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
Conversation
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.
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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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Ah, no, I mean: if the author has already produced a well-designed figure, cloze deletions on elements of that figure tend to be much more effective (speaking only IME here) than cloze deletions of prose. Lots more implicit context in the visual info.