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
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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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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Yeah I noticed how your notes show different levels of hierarchy side-by-side. It's very smooth, no cognitive load. Where do the prompts themselves (with their review history) live? Does it require a second medium (eg. Anki) to do the actual reviews?
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Conceptually, the prompts “live” in the plaintext; one reviews using a separate client built for that purpose (and which tracks history). For me, reviewing is a very different context/stance from writing/editing/thinking. I’m likely to do it while in between things, on my phone.
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