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:
Conversation
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.
Replying to
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.
1
1
13
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.
7
1
26
Also critical: what kinds of understanding is SRS bad at encoding?
Quote Tweet
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.
2
10
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
Yes, this is a challenge for many people. I’ve made a note to write about this. I think the mnemonic medium will help: notes.andymatuschak.org/The_mnemonic_m
But in the meantime, I think this is the best resource: augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
5
Replying to
Might help to have the ‘frequent revision’ mindset of note-taking. I thought about this for languages: learn bilingually, then as understanding increases, re-write answers in the target. Start with what’s easy and use the revision as a cue/queue to change what is being practiced.