The essay explains a tonne of use patterns for the personal memory system Anki. It’s a much more in-depth version of my tweet storm:https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/957763229454774272 …
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এই থ্রেডটি দেখানধন্যবাদ। আপনার সময়রেখাকে আরো ভালো করে তুলতে টুইটার এটিকে ব্যবহার করবে। পূর্বাবস্থায়পূর্বাবস্থায়
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Great essay. Re "[in HCI] the overwhelming majority of papers seem timid when compared to early work on augmentation." I totally agree. Do you know of communities you think are doing better? I like
@distillpub but the focus is ML, not augmentation or interaction. -
Thanks! Full fledged communities, no. But nascent communities, sure - I find inspiration in lots of groups of artists, musicians, YouTubers, ppl writing “Explorable Explanations”,
@Dynamicland1, etc. -
A crucial fact, for me, is that for many of these groups the primary thing is the artifact - sharing it, using it, etc.
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You talk about mixing cards into one deck-- that fits with principle of interleaving, which is another cogsci backed learning principle.
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Additionally: memory palaces/journeys + Anki is quite effective. Very good for memorizing a sequence of information. Example: remember genetic diseases by representing them with an image or person, have 1-3 additional bits of info in the story, and group in categories
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Like: all glycogen storage diseases in one journey. Trinucleotude repeats in another. etc. Big issue: each journey card requires more effort-- like 2-4 minutes of thinking to go through 40-60 loci. Still efficient, but annoying to have mixed with other cards
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I think my issue with the memory palaces is that they rely on rich associations… to the wrong things. You ultimately want people to build rich associations internal to a subject, not by relating it to the house your grew up in. Still, I should explore it more, I may be wrong
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True. But for some subjects you need to get to a pretty high level of understatto build context for association. So they're a nice shortcut. And once you have an image for a subject it can get reused to build connections in a way similar to normal learning
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I’d really like to believe this is right. Unfortunately, the people who really develop these mnemonic skills don’t seem to use them this way. Rather, they end up memorizing lots of trivia. But maybe that’s just a selection effect (eg “digits of pi” is a memorable parlour trick).
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Good point. Anecdotally I've reused Red Pokemon as symbols for gram negative bacteria, Purple Pokemon for gram positive. Other random stuff like that for medicine. But overall, yeah, memory palace don't tend to be used for practical stuff.
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Very interesting and useful read! As you may know, Simon had a lot to say about the relationship between pragmatically tinkering designers and rigorous scientists as well (The Sciences of the Artificial). https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed.pdf …
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Thanks! Yes, I love that book!
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Me too. On the same note, I can also recommend Vincenti’s classic “What Engineers Know and How They Know It”. Not aeronautics instead of cognitive science, but very insightful.
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whatever the technique - Anki, meditation, impressing your partner or whatever - being engaged deeply is the key... speaking from a personal experience

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Yes, though I find Anki functions as something of an emotional prosthetic for me: it helps me care more. But it definitely works better for material I’m invested in; it’s a sort of engagement amplifier.
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ahhh "an emotional prosthetic" - totally
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Great piece -- when you were memorizing Dickens, what was your card structure? Was the front one sentence, and the back the next sentence in the book?
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No, that would be too complicated (and violate the atomicity principle). It was short phrases used to cue the next short phrase. Very slow without larger chunks.
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(On inspiration from
@michael_nielsen) I started using Anki to memorize poetry this way. Line N cues Line N+1. Works very well!
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লোড হতে বেশ কিছুক্ষণ সময় নিচ্ছে।
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