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.
Replying to
Procedural knowledge 😛 (Though you can encode knowledge that helps you procedurally, e.g. recipe can help your fluidity when cooking even if you can't encode how to chop an onion)
Unrelated: Have you ever done something with incremental reading?
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Hm. From a memory perspective, there’s support for encoding procedural knowledge: gwern.net/docs/spacedrep. Motor skills see mixed findings.
IR: Yes, have built some prototypes too. Thoughts too early to distill here.
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Replying to
Sometimes it can come in the way of chunking a topic well by fragmenting it into multiple cards. However, using separate decks, and reviewing the scheduled cards in the order of their creation can help with this to some extent.
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