📣 Announcing an experimental new tool for thought 🚨
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:
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Does this feel familiar?
1. You read a book and feel you understood it.
2. Next week, you try to answer a question about it.
3. Surprise: you don't remember the details at all!
It's not just embarrassing at a cocktail party: it's a real barrier to learning complex new topics.
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Happily, there's a way to remember anything almost effortlessly: spaced repetition. A few minutes each day—as much memory as you want. Magic.
But few people use it. Textbooks don't leverage it. Tools for it desperately lack design. What if we fix it up and build it into a book?
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One reason books are hard is: readers run all the feedback loops. "Did I really get that? Should I flip back?" This demands attention to both the content and also the meta.
We interleave prose and lightweight spaced repetition to take some of that work off the reader's plate.
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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.