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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1/4 The system I've settled on using with Anki has my cards mostly of three different types - Cloze (for simple cards like definitions), Explanation (for explanations that can fit on one card) and a List type for longer cards.
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2/4 For example, I'll break down a long explanation of a concept into steps. Then, the cards I have show all previous steps, before asking for the next step (along with a card to recall every step).
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3/4 I've used this system fairly successfully for learning A Level Chemistry and Physics, and more recently some undergraduate-level maths, making a total of around 9k cards. Perhaps not very complex knowledge, but not trivial either.
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4/4 Another thing worth considering is the trouble with having many 'atomic' cards based around a single concept - it can get difficult to change your system when a new, better understanding of that concept develops. You have to hunt around for all the related cards.
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1/2 Something I've been experimenting with as a partial solution to this is embedding my flashcards in a wiki-like system (currently using ), and adding them to Anki from there (using a script I whipped up).
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One of the arguments for such systems is that it provides a layer of organisation beyond tags and folders that more closely approximates how the knowledge is actually stored. I'm hoping to carry over the benefits of that to my Anki cards.
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Yes, I've been writing cards that way for almost a year now. It does seem to help solve the problem you describe in which you need to change the cards when your understanding improves. I can't say I understand yet.
Yes, I saw these notes when coming into the whole zettelkasten topic! Big factor in me deciding to take up the system. I just needed something that could use a little more of Anki's features (custom note types, images...), but the principle is the same.
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As for the changing cards, my guess is that it helps with finding related cards since notes are linked together naturally. For example, you can see what lemmas/theorems are used to build up a more powerful theorem, and access those notes directly.
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