Anki-fy your life • Hacker News Board

Re: Anki-fy your life

#231

Post by iFreilicht » Fri, Mar 24, 2023, 12:41 PM UTC

coffeebeqn wrote: post #62

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…

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

I don't personally use this method, but it seems to me like this would help with all the cases where you search for something on stackoverflow, use the solution, and 3+ months later you encounter the exact same issue. You remember that you already had this issue, and you remember that you searched on SO and found a solution, but you don't remember what it was. If you wrote a flash-card and learned it, you'd have that knowledge available immediately. Or, let's say you're learning a new language/framework that you want to use professionally, but don't use frequently yet. So you start a project in that language/framework, learn some of the things that make it different, and every time something surprised you or you had to search for a solution, you write a flashcard. Then you can learn these aspects separately from having to work on a project, and once you do have a use for it, you have the knowledge available.

I think this could be less likely if you're very specialized, but if you're a consultant or freelancer and have to work with lots of different technologies, locking down the differences and unique aspects for each could save a lot of time.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#232

Post by achileas » Fri, Mar 24, 2023, 3:13 PM UTC

iFreilicht wrote: post #231

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

I don't personally use this method, but it seems to me like this would help with all the cases where you search for something on stackoverflow, use the solution, and 3+ months later you encounter the exact same issue. You remember that you already had this issue, and you remember that you searched on SO and found a solution, but you don't remember what it was. If you wrote a flash-card and learned it, you'd have that…

There are (arguably) better ways to handle this, though. When you get enough cards, you won't conceivably review them all within a reasonable enough timespan to encounter concepts often enough to really remember.

The use case you mention is more suited to a personal knowledgebase with good search capabilities and/or networking, like Obsidian, Tana, Roam, org-mode, whatever. That way you have the knowledge somewhere, you can search it (of course, this can be lossy - like writing good cards this requires writing good notes), and you can build up all the context you need.

I think the article misses the mark on the dichotomy here - it's not search vs. flash cards, it's owning your knowledge vs. relying on external, potentially ephemeral sources. Flash cards and spaced repetition are great for certain use cases (Anki is incredibly popular among language learners for a reason), but not for all of them.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#233

Post by fluidcruft » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 11:54 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #228

fluidcruft wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the arbitrary-factual isn't they way people recommend using Anki. I really struggle to understand exactly what people are actually using it to learn. There are a lot of medical students and that makes sense, but that is... arbitrary-factual. I've tried many times with other material, but I always get far more out of creating condensed notes and reviewing actual notes than quizzing random factioids in Anki. I get…

Quoting myself from four years ago: Dr Ali Abdaal runs a YouTube channel (about studying medicine at Cambridge University) and one of his videos is on "Evidence-based revision tips", with citations for the studies he's working from - here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE it's about 20 minutes. He says that spaced repetition is effective, but basic repetition of re-reading, re-watching, re-listening is not…

The thing I would counter is that "people studying medicine in medical school" is a bit of a bubble. This is particularly because the step of creating notes isn't necessary. There are many, many pre-built notes and study guides to select among. It's more about finding one that works for you and adapting it to the specific coursework.

The point being that if you are studying medicine the notes for review already exist and you just touch them up. You spend very little (if any) time actually creating them. I would certainly agree it's a waste of time to create your own notes in medicine.