There's ongoing tension in designing memory systems for "efficiency" vs. emotional experience.
In this (unlocked) post I argue that the critical thing to optimize is emotional connection and suggest a way to fluidly deprioritize boring material:
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But (to illustrate the tension) and RA Bjork ran an empirical study on the effects of students' choices to drop flashcards and found "small but consistently negative effects on learning." web.williams.edu/Psychology/Fac
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Of course, it's important to note that the broad term "learning" here is used to refer to "accuracy." Trading off accuracy for not-being-bored may actually be net positive for learning writ large!
… though, given the reported behavior, it's not clear that's what was happening.
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It's always hard to know how to interpret attitudinal survey responses in studies like this. The participants were learning Swahili vocabulary provided by the investigators. How would their behavior differ in a personally-motivated setting outside formal education?
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That's one reason why I'm excited about learning from Quantum Country readers: it's a serious context of use, and participants are (so far!) people who've chosen to study quantum computation.
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Another (2020) paper on this tension from Daphne Whitmer and colleagues, with a more authentic scenario: andymatuschak.org/files/papers/W
In-training US Marines used SRS to learn to identify armored vehicles. Group who could drop cards remembered much less well.
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I think that dropping being good/bad depends a lot on the reasons behind it: "I lost interest in the topic" vs "I find the topic too hard".
The real problem is that you need quite a lot of sr experience to tell the reasons apart.
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For the first year or two of Anki practice, I didn't know about the suspend button (or if I did, I feared it). In hindsight it was a good thing.
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