Announcing an experimental new tool for thought
@michael_nielsen and I have been wondering: what happens if we take powerful ideas from cognitive science and deeply integrate them into explanations? Our first experiment in a new "mnemonic" medium:https://quantum.country/qcvc
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Imagine you’ve just finished a tough section. We say: catch your breath; let’s take stock. We quickly flick through what we learned. Got it all? Great, we’ll review again later, when you've probably forgotten. Something slipped your mind? OK: we’ll review that bit sooner.
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Something felt totally mysterious? You just learned that you left the stove on before you left the driveway. It doesn’t feel so onerous to read a section again on the spot. It would feel much more tiresome to realize that a few days later… so you might not reread the section.
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One reader said: "There was a section where I tanked them all. I thought: wow, I clearly didn’t get whatever I was supposed to get. […] So then I went back and asked ‘why am I not retaining this?’ I’ve never had that with a textbook before: usually the problems are at the end."
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That's the retrospective effect. The *prospective* effect is a feeling of safety. Once you’ve read a few sections, now you read each new passage knowing that you’ll have this quick check at the end. It's a save point every few minutes. You're not going to miss anything.
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Then, the next day, you'll get your invitation to your first review session. A few minutes of study, repeated over about 20 sessions over the next year, and you'll remember everything forever. It feels like cheating. One reader: "The bang for the buck is extraordinary."pic.twitter.com/j2JbYkcmM1
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Lots more to share: how the mechanics affect the prose and vice-versa; how we designed the interactions to be super light-weight; the impact of self-assessment on the design; conveying exponential progress; exploring new media via serious—not toy—content; etc. Stay tuned!

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I’ve read in the past that manually crafting a spaced repetition deck helps immensely with recall relative to using premade cards. Do you worry about losing that here?
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Yes, we thought a lot about that. In brief, probably both are helpful. Making cards is itself a skill; that skill is hard to acquire and is metacognitively taxing; like all such skills it is best to scaffold it. Very interested in designing a “next step” on this scaffold.
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Excited to dig into this, both to see the format and to learn the material! You might have already seen, but
@ncasenmare made an article which attempts to use spaced repetition to teach you about spaced repetition:https://ncase.me/remember/ -
Yes, for sure! It's lovely.
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