91–100 of 538 posts
Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are people here using spaced repition for?
There's an anki deck built from the jeopardy archive with 400,000 questions, so I'm studying trivia that way. I enjoy trivia.
Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are people here using spaced repition for?
I’ve been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based. It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it’s also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it. Which is really a shame, as the spacing…
I don't think any of us are satisfied with how most things look, but we're severely under-resourced.
Feel free to email me if you'd be interested in getting involved with the Android side of things.
I wrote "Why Anki Doesn't Work for Me" ( https://medium.com/@iandanforth/why-anki-doesnt-work-for-me-... ) six years ago, which means it was before the new algorithm was implemented. While Anki likely still suffers from all the other issues I mentioned, this directly addresses my point (3). I'm going to have to give it another try and see if the other points are still too much friction, or if the frustration caused b…
> And the idea that you’ll literally never see a card again after the last interval is terrifying, as it means you’re constantly losing knowledge.
Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now. Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern. A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you…
More fundamentally, SRS isn't a superpower because it's just very specific to creating a direct prompt retrieval. Generalization is poor. Even creating a graph of knowledge, is a chain of edges between bits of knowledge, isn't done very well here.
And I suspect there's a very deep, fundamental difference between recollection knowledge and logical-modeling knowledge. Recollection seems very similar to a dictionary access, and if you recorded the time to recall in humans I suspect they'd all be constant. But learning the knowledge of a logical model, like of a mathematical concept, appears to be vastly different and have very different time to compute.
Proponents of SRS will point out logical models need facts as well, like formulas, lemmas, etc. Which is true. But if you already grasped it before you'd grasp it faster the second time. So the practical use of SRS is a significant step above having a very well sorted and labeled notebook, but still way below becoming a genius.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Anki but it’s an archetypal example of “designed by an engineer”. It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively. An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
Sorry, but what's clunky about it? All buttons in reach of your thumb on the mobile app and usable keybindings on desktop? Is there not enough useless whitespace around every button?
Second thing, control over workload should not be that hard. Anki requires too much tweaking to work reasonably.
Third thing, both old and new algorithm have a notion of "you are pressing the buttons wrong". If you are pressing the buttons wrong, you will end up with absurd intervals - like 4 months interval on something you just learned.
My personal peeve about Anki: I don’t like its data model. It seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes, roughly, templates plus some concept of which car…
Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now. Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern. A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you…
I would expect the flashcards produced under this regime to be utterly useless, like a flashcard with "A" and the answer is "B", or simple math problems. In other words, Goodhart's law.
I’ve been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based. It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it’s also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it. Which is really a shame, as the spacing…
Compared to i.e Duolingo, the app is quite boring. I still have been using it for years. But I sometimes wonder if adding a bit of gamification may help. For instance, streaks, sound effects, etc. Obviously, those should be optional
You do anki because you feel like you must and you have very little control over it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to i.e Duolingo, the app is quite boring. I still have been using it for years. But I sometimes wonder if adding a bit of gamification may help. For instance, streaks, sound effects, etc. Obviously, those should be optional
I've quit Duolingo because of the gamification. It's far, far too much, and it puts me in the wrong mindset for learning. Instead of concentrating on the knowledge, I'm gaming the system to improve my score the most. There were times I would stop learning because I knew if I saved it for later, I could use a multiplier for a higher score. And the daily emotion-tugging streak reminders started to actually piss me off.…
My kids loved it. I did not cared. So, the likely explanation is that many people like that icon changes or dont mind it.