A love letter to flashcards
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A love letter to flashcards
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Re: A love letter to flashcards
#2> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways.
I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#3Flashcards are brilliant. Anki is finally usable after they ditched the hot garbage algorithm they were using. Previously I've used the Leitner method and I stil think that's the best one for me.
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#4> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways. I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
Yeah most of the advance assumes you have the data ready at hand and just need to phrase the cards right, get the number of words right. Whereas for conceptual domains the biggest problem is: how do I encode this as question-answer pairs at all? What I want to read more of is people sitting down and writing in the first-person perspective how they go about it, like Michael Nielsen does here: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
I wrote a bit more about this problem here: https://borretti.me/article/the-applicability-of-spaced-repe...
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#5> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways. I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
Perhaps "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
" [1] might be of interest for you. I have read author's "Augmenting Long-term Memory" [2] and have incorporated a lot of his advice into my Anki practice.
For me, it's quick access recipes (breakfast pancakes for kids), what was the name of the glacier that we hiked to last year, behavioral prompts etc.
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#6Used to use Anki for foreign language learning. Guessing it would have been useful to memorise calc, chem and physics equations if it had existed when I was young.
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#7Flashcards are brilliant. Anki is finally usable after they ditched the hot garbage algorithm they were using. Previously I've used the Leitner method and I stil think that's the best one for me.
Which algorithm is the hot garbage one to you? SuperMemo 2?
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#8> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways. I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
I kinda feel like using memorization techniques for things that require deeper understanding probably isn't the most efficient way to learn.
IMO you want to be actively trying to map the new concepts to things you already understand, and constantly working to update your mental model.
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#9I tried to make an auto flashcard generator but ran into the issue that one word can map to many senses. But most word frequency datasets don't disambiguate the sense. So if you want to include all the senses for a word while ranking words by frequency they all get the same starting position.
Re: A love letter to flashcards
#10> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways. I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
I kinda feel like using memorization techniques for things that require deeper understanding probably isn't the most efficient way to learn. IMO you want to be actively trying to map the new concepts to things you already understand, and constantly working to update your mental model.
I think of it like drills in a sport. If your practice is 100% drills, you'll be pretty bad. But drills give you an awesome foundation to do the really complex stuff intuitively.