Using Anki to remember what you read

This will probably get down-voted by the hacker news crowd. Information aggregation from diverse sources to construct a comprehensive knowledge graph in our heads and hence further and deepen our understanding of this world and the context in which things happen can be a goal. But at some point, the methods we use to accomplish them can take more importance than the actual goal. The method is not the goal.

This is similar to how there are many rituals in every religion that people might follow without understanding the underlying concepts. The rituals are not the religion but we still see people mindlessly doing things that their ancestors did.

I would much prefer that we build systems that automatically create that knowledge graph objectively (like the wikipedia) and layer an AI system on top that will create new connections, even with brute force, that our minds in a lifetime cannot. This will not stop us from having opinions. People will still come to different conclusions based on the same underlying data but atleast the data and the surrounding context will be available to all.

And now I feel hopeless again. How can someone get better at so many things so fast that too in tech?? I still myself noob after all these years.

For math/programming, it's better to keep it short in my experience. But for other things, like knowledge from books, I use both methods, here are some examples:

---- What happen to slaves in Africa after the slave trade was abolished by the America/UK in the early + mid 1800s?

simply led to a redeployment of the slaves, who were now used within Africa rather than in the Americas

“So the abolition of the slave trade, rather than making slavery in Africa wither away, simply led to a redeployment of the slaves, who were now used within Africa rather than in the Americas. Moreover, many of the political institutions the slave trade had wrought in the previous two centuries were unaltered and patterns of behavior persisted. For example, in Nigeria in the 1820s and ’30s the once-great Oyo Kingdom collapsed. It was undermined by civil wars and the rise of the Yoruba city-states, such as Illorin and Ibadan, that were directly involved in the slave trade, to its south. In the 1830s, the capital of Oyo was sacked, and after that the Yoruba cities contested power with Dahomey for regional dominance. They fought an almost continuous series of wars in the first half of the century, which generated a massive supply of slaves. Along with this went the normal rounds of kidnapping and condemnation by oracles and smaller-scale raiding. Kidnapping was such a problem in some parts of Nigeria that parents would not let their children play outside for fear they would be taken and sold into slavery.”

Excerpt From: Daron Acemoglu. “Why Nations Fail.” iBooks.

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What are two reasons why large scale wars no longer occur ?

1. Price of war has gone up because of Atomic weapons. 2. Weath is no longer is physical goods (gold,etc) but in the minds of the citizen (Silicon Valley).

Scholars have sought to explain this happy development in more books and articles than you would ever want to read yourself, and they have identified several contributing factors. First and foremost, the price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.

Secondly, while the price of war soared, its profits declined. For most of history, polities could enrich themselves by looting or annexing enemy territories. Most wealth consisted of material things like fields, cattle, slaves and gold, so it was easy to loot it or occupy it. Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital and organizational know-how. Consequently it is difficult to carry it off or conquer it by military force.

Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens (p. 372). Harper. Kindle Edition.

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Basically, I create cards with short answers but provide the context (usually the paragraph I found it in). This method works extremely well for remember everything you read. I could write a more technical blog post on this if people actually care and find this interesting.

i missed that and i now agree.

It helps to read the article before commenting. The headline is overblowing it. He's not learning books by heart, just highlights some key facts he found valuable while reading and then reviews those and adds some of those go in a flashcard and zettelkasten system.

Impressive for doing it consistently but it's not learning entire books.