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Anki, superpowered flashcard system to let you remember anything easily.

Anki, superpowered flashcard system to let you remember anything easily.

by malmesjo@ · 56 things on NewTwos

https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
Quotes/extracts from the paper by Michael Nilsen
It's a failure mode to spend too long reading unimportant papers.
At a practical level, I use the desktop Anki client for entering new cards, and the mobile client** The desktop client is free, but the mobile client is, at the time of writing, 25 dollars. Many people balk at that as “too expensive”. Personally, I've found the value is several orders of magnitude beyond 25 dollars. Mobile Anki is certainly far more valuable to me than a single meal in a moderately priced restaurant. for reviewing.
What made Anki finally “take” for me, turning it into a habit, was a project I took on as a joke.
By contrast, had I used conventional note-taking in my original reading of the AlphaGo paper, my understanding would have more rapidly evaporated, and it would have taken longer to read the later papers. And so using Anki in this way gives confidence you will retain understanding over the long term. This confidence, in turn, makes the initial act of understanding more pleasurable, since you believe you're learning something for the long haul, not something you'll forget in a day or a week.
It's tempting instead to use Anki to stockpile knowledge against some future day, to think “Oh, I should learn about the geography of Africa, or learn about World War II, or […]”.
The problem is somehow in that initial idea I “should” learn about these things: intellectually, it seems like a good idea, but I've little emotional commitment.
By contrast, when I'm reading in support of some creative project, I ask much better Anki questions. I find it easier to connect to the questions and answers emotionally. I simply care more about them, and that makes a difference.
with a field I already know well, my curiosity and my model of the field are often already so strong that it's easy to integrate new facts. I still find Anki useful, but it's definitely most useful in new areas.
One surprising consequence of reading in this way is how much more enjoyable it becomes.
Make most Anki questions and answers as atomic as possible:
The solution was to refactor the question by breaking it into two pieces. One piece was: “What's the basic command and option to create a Unix soft link?” Answer: “ln -s …”. And the second piece was: “When creating a Unix soft link, in what order do linkname and filename go?” Answer: “filename linkname”.
Note that this doesn't mean you shouldn't also retain some version of the original question. I still want to know how to create a soft link in Unix, and so it's worth keeping the original question in Anki.
One benefit of using Anki in this way is that you begin to habitually break things down into atomic questions. This sharply crystallizes the distinct things you've learned.
one real benefit is that later I often find those atomic ideas can be put together in ways I didn't initially anticipate. And that's well worth the trouble.
Anki is an extremely simple program
Despite that simplicity, it's an incredibly powerful tool. And, like many tools, it requires skill to use well.
Anki isn't just a tool for memorizing simple facts. It's a tool for understanding almost anything.
Use one big deck
The world isn't divided up into neatly separated components, and I believe it's good to collide very different types of questions.
Avoid orphan questions
they're not closely related to anything else in my memory. It's not bad to have a few orphan questions in Anki – it can be difficult to know what will turn out to be of only passing interest, and what will grow into a substantial interest, connected to my other interests. But if a substantial minority of your questions are orphans, that's a sign you should concentrate more on Ankifying questions related to your main creative projects, and cut down on Ankifying tangential material.
It's particularly worth avoiding lonely orphans: single questions that are largely disconnected from everything else
Don't share decks
As an example, I've a (very short!) list of superficially charming and impressive colleagues who I would never work with, because I've consistently seen them treat other people badly. It's helpful to Ankify some details of that treatment, so I can clearly remember why that person should be avoided
Construct your own decks
The most important reason is that making Anki cards is an act of understanding in itself
That is, figuring out good questions to ask, and good answers, is part of what it means to understand a new subject well.
For instance, it's possible to try to remember as an isolated fact that 1962 was the year the first telecommunications satellite, Telstar, was put into orbit. But a better way of remembering it is to relate that fact to others. Relatively prosaically, you might observe that Telstar was launched just 5 years after the first Soviet satellite, Sputnik. It didn't take long to put space to use for telecommunications. Less prosaically – a richer elaboration – I personally find it fascinating that Telstar was put into orbit the year before the introduction of ASCII, arguably the first modern digital standard for communicating text. Humanity had a telecommunications satellite before we had a digital standard for communicating text! Finding that kind of connection is an example of an elaborative encoding.
Cultivate strategies for elaborative encoding / forming rich associations: This is really a meta-strategy, i.e., a strategy for forming strategies. One simple example strategy is to use multiple variants of the “same” question. For instance, I mentioned earlier my two questions: “What does Jones 2011 claim is the average age at which physics Nobelists made their prizewinning discovery, over 1980-2011?” And: “Which paper claimed that physics Nobelists made their prizewinning discovery at average age 48, over the period 1980-2011?” Logically, these two questions are obviously closely related. But in terms of how memory works, they are different, causing associations on very different triggers.
95% of Anki's value comes from 5% of the features
I rarely use any of these features. My cards are always one of two types: the majority are simple question and answer; a substantial minority are what's called a cloze: a kind of fill-in-the-blanks test. For instance, I'll use clozes to test myself on favorite quotes: “if the personal computer is truly a __ then the use of it would actually change the __ of an __", __, __” (Answer: new medium, thought patterns, entire civilization, Alan Kay, 1989).
Clozes can also be used to pose questions not involving quotes: The Adelson illusion is also known as the ___ illusion. (Answer: checker-shadow)
I know many people who try Anki out, and then go down a rabbit hole learning as many features as possible so they can use it “efficiently”. Usually, they're chasing 1% improvements.
This kind of rabbit hole seems to be especially attractive to programmers.
For this reason, when someone is getting started I advise not using any advanced features, and not installing any plugins. Don't, in short, come down with a bad case of programmer's efficiency disease. Learn how to use Anki for basic question and answer, and concentrate on exploring new patterns within that paradigm. That'll serve you far better than any number of hours spent fiddling around with the features. Then, if you build a regular habit of high-quality Anki use, you can experiment with more advanced features.
Procedural versus declarative memory: There's a big difference between remembering a fact and mastering a process. For instance, while you might remember a Unix command when cued by an Anki question, that doesn't mean you'll recognize an opportunity to use the command in the context of the command line, and be comfortable typing it out. And it's still another thing to find novel, creative ways of combining the commands you know, in order to solve challenging problems. Put another way: to really internalize a process, it's not enough just to review Anki cards. You need to carry out the process, in context. And you need to solve real problems with it.
Getting past “names don't matter”
names do matter
they're the foundation that allows you to build up a network of knowledge
What do you do when you get behind? Anki becomes challenging when you get behind with cards. If you skip a day or two – or fifty – the cards begin to back up. It's intimidating to come back to find you have 500 cards to review in a day.
I set myself gradually increasing quotas (100, 150, 200, 250, and eventually 300) of cards per day, and worked through those quotas each day for several weeks until I'd caught up.
it was somewhat demoralizing and discouraging. It'd be better if Anki had a “catch up” feature that would spread the excess cards over the next few weeks in your schedule. But it doesn't. In any case, this is a gotcha, but it's not too difficult to address
Using Anki for APIs, books, videos, seminars, conversations, the web, events, and places
For seminars and conversations with colleagues I find it surprisingly helpful to set Anki quotas. For instance, for seminars I try to find at least three high-quality questions to Ankify. For extended conversations, at least one high-quality question to Ankify. I've found that setting quotas helps me pay more attention, especially during seminars. (I find it much easier a priori to pay attention in one-on-one conversation.)
I'm more haphazard about videos, events, and places. It'd be good to, say, systematically Ankify 3-5 questions after going on an outing or to a new restaurant, to help me remember the experience. I do this sometimes. But I haven't been that systematic.
I tend to Ankify in real time as I read papers and books. For seminars, conversations, and so on I prefer to immerse myself in the experience. Instead of getting out Anki, I will quickly make a mental (or paper) note of what I want to Ankify. I then enter it into Anki later. This requires some discipline; it's one reason I prefer to set a small quota, so that I merely have to enter a few questions later, rather than dozens.
One caution is with books: reading an entire book is a big commitment, and adding Anki questions regularly can slow you down a lot
unmindfully Ankifying everything in sight is a bad habit, one I've occasionally fallen into
Ankify things that serve your long-term goals. In some measure we become what we remember, so we must be careful what we remember*
Avoid the yes/no pattern
Yes/no questions should, at the least, be considered as good candidates for question refactoring
Aren't external memory aids enough?
for creative work and for problem-solving there is something special about having an internalized understanding. It enables speed in associative thought, an ability to rapidly try out many combinations of ideas, and to intuit patterns, in ways not possible if you need to keep laboriously looking up information
This doesn't mean reading every word in the paper. Rather, I'll add to Anki questions about the core claims, core questions, and core ideas of the paper. It's particularly helpful to extract Anki questions from the abstract, introduction, conclusion, figures, and figure captions. Typically I will extract anywhere from 5 to 20 Anki questions from the paper. It's usually a bad idea to extract fewer than 5 questions – doing so tends to leave the paper as a kind of isolated orphan in my memory. Later I find it difficult to feel much connection to those questions. Put another way: if a paper is so uninteresting that it's not possible to add 5 good questions about it, it's usually better to add no questions at all.