Anki

tags : How to remember what you learn, Learning How to learn

How memory works §

• When you attempt to recall some knowledge from memory, the act of “retrieval” reinforce those memories. Don’t think about your ex.
• The learning produced by retrieval is called the “testing effect”. This is more about producing learning rather than accessing learning.
• If things are in your memory and you’re doing creative work, it’ll help me get into flow faster
• Salience(Notability) typically fades over time. If you don’t soon have a chance to connect that new idea to something meaningful in your life, you may stop noticing opportunities so readily. SRS helps us leverage Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

Writing better prompts §

This is summarization of this article.

Type of information §

Factual §

• Closed list, almost like an equation
• Not about just being able to answer factual question
• The idea has to spontaneously occur to you when it’s useful

Procedural §

• Explanation prompts are helpful, avoid rote learning and build a deeper understanding

Conceptual §

To internalize a concept, you need to understand its components and relationships. You can use the following lenses when constructing a prompt for a concept but you don’t necessarily have to use all of them.

• Attributes and tendencies
• Similarities and differences
• Parts and wholes
• Causes and effects
• Significance and implications

Practical §

• Open lists: These are like tags(not anki tag). With this, you connect new ideas to old ones
• Prompt: Focused on tagged items, linking instance-tag.
• Prompt: About the tag itself, perhaps patterns etc.
• Prompt: Fuzzy links by examples.

Basic guidelines §

• You are giving your future self a “recurring” task
• Prompts should collectively invoke retrieval practice of all the key details
• Don’t do pattern matching, even if it’s a cloze. You are recalling the knowledge not the pattern to fill. Just balance it out.
• Don’t do binary prompts(Y/N). Better rephrase them as open ended questions, usually means linking it some example/implication.
• Don’t disrupt your review session if something wrong w the prompt, SRS apps allow “flagging”. Use that feature and modify the prompt later, maybe holistically.
• Optimize prompts for the “emotional connection” w your review session

Skills needed §

1. How to break things down to things that we need to know
2. How to construct questions, that’ll reinforce that knowledge (This involves interpretation)

Process of writing §

• Iterative
  • Since you are not sure what’s important, it’s hard to write good prompts on your first exposure to new ideas.
  • Write iteratively. Come back, writing more prompts as you understand what’s most relevant.
• When?
  • Whenever you feel it
  • While you read (for simple topics)
  • In batch, after reading/highlighting (for topics that doing anki back and forth might be disruptive)
• How much?
  • Don’t try to economize on prompts. Write more prompts than feels natural.
  • No deep virtue in writing a prompt about every detail. Keep things limited to your curiosity, usefulness and interest

Prompt types §

• Retrieval prompts
• Creative prompts

Properties for retrieval prompts §

• Achieving these properties is mostly about writing tightly-scoped questions
• Important to break knowledge down into its discrete components
• SRS schedule will build those pieces back up as prompts

• Focused: Q/A involving too much detail will dull concentration and do incomplete retrievals
• Precise: Should be precise about what they’re asking for
• Consistent: Should produce consistent answers. i.e lighting the same bulbs everytime.
• Tractable: To avoid interference/churn/annoyance in your review sessions, write prompts which you can almost always answer correctly. Way to do is by adding cues
• Effortful: Should actually involves retrieving the answer from memory

Properties of creative prompts §

• Objective is not memory but to change behavior and invoke new thoughts
• Creative prompts are more like a textbook exercise. Goal itself is to avoid retrieval.
• You remember information better when you generated it yourself. (generation effect)

Other tips §

• Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics

• Sometimes the answer might be very vague, but you need to ask you mind about it. In those cases, OK to use blank answer and use your own judgement to check if you were able to recall

  “One consequence of this for the Ankification process is that over time I find myself more and more wanting to use blank answers: I don’t have a conventional symbolic or visual representation for the answer. Instead, I have to bring to mind the former experience of the answer. Or, I will sometimes use an answer that would be essentially unintelligible to anyone else, relying on my internal representation to fill in the blanks. This all tends to occur pretty late in the process.”

• Top trick: For something like Math, you’ll be using pen and paper mostly. So for the start, you can make these anki card on paper and later when you get time convert them to digital, you add them to Anki.

• With Math, you’ll need to do deep Ankification.

Phase 1: Understand the math/proof/problem §

As described, this deep Ankification process can feel rather wasteful. Inevitably, over time my understanding of the proof changes. When that happens it’s often useful to rewrite (and sometimes discard or replace) cards to reflect my improved understanding.

• The Q&A will not be like: What’s the proof of X?, though we can always have that but we’re trying to recall understanding vs recall just the proof.
• The Q&A will be around
  • how different things inside the problem/proof are related to each other.

How Michael maths (why does my mind does not work dis why :( ) §

• The inner experience of mathematics: As I reread the description of Part I just given, it is rather unsatisfactory in that it conveys little of the experience of mathematics one is trying to move toward. Let me try to explain this in the context not of Anki, but rather of an experience I’ve sometimes had while doing research, an experience I dub “being inside a piece of mathematics”.

• Typically, my mathematical work begins with paper-and-pen and messing about, often in a rather ad hoc way. But over time if I really get into something my thinking starts to change. I gradually internalize the mathematical objects I’m dealing with. It becomes easier and easier to conduct (most of) my work in my head. I will go on long walks, and simply think intensively about the objects of concern. Those are no longer symbolic or verbal or visual in the conventional way, though they have some secondary aspects of this nature. Rather, the sense is somehow of working directly with the objects of concern, without any direct symbolic or verbal or visual referents. Furthermore, as my understanding of the objects change – as I learn more about their nature, and correct my own misconceptions – my sense of what I can do with the objects changes as well. It’s as though they sprout new affordances, in the language of user interface design, and I get much practice in learning to fluidly apply those affordances in multiple ways.

  Albert Einstein wrote to the mathematician Jacques Hadamard,

  The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined… The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Phase 2: variations, pushing the boundaries §

• The Q&A will be around
  • different interpretation of the problem
  • what happens if this is changed kind of questions