One of my big tasks for the next year will be to better understand how to write well in the mnemonic medium—and how to help other authors write well. Starting to collect notes here:
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When explaining SRS’s poor adoption, I often say “it’s hard to write good prompts.” That’s a bit misleading: it’s relatively easy to write prompts which encode simple facts—which is all most people imagine doing. What’s hard is writing prompts which develop rich understanding.
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As writes: “Anki skills concretely instantiate your theory of how you understand; developing those skills will help you understand better.” Paraphrasing: to be a virtuoso author in the mnemonic medium is to be a virtuoso in understanding, in theory of knowledge.
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I have to remind myself of this regularly because it’s too easy to write tips about how to write SRS prompts for simple facts. The harder—and much more important—challenge is in understanding how to encode complex knowledge in this form.
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Also critical: what kinds of understanding is SRS bad at encoding?
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
For sure. It's a few years old, so there might be new evidence. And I wasn't worried... I'm actually more interested to know what things SRS is not good. I think it can be used for most things, and the things it's not good for are probably fewer.
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Minimum information principle -> well known
Redundancy -> One idea attacked from multiple angles instead of a single card
Context -> Cards should have cues that elicit the context of the target knowledge (may be something as simple as adding [Javascript] to a card)
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Yes, these seem to be most of what one needs to write good prompts for simple facts. They don’t describe how to encode more complex understandings, though.
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"the critical thing to optimize is emotional connection to the review session and its contents" I think this is exactly right
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I like the "reflected essay" metaphor, but I think it's not complete. Yes, as a reader, I want to be guided by the author's reflections, I want the questions to cover all the ideas in the essay. But I also want to connect the ideas to my life, to my own personal experience.
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Yeah, this resonates. A high-fidelity reflection is a step, not a destination. Similar to Adler + van Doren’s distinction between analytical and syntopic reading.
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