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Anki-fy your life

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Re: Anki-fy your life

#181

Post by lmpdev »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #144
NiloCK wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Understanding is the structure of knowing. Memorization is the paint on top. It ain't gonna hold your house up.

Memorisation is adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge

Understanding is efficiently arranging and coordinating those nodes in an efficient path for most situations

Wisdom is knowing in which contexts to actually apply that path of nodes

Tacit knowledge is similar to wisdom just it generally lacks memorisation

There's not a perfect mapping in English between Memorisation, Understanding and Wisdom and their most pragmatic corresponding analogues in nature, but I have found this distinction between terms useful in the whole memorisation v understanding debate

Re: Anki-fy your life

#182

Post by watwut »

Firther wrote: post #151
watwut wrote: 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.

Would it be better if memorisation could be achieved through distributed practice, vocabulary learned through reading and listening, spaced repetition achieved through well written textbooks, curriculum, mentorship, etc? Absolutely, but these factors aren't always a given and often are often outside of one's own control. If failing to keep good Anki hygiene is considered in the ROI calculations, these issues should b…

If you have 20 minutes a day to use anki for memorization in foreign language, then you have 20 minutes a day to consume foreign language media. You just swap activity. You do not need perfectly designed media for that, you need any media slightly harder than your level. Internet has them.

That is exactly setup where anki makes less sense.

Anki makes great sense when you have a lot of time for that foreign language activity and are spending portion of it in anki vocabulary.You do it in addition to other activities.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#183

Post by sph »

MichaelNolan wrote: post #41

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…

I am completely self taught (started programming at 14 and dropped out of high school) yet I have never user Anki and spaced repetition once.

I am curious to know how it can make my life better, and I'm not being sarcastic, but yours is a tall claim and I am very used to learn everything I do by myself.

What can Anki do for me in 10-20 minutes a day? Finding or preparing good flash cards is a lot of effort for someone used to ADHD-fueled information skimming to learn something breadth-first.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#184

Post by vishnugupta »

NiloCK wrote: post #124
coffeebeqn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Memorization is the same as knowing.

They are not the same which is why they are two different words. For example, memorising first 1000 prime numbers is not same as knowing prime numbers. The former person will not be able to figure out 1001st prime number because it's not in their memory bank but the later can calculate it. Sure it takes time to calculate but it's not impossible.

Now, I'm not belittling memorisation. A baseline memory is needed otherwise one'll be wasting time and energy figuring out everything from first principles all the time. This is akin to rainbow tables saving time. But as with all things in life finding right balance is key. As you pointed out, it's useful to memorise things at work to save time and energy.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#185

Post by Volrath89 »

NiloCK wrote: post #124
coffeebeqn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Completely agree here. Memorization is actually quite important.

Try learning Spanish from scratch with a "bad memory" and let me know how it goes.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#186

Post by timokoesters »

vishnugupta wrote: post #184
NiloCK wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Memorization is the same as knowing. They are not the same which is why they are two different words. For example, memorising first 1000 prime numbers is not same as knowing prime numbers. The former person will not be able to figure out 1001st prime number because it's not in their memory bank but the later can calculate it. Sure it takes time to calculate but it's not impossible. Now, I'm not belittling memorisat…

You can memorize things like "Definition of prime number" or "Main application of prime numbers". I think memorizing concepts is much more important than memorizing raw data

Re: Anki-fy your life

#187

Post by Pawka »

While reading the post and comments I also was raising the same question. What I'm going to try - add separate facts from technical books.

I like reading tech books which are not directly related to my job as SWE. E.g. I'm not working with Bitcoin or ML, but found those books very interesting. However after a year pass - I barely can remember little bits which I've found very interesting when read the books.

I think adding some facts to Anki cards would help me to remember those certain things. I guess difficult part would be to detect the fact which is worth to be added as a card. Since while reading the book - these things seems obvious. Going to try anyways.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#188

Post by Kelamir »

Pawka wrote: post #187

While reading the post and comments I also was raising the same question. What I'm going to try - add separate facts from technical books. I like reading tech books which are not directly related to my job as SWE. E.g. I'm not working with Bitcoin or ML, but found those books very interesting. However after a year pass - I barely can remember little bits which I've found very interesting when read the books. I think…

> I guess difficult part would be to detect the fact which is worth to be added as a card.

The time to memorize something is supposed to outweight the time you'd need to look it up. Say the target is five minutes - in that case, it's important to follow the Pareto rule as well, and to discard any cards that take you more than that to memorize in total, including the time you recall them. In practice, it means discarding over 20% of cards if possible, to learn 80% that are easy to remember.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#189

Post by miklosz »

Firther wrote: post #151
watwut wrote: 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.

Would it be better if memorisation could be achieved through distributed practice, vocabulary learned through reading and listening, spaced repetition achieved through well written textbooks, curriculum, mentorship, etc? Absolutely, but these factors aren't always a given and often are often outside of one's own control. If failing to keep good Anki hygiene is considered in the ROI calculations, these issues should b…

I find that Anki, by showing up the cards at certain (optimised) intervals, delivers distributed practice. Out of the efficient learning methods as evaluated by this paper: "Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology" [1] (scroll to Table 4 for results) Anki delivers both distributed practice and practice testing in a very natural way.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full

Re: Anki-fy your life

#190

Post by 1123581321 »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #42

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of anything in my job as a software engineer that I’d benefit from memorizing through flash cards. What are people memorizing exactly?

Mine’s a grab bag. If I had to look something up, and value knowing it cold the next time it comes up, it goes in. I could see some engineers having nothing that fits that criteria.
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