I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system is at a point where I can't do anything for a long time that isn't interesting, has immediate or intermediate rewards, or can capture attention for a long time. And on top of that, repeating that habit requires all these criteria.
Examples:
Scrolling on the phone?: Basically direct dopamine injected into my brain. Can do indefinitely. Not good.
Programming? Sure I can put a few hours in, or even days if building quick prototypes where the payoff is imminent.
Reading? Can go on indefinitely, depending on the book: it's just continual stream of interesting immersive stuff
Exercise? Well that depends on the activity. Running indoors without any stimulation: absolutely cannot do. Cycling or running or walking outside with an audiobook, or music? Absolutely: constant stimulation plus endorphins.
Learning Piano? Only if I can bang out a few good tunes immediately in the session, then I can allow myself to struggle with the difficult stuff in between. Absolutely cannot and won't do rote deliberate practice. This hinders my progress significantly, but at least I have fun.
Learning a language? Well, unless I can get imminent rewards, or be continually interested and engaged, there's just no way I'll be able to do this. And I feel like rote, deliberate practice is just impossible for me to build a habit out of.
One way I know for a fact that I can learn another language is through necessity to communicate with it. Let's say I'm thrown into an environment where the ONLY way I can get anything done is through having to communicate directly, without the aid of translators or tools. I think this is how babies learn.
> I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system...
I'm willing to bet you've never had probes analyzing anything about your dopamine system and how it responds to any of the activities you go on to describe. More likely, you've started using trendy pseudo-scientific jargon to justify why you believe yourself to be physiologically limited.
Do you struggle to see through or enjoy to some of those activities? So be it.
But chalking that up to some scientific sounding stuff you pieced together over the years just hardens those limitations. It's a very bad habit that's become really common lately. I strongly recommend trying to break it. It'll open up some doors that you're currently keeping shut.
I feel similar to how the parent commenter feels, but describe it using different words. Therapists and psychiatrists will use similar language, dopamine, motivation, and executive function.
How do you recommend one does this?
> I strongly recommend trying to break it
I currently try to hack my main activities to prevent myself from being too lazy to do them. Would be happy to hear your suggestions!
Controversial take but I think the state of therapy/psychiatry has become a bit of a joke over the past handful of years where people have normalized the idea that everyone needs to be speaking to a therapist. With the fact you can shop around for a therapist, and the fact that most people like being told their problems are others' faults, you have an industry that from my view has mostly just taught everyone to externalize blame and pay someone to validate that for them.
Everyone wants to get a diagnosis of ADHD and/or autism so they can spend the rest of their life never growing or improving and living under the pretense that they don't have the ability to do certain things because a professional told them their brain is inherently limited. When in reality these diagnoses are just categorizations of behaviours, not some kind of scientific barrier baked into the coding of the universe.
I think people would be better off not dwelling so much on the "facts" they think they know about their own brains. It's inherently limiting to assume everything your capable of can only come as a result of the function you think your brain operates on.
Honestly, diagnosing for ADHD accelerate the improvement.
It is impossible to fight if you don't know what you're fighting. It enables you to prevent repeated patterns, not chasing your tail in an endless struggle.
You are so right.
People imagine everyone going to therapy to cope, but really it's being able to recognize triggers and adapt.
Everyone already does it in some ways - for example, you know you make mistakes when tired tired - you recognize you are tired this moment and decided to reschedule the important activity.
Therapy gives same tool - you recognize you are having an episode and take steps to avoid typical negative outcomes.
Everyone wants to get a diagnosis of ADHD and/or autism so they can spend the rest of their life never growing or improving
If you ever saw someone get an ADHD diagnosis, along with appropriate medication and mental tools, you might not hold this antiquated, bigoted view of others.
I spent many years as a basically spoiled over-paid developer, sitting around with effectively unlimited resources for distraction and definitely, it took some conditioning to recover from it.
It's really not something I can easily recommend, but completing 75hard had quite a significant impact on my approach to a lot of things, and I'm extremely fortunately to have done it. I also practice zazen quite intensively but I'm not sure that's quite as directly useful as 75hard for most people.
Yes, the guy behind it is a lunatic, and the subreddit is a bit of a cult, but something happens to you around day 40 and it sort of 'snapped' me out of it.
For the typical HN person who might valorize evidence-based living, the starting point is probably learning to:
1. Recognize where you've adopted a belief from little direct evidence,
2. Pay attention to what impact these (inevitably) many beliefs have on your life
3. Stop reinforcing and repeating those that are only there as invisible walls to justify negative or limiting self-image
Even between "dopamine" and "motivation", one belief blames an imagined phyiology that might only be remedied through some therapeutic medicine/practice that may not even exist; the other blames a weak will that you might find some satisfaction (or pleasure) in challenging now and then.
Are either strongly evidenced in one's individual case? No, but if you have to believe one of them, it may as well be the one that lets you wake up some morning and see if you might accomplish something surprising.
Have you ever actually tried to learn a language? I'm learning Korean as a native English speaker. I thought it would be a grind, which it kind of is, but learning new words and grammar is actually really fun. I use anki cards and get a dopamine hit whenever I remember the word correctly.
I think my language learning problem is motivation.
Reading this post, that is alot of work, for something that doesn't have clear pay off.
I think it would be cool to be able to speak Spanish and Mandarin(and others) But there isn't that much practicalness for me it especially when everyone speaks English.
I've recently discovered this approach, and I really like it.
I've looked at ways to make it more interactive / gamified, and I've made a prototype with with simple interactive stories (text adventures), designed for language learners (https://lingostories.org - 100% free).
I'm still trying to figure out what the next steps should be to make it more useful, but some people already enjoy it.
The main thing learners utilizing comprehensible input need is volume, so if you actually want to make it useful as more than a one-off novelty, your priority kind of needs to be in pumping out the content (while keeping it relatively interesting since that's also important). That's really the hard part. I will also say that I'm not personally convinced that "here's the words you heard, now tap them in order" minigames are very helpful. Other than that, the features and functionality are nice. Reminds me of Duolingo stories, which is their best content IMO.
Thanks a lot, I appreciate the feedback! Indeed, Duolingo Stories are the part of Duolingo I enjoyed the most too.
Taping words: I sometimes find it useful to focus my listening and try to recognize the words. But I'm not sure about the design here and maybe I should disable it by default. Thanks again!
With old-school graded readers. Turns out that the people in past centuries who we ridiculed for their antiquated approaches for learning languages all spoke multiple languages.
They didn't have comic books, though, which are another good source of interesting reading material that also comes with elaborate visual hints to what is being said. If I were trying to learn Mandarin, I'd scour the internet for bootleg scans of Jademan comics from the 80s.
Yes. That's how I learned my native language and that's how I learned other languages. Super effective, and super fun. No rote memory whatsoever. BTW, Chinese didn't have a tradition of producing comic books, but they were big on turning classics into so-called 小人书，a perfect source for learning authentic, highly contextual, yet simple Chinese. Here is an example: http://www.laohuabao.com/xiaorenshu/gudian/9/113957717.html
Slight aside, but I learned to read with Asterix & Obelix & Tintin. The Asterix series in particular was fantastic for reading the same story in difficulty languages, and savoring the wordplay in each, and how the translators played with things. Having visual context to go with the words themselves was such a boon, I really am surprised the approach isn't given more legitimate respect.
Comic books are especially helpful for conversation because they are often written in that sort of "what one would really say" style, which is extrememy helpful for speaking more native. When I was learning Finnish I found a set of translated Garfield books that were really helpful.
> Learning a language? Well, unless I can get imminent rewards, or be continually interested and engaged, there's just no way I'll be able to do this. And I feel like rote, deliberate practice is just impossible for me to build a habit out of.
Create your own environment. Set your devices to the language you want to study. Consume content in that language. Instead of doing X in English, do X in your target language. It can be a processes of enriching substitution. This helps with technical skills as well, as there are also far fewer resources when you search an error message, and you need to be able to mentally grep the text quickly for what you're after.
I'm someone who was perfectly able to use anki and learn chinese to a decent level with fairly intense combined-type untreated (at the time) ADHD. What you need is a compelling reason to learn (for me, it was the fear of letting down my wife by not being able to talk to her family).
Ignore them. There's a belief system that sees a lack of success in anything that one wants to do as illness or witchcraft. For them, a person doesn't lack motivation to practice something because that thing is difficult and exhausting and one can't always see a sufficient reward (or chance of gaining that reward in a reasonable amount of time) in the end. For them, it's always going to be an illness or a curse that is stealing away your ability to achieve your true desires.
They might be recommending pharma here, but it would be prayer on another forum, or more protein intake on a third.
> Another came with sad eyes and said to him: "I don't know what my sickness is."
"I know," Baudolino said. "You are slothful."
"How can I be cured?"
"Sloth appears the first time when you notice the slowness of the movement of the sun."
"And then—?"
"Never look at the sun."
I have severe ADHD and do spaced repetition just fine, even when I'm not on my meds. The only reason I've paused my Japanese learning is sleep issues and stress from trying to find a tech job. What GP is describing sounds like the sort of resistance to tedium that can happen to anybody, not just to those with ADHD.
The issue with software like Anki is that it can feel like a complete chore or like a fun game depending on how you use it and the quality of premade cards available. Only using SRS, doing it for 1hr+ straight with no breaks, and DIYing all the cards is how a lot of people use Anki, which is insane to me.
Examples:
Scrolling on the phone?: Basically direct dopamine injected into my brain. Can do indefinitely. Not good.
Programming? Sure I can put a few hours in, or even days if building quick prototypes where the payoff is imminent.
Reading? Can go on indefinitely, depending on the book: it's just continual stream of interesting immersive stuff
Exercise? Well that depends on the activity. Running indoors without any stimulation: absolutely cannot do. Cycling or running or walking outside with an audiobook, or music? Absolutely: constant stimulation plus endorphins.
Learning Piano? Only if I can bang out a few good tunes immediately in the session, then I can allow myself to struggle with the difficult stuff in between. Absolutely cannot and won't do rote deliberate practice. This hinders my progress significantly, but at least I have fun.
Learning a language? Well, unless I can get imminent rewards, or be continually interested and engaged, there's just no way I'll be able to do this. And I feel like rote, deliberate practice is just impossible for me to build a habit out of.
One way I know for a fact that I can learn another language is through necessity to communicate with it. Let's say I'm thrown into an environment where the ONLY way I can get anything done is through having to communicate directly, without the aid of translators or tools. I think this is how babies learn.