* (4,5): SR systems should encourage studying when you're most motivated; they shouldn't rely on you studying even on a vacation, or discourage extra studying when you complete your day's review. This requires changes to both algorithm and UX.
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* (6) An extra app like Anki is extra friction; brings SR to your email inbox, but you still need to click through to review. Great progress, but we can do even better.
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I want to share these ideas with folks thinking about spaced repetition. So, here's some unsolicited @-ing; I hope you don't mind:
@hermannebbinghaus
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Broadly agreed! Though alas, I believe #1 and #2 are deep research projects: my experiments with cloze-driven extracts like the ones you describe have been pretty unsuccessful in the long-term.
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I've been happy with one-press cloze for several months now. I wonder what was different in our experiences.
One possibility: cards live directly in roam and so are always in an editable mode, so clean-up friction - like adding missing context - isn't too high.
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Another: the cards you create require more synthesis / a higher level of abstraction that cloze extraction allows for
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Yeah, that's possible. I don't think the long-term problems became particularly glaring until 6-12 months, so you may not be feeling it yet.
The central problem for me with verbatim clozes is that I find myself not caring about the wall of text I'm being confronted with.
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The tension is: use a short source range—which later feels contextless and less emotionally meaningful; or include more context, yielding a burdensome prompt not very focused on what I actually want to reinforce.
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The verbatim phrasing is very rarely what I actually want to reinforce. Sometimes it works out! But the majority of the time, not.
I find verbatim clozes have much worse issues than hand-authored clozes, but problems with the latter too:
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Silver lining: informal experiments suggest that verbatim clozes are much better as an input model for NLP systems generating focused Q/A style prompts, vs. just highlighting some text.
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Also separately: visual clozes seem pretty reliably good! A lot more to anchor on, I think.
That's interesting! The same block of text as an image from book/site/doc with a cloze over a key word or phrase, as opposed to that text as text in your SRS app?
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We saw a large lift at Hickory ~40% in recall (I think) when an image was added to the card.
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