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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I like how the "Skip" feature you describe increases the (emotional) signal-to-noise ratio of your flashcards. We flipped this around when developing Traverse: you create tons of flashcards, but only cards for which you activate the "Remember" switch are scheduled for repetition
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Interesting. Why default to having them off? Is it because most “units” in your system aren’t actually flashcards? I watched the video on your web site, and most of the items seem more like notes?
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Indeed it is. You'd take notes as in any note taking app, or even by importing whole articles or other sources, and you turn a very select emotionally resonating set into flashcards
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Only once you turn it into a flashcard do you change the title into a question (and possibly adjust the content to work better as a flashcard rather than just a note)
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It lowers the barrier to writing flashcards. Based on the research you and Michael Nielsen did on writing good cards, does it strike you as a reasonable balance or do you see obvious problems?
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I'm not sure. Incremental formalization is likely a good approach, but I find that refinement is often messier than the atomized blocks in this interface suggest. A note often wants to become 10+ questions; questions may draw on several notes; etc.
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This is part of why my approach to this type of incremental formalization has been very plaintext-centric: it's relatively easy to work at multiple levels of abstraction by smushing text blocks around.
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Good point. In Traverse you could currently achieve this by creating links on the original card to further cards with follow up questions, and move text blocks from the original card over to those. The linked cards insert themselves into the linear flow of cards (=tree traversal)
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The real challenge there would be to make moving text blocks around cards in a graph as frictionless and intuitive as within a single document. You'd have to be able to instantly see how it changes hierarchy and flow of your cards
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Right. My approach has been to collapse the hierarchy one level, embedding prompts within larger units of plaintext which themselves are connected in a graph.
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