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The 85% Rule for Learning - Scott H Young

scotthyoung.com · 1,323 words · saved by 1 readers

How often should you succeed at a task, to maximize learning? I review research suggesting the answer is close to 85%.

Learning, it seems, is optimized for both humans and machines when we succeed around 85% of the time. From a recent paper by Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia and Cohen: In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and where learning progresses most quickly. […] For all of these stochastic gradient-descent based learning algorithms, we find that the optimal error rate for training is around 15.87% or, conversely, that the optimal training accuracy is about 85%. If you’re always successful, it’s hard to know what to improve. If you constantly

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