend, though, and we drove at least two teachers out of school and into therapy[3]. This class was the anti-thesis of learning. To demonstrate this, we decided to tape every test a student had failed with a 6, i.e. the worst possible grade, to a wall. After 3 days, the wall was entirely covered in tests. A week later, we took it down again so that the teachers wouldn’t get too demotivated. Yeah, it was pretty bad, but at least no-one annoyed you and you could just talk or read all day and not get interrupted by those stupid things called “classes”. And the ability to focus and try to write down lyrics from memory while people around you are playing soccer during history class is pretty useful, I have to admit. Nobody can possibly distract you after this.

4. Further Proof

If you’re still not convinced that I’m Procrastination Personified, let me list a few other facts. The first national election I was allowed to vote in got the lowest level of participation since the state got founded. As did the second. I wonder if anyone is even bothering to show up in 4 years. Maybe I shouldn’t so that the Pirate Party can actually win this time [shameless political plug].

My year of birth is mostly remembered for Chernobyl, an act of extreme negligence and the explosion of Challenger. Probably the only good thing to happen in 1986 is the release of Watchmen, a story about powerless and disillusioned superheroes.

The one forum of which I was a regular member, one of the largest in Germany actually, got raided by the police and was never rebooted out of laziness of everyone involved.[4]

Oh, and remember the 5 schools I mentioned earlier? 3 of those closed down because they couldn’t get find enough new students. 1 of them was just completely redone right before I went there and everyone was very optimistic that it would have a bright future. It didn’t last another 2 years.
It gets worse. Two of the towns I lived in don’t exist anymore because nobody cared about living there. Both of them were industrial centers before I was born and played important historical roles. The most awesome coat-of-arms, featuring a bear wielding a pair of axes, didn’t help in the end. Detroit, I feel your pain.
In fact, the whole nation I was born in,  the German Democratic Republic, doesn’t exist anymore because, well, you know why.

Any questions?

Notes

[0] This is first year, not year of graduation.
[1] Everything as of this writing, of course.
[2] No, I’m not bitter.
[3] Seriously.
[4] No names. It’s better this way.

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