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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You might find this paper on "Knowledge Components" useful pact.cs.cmu.edu/pubs/Koedinger
Essentially, the specific learning intervention depends on the type of knowledge. Anki/SRS probably works for everything in some sense, but maybe is not optimal for all types.
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Thank you, will read! (don’t worry: I’m certainly don’t believe SRS prompts can best encode all knowledge—but I want to better understand their limits)
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good observation, feel like people don't have much experience with making prompts (recalling a certain kind of flashcard), so in my mind the medium lends itself to things that are isolated, broken down, yes/no unless you develop a sense of it as more parts/whole?
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That’s the way most people use it, yes. But a small number have found ways to encode rich, connected knowledge—and it’s surprisingly compelling there too. Unfortunately, this skill is not yet well-understood or widely-distributed. (Yet!)
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Don’t forget figures of speech and rhetoric generally! Nobody forgets a good chiasmus...
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Indeed! Your prompts have been helpful here. I’ve been slowly accumulating some notes in that direciton over here…
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For what it's worth, my usage of Anki starts off with rote/shallow prompts using screen clips + image occlusion. But then I progressively suspend these cards as I become familiar with them and add to the deck better questions that are sparked during the review... 1/3
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These could include questions that I don't yet have answers to. But the new questions tend to favor summarization of a concrete topic, comparison with related work, as well questions about the big picture. .. 2/3
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