* (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.
Conversation
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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Is it missing context that causes the mismatch between the verbatim and what you want to reinforce? E.g. something that could be fixed by NLP
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Or is it deeper in that the thing you want to reinforce is usually not directly put to paper by the author? E.g. you want to reinforce an interaction with your own prior knowledge
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Two primary categories:
- it's some higher-level synthesis/distillation/implication which is implied by, but not literally present in the prose
- it's some connection to my own projects, experiences, theories, etc