Enter: the mnemonic medium. By interleaving expert-authored prompts with prose narrative, authors embed those prompts in structure with meaning. notes.andymatuschak.org/z5YjgWTaYfhWLr
Authors supply the prompts, lightening readers' burden.
Conversation
There's some tension here. If I made my own 112 prompts for the first chapter of QC, I'd likely get a much deeper understanding of the material. But—also—I probably wouldn't do it! I want to spend that effort on material core to my creative work, less on more peripheral material.
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The first chapter of QC takes most readers 4 hours to read (and has 112 questions). I spend 1-2 hours a day reading. So if the mnemonic medium were ubiquitous, I'd end up adding 40 questions a day, no sweat. That seems awfully enticing!
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The mnemonic medium is a long way from ubiquity, to put it mildly. In the meantime, I've significantly increased my rate of new SRS prompts with another approach: turning my daily writing practice into a kind of *personal* mnemonic medium.
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I write for a few hours each day, accumulating notes like the ones you see in this thread. They really help me think. notes.andymatuschak.org/zVFGpprS64TzmK
But as I write prose about those topics, I also write SRS questions inline, much like the mnemonic medium.
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Those embedded questions end up in my daily review practice. I find that it's easier to write a lot of them this way, in the context of writing prose. Particularly cloze deletions.
The practice feels quite strange! It certainly distorts the prose… but not always harmfully?
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One thing I like about this approach is: I don't want to just remember things I read—I want SRS to help me develop new ideas! I want to regularly review all the fragmentary inklings I sketch on the way to new insights. Embedded prompts are a convenient way to make that happen.
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I feel I don't yet understand the personal mnemonic medium at all: I've only been writing this style of note for about a month. It's different from the mnemonic medium, and it's different from my old note medium, which is itself idiosyncratically different from normal notes.
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I do notice that my 40 question/day quota is more consistently saturated with this practice, and that may be the high-order bit!
And of course, if review sessions are sufficiently valuable, that cap will grow: people will happily spend more than 10 minutes per day.
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What do you base this 40 questions on, just material that you are reading/writing/thinking about?
How often do you go back to answer and study does 40 questions?
Any specific goal?
40 questions a day seem like a lot, 1200 Qs a month seem hard to practice to
more on this?
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This is in the context of a spaced repetition memory practice, in which 1200 q's is actually quite cheap. See augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html and numinous.productions/ttft/ for background.
