Reading "Augmenting Long-Term Memory" in 2018 completely changed how I learn.
(Someone introduced me to Anki years before that, but until "Augmenting LTM" I thought it was just for trivia.)
It also significantly increased my motivation to learn!
Conversation
Over 2 years I added 1500+ cards, huge variety. Arbitrary examples:
Q: How to calculate variance in one pass?
A: E[X^2] - E[X]^2
Q: What's Michael Pollan's food "mantra"?
A: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Chinese: {{c1::与}} is the literary version of {{c2::和}}
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However, a few months ago I stopped using Anki for a few reasons:
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1. Retained knowledge was too brittle
e.g. I created 7 cards to remember "AVL tree" behavior; I knew those cards reflexively
But when friend asked me to explain AVL trees I couldn't do it (nor would I have been able to implement one)
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I’d be really interested to see the cards you put together for AVL trees, if you’d be open to sharing. the cards I put together are atomic but do require heavy pretty lifting on the question writing side as a kind of setup to the specific question I’m looking to answer.
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I restored from backup; in retrospect I'm embarrassed how incomplete they were!
I retract the above point (brittle knowledge); I blamed the tool but I wasn't using it well in this case.
If I revisit AVL trees with Anki, I'd make a lot of graphical cards like this:
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interesting! I started out making cards the way you made them. And for specific contexts, they're quite useful! But like you, I didn't find it to be "sticky" enough for me. So I started trying to add some extra context to my questions. Here's a couple of old quantum anki cards
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certainly don't expect this to be the ideal way to make cards, but I've found it to be more effective for me so I'm happy!
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Don't you end up just memorizing the answers to particular problem, instead of the general process of how to solve the problem?
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It seems like the best thing would be cards that auto-generate a problem on a template, instead of having specific questions. Is there a way to do that with Anki?
(Short of just having cards that are pointers to khan academy, Varsity Tutors, etc.)
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Have done some writing / experimenting in this space; see this vicinity:
Awesome. I'm collecting a bunch of stuff about SR and incremental reading to go through this week.