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Anki-fy your life

abouttolearn.substack.com

121–130 of 233 posts

Re: Anki-fy your life

#121

Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside. When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- uni…

In my experience trying to follow Zettelkasten was an order of magnitude now work than spaced repetition.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#123

I'm sure taking 10 minutes out of their day to reflect and write a diary entry would increase most peoples wellbeing a lot more than trying to neurotically remember everything you come across.

I'm sure spending those ten minutes doing some cardio will have more benefit both physically and mentally than writing a diary.

We could do this all day. The fact that there's something better one can do doesn't negate the benefits of the former.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#124

I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe that most people's professional lives would be improved by using it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain, but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally" remember it. I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a day that has a higher ROI…

Why is it useful? My job at least isn’t bottlenecked by me not memorizing enough things. Or maybe it is! But I’m not convinced

People have this weird disdain for memorization. Memorization is the same as knowing.

Can you imagine that there have been points in your job that would have gone smoother if you'd known more?

Re: Anki-fy your life

#125

Using the pigeon hole principle on these systems tells me that if I don't eventually drop all cards completely I will reach a point where the only thing I'm doing is reviewing old material. None of the algorithms I've looked into seem to acknowledge this. Is there one which throws out a card after you get it right n times?

Not sure how. I have flashcards that are due a decade from now. Everyday you'll have cards that are due after you die.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#126

Anki (or a Leitner box) is the recommended method from the book "Fluent Forever" After learning one language in school and a few others ad hoc on my own I gave this method a try. I quickly gave up, though, once I discovered Dr Krashen's work on comprehensible input, and how boring and time consuming creating and studying Anki is. Dr Krashen's work says that we learn language when we understand it. I.e. when we receiv…

It'd be cool to have a system like chatgpt (maybe converted to audio) that you could use to practice conversations in a different language.

FYI gpt4 is being packaged by duolingo to do just this in their $$ tier.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#127

I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe that most people's professional lives would be improved by using it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain, but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally" remember it. I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a day that has a higher ROI…

This is where I've found ChatGPT sooooo effective in searching.

I ask it a question much more naturally vs google - meaning less cognitive load and the answer it spits back is usually a result of multiple sources distilled down to the smallest amount of information - basically all the "fluff" removed. This means less time spent reading, filtering, finding the answer.

It's been wrong a number of times which costs me 5-30 minutes at a time, but I've severely benefited in time overall by orders of magnitude.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#128

Is there a measure, anywhere, of the bollocks to content ratio on HN on Saturdays? It seems to peak that day. But, this one is so bad, it's not even wrong. Who on earth knows what the future will bring? Who on earth knows, ahead of time, what's worth 10 minutes, or 2 minutes, or no time at all. That's intuition, and that's a gift. All the rest is bollocks, and it seems to turn up on Saturdays too much; that is, the p…

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Re: Anki-fy your life

#129

A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g. Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my experience using them for several years for long-term memory: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to learn certain topics. Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at their studies because they co…

I've been working on https://github.com/trane-project/trane for the past year or so, mostly to get around these limitations. I tried to find a way to use Anki or another existing software to aid my music practice, but I couldn't get it to work.

Some ways in which it's different:

- Dependencies are core to the system. For example, if I am learning a music piece, I want to start by learning small sections and only move on to larger sections when I am good enough at the small stuff, eventually ending with a final exercise that tests my performance of the whole piece. A lot of knowledge/skills follow that pattern, but I couldn't find a way to make Anki or SuperMemo understand this.

- It's meant for both memorizing stuff and practicing exercises. I have tested it with your exact example (math problems from textbooks). It works fairly well, but it's at a very early stage (you can look around at https://github.com/trane-project/trane-math, but it still needs a readme). So it's doing the same thing as the students you mentioned. The difference is that the scheduling is done automatically. Review of existing problems and addition of new ones happen without requiring planning or tracking from the student.

- There's an emphasis on generating the flashcards as text files, so they can be shared. I don't understand why people insist of remaking their own flascards every time. If someone wishes to learn guitar, for example, it's my hope they just download some courses and start learning without spending any time redoing flashcards. This design choice probably makes it harder to write the flascards, but it balances out once the flashcards are done and can be passed around.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#130
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that pretty much anything has better ROI then 10-20 minutes of pure rote memorization a day. Plus, keeping in 10-20 minutes a day requires separate skill on itself. Anki has a way of taking over and expanding the time it requires.

> of pure rote memorization I wouldn't describe my use of Anki as "rote memorization". Though certainly some people use it that way. There is a big difference between blindly putting raw and unfamiliar facts into an SRS, and using an SRS to remember things you have learned and understand. It's the second case that pays large dividends over time.

Anki certainly is rote memorization. SRS is just the most efficient way to successfully do it.
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