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I No Longer Tell My Friends about Anki/SuperMemo
- xupybd 6y agoOutside of learning a language are there many times that wrote memorization is useful? I can't think how I would use this in a software development sense. Coding katas come close to this and a useful but I'm not sure flash cards would do the same. Maybe it would be handy to memorize a libraries API but then if I use something enough that memorization would be useful I'll learn it by way of using it.
- jacquesm 6y agoTraffic signs musical notation geography history chemistry metallurgy physics healthcare ... This is one of those 'what have the Romans done for us' comments. Intelligence + facts = smarts. Facts are to thinking like fuel is to an engine, without facts your thinking will be either useless or wrong. So regardless of how smart you are some degree of access to facts is a requirement and if you can do this without having to look things up all the time it will go faster and with access to more facts the quality of your output will go up.
- im3w1l 6y agoDid you use it for any of these and what was your experience?
- xupybd 6y agoI get what you are saying. If I were studying this would be great. But it's been a long time since I have done any formal study. Most of what I learn now days is by doing. I might read a book on a topic but never have an assignment or a test to follow up. I'm attempting to find out if others in my shoes have found a use for memorization like this. If so it might be something worth me trying.
- istjohn 6y agoDo you ever find yourself going back to something you used to know well, only to find that you're now a bit rusty? In theory, spaced repetition would allow you to keep that knowledge from getting stale. I think you'll find you learn new things quicker with judicious use of spaced repetition. As a bonus, you'll never forget those things as long as you maintain the habit. And we're all always learning, so that shouldn't be hard. I do think the hardest part of spaced repetition use outside of the classroom is choosing what to memorize. In school, those decisions are made for you. I find it easy to bite off too much and start memorizing minutiae of a technology instead of the essential items. But I think it's just another skill to master.
- watwut 6y agoActually in history less so. Unless you are learning for some kind of odd test where they will demand ton of exact dates, you are better off learning how events related to each other and how they followed. Hardest parts of physics and chemistry in understanding. Again, you can use flash card memorization here and there, but the first of it is different.
- sjy 6y agoI have no formal training in history, but Anki has got me much more interested in it. Before Anki, I tended to collapse centuries of history into ‘the distant past,’ which made it hard to appreciate how events related to each other, or distinguish between events separated by years and events separated by decades or centuries. I discovered, by using Anki for an exam, that it’s relatively easy for me to remember 4-digit numbers, and relatively difficult for me to remember sequences of events. So, memorising the years of events has been a great way for me to learn more history. Arbitrary dates with no understanding of the context are harder to remember, so the cards that come up the most are the topics to read more about (or delete, if they really are useless factoids). It’s a bit like using the number line as a memory palace.
- watwut 6y agoI dont have formal training either. But I found that they collapse into blob when you don't understand them. Because then you are memorizing names of events without knowing what they actually were in any detail. Once you listen to more detailed lecture or read more detailed book, they become clearly distinct due to many small differences and stories. So misplaced event suddenly "dont makes sense", because you can explain why it could not happen then.
- Balgair 6y agoNot to nit-pick, but physics? What would you use flash-cards for in physics? Memorizing equations? Why would you ever do that?
- CryingSofa 6y agoBesides learning vocabulary, the one place I'm really getting great results with Anki is exam preparation. Exams are often in a very well-defined scope where you can rote learn most of the definitions, and the few exercise variants that appear in preparation also can appear on the exam. I don't think that this is the best way to learn many things, but exams are partially tangential to true learning and it works well enough in my experience.
- instance 6y agoThere was a post not too long ago (I can't remember it unfortunately) where someone argued that memorization (they used software development specifically as the example) could help in connecting concepts. You can be a developer who knows what to google. Or you could be one who knows lots by heart and connects everything they know. I'm a bit sceptical myself, since rote memorization seems like something that is easily forgotten after a few months..
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoI feel like understanding rather than pure knowledge is what allows you to connect concepts.
- CryingSofa 6y agoYes, but some knowledge is a requirement to really understand something. Trivial example: can you really understand addition of numbers if you can't remember how to do it? Pure memorization of facts is also really helpful to creating new understanding: Have you ever read a textbook that stacked definition upon definition and at some point you can't really keep up anymore because you're going back to the previous paragraphs all the time? At that point, pure memorization of definitions (even without understanding them really) already helps massively to reduce cognitive overload and makes forming new understanding form the rest of the text even possible.
- istjohn 6y agoThe point of Anki is that you will never forget an ever growing library of information if you maintain the habit.
- jowday 6y agoI basically settled on an Anki-like system for cramming for tests in college. But this was a situation where I largely didn't attend class, but knew what formulas I'd need to know to pass each exam. Like clockwork, about 48 hours before an exam I'd lock myself away and make a bunch of flashcards, then spend hours rote memorizing them. It worked, and it got me through the tests, but I'd didn't really learn much.
- istjohn 6y agoThis is NOT what Anki is for. It's called space repetition for a reason. The whole raison d'etre of spaced repetition is that you can memorize information in a fraction of the time by reviewing the information at progressively increasing intervals. If you had practiced spaced repetition, by the end of the term you would have spent a fraction of the time studying and would retain the vast majority of the information for months. If you spent a few minutes per week reviewing, you would still remember those facts today.
- henrikeh 6y agoI’ve used flashcards quite extensively during my studies (electrical engineering and telecom engineering) and I continue to use it for technical subjects; albeit with reduced intensity. Spaced repetition systems are not just about “rote” memorization. When used right it is a very personalized practice tool that can help with quite high-level ideas. I wouldn’t fx. make flashcards for an entire API — instead I would focus on the concepts and features that are important for what I am doing. You can make it about “exactly” what you want to practice and remember. Think of it more as a collection of personal notes with build in recall practice, rather than remembering scores of “random” facts.
- sjy 6y agoI put all kinds of things in my Anki deck, mostly unrelated to software development, but I have created cards for things like the definitions of CRDT, ACID and monad, what link-local IPv6 addresses look like, and some useful flags in grep and parallel. Ever get annoyed by the realisation that you learned something a few months ago, but have forgotten it by the time you need it? Anki can fix this.
- zem 6y agoone (small) group that has taken to spaced repetition study techniques quite enthusiastically is the tournament scrabble community. the thing about scrabble is that you don't need to know what the words mean, you just need to memorise "acceptable sequences of letters", and also while there are ~275000 valid words in the official dictionary, people have already done the work to sort them into usefulness order. so if you want to play top-level tournament scrabble it is really helpful to simply memorise, say, the 5000-10000 (depending on your dedication) most useful words, keyed by "alphagram" (the alphabetically sorted set of letters in the word). e.g. ADEINRT -> [ANTIRED,DETRAIN,TRAINED]. again, you don't need to know or care what those words mean, just to know the they are the only three words made from that set of letters (as an aside the most useful words to memorise tend to be predominantly 2, 3, 7 and 8 letters long, most tournament players master the 2s as soon as possible, take a while with the 3s and start "cardboxing", scrabble jargon for using a flashcard app with spaced repetition, to learn the top few thousand 7s and 8s) anki itself is not super popular since there are apps like zyzzyva that are specialised for scrabble word study, but the technique is.
- yourqiwi 6y agoI collect interesting facts and tidbits I find in books, podcasts, and YouTube, and turn them into flashcards. It helps me remember various insights that I would otherwise forget. For example, I made cards for different Russell conjugates[0], definitions of certain words (eg culture, knowledge, optics, reify, ancillary, falsifiable), and quotes from books. You can program yourself with flashcards[1]. EG I have a card that says "What should you do when someone is explaining something and you don't understand?" (Ask questions until you understand). When my colleague is explaining something and I just don't get it, this flashcard triggers me to ask questions, instead of pretending to understand. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation 1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iocMeRcSKf3gAxsTh/self-programming-through-spaced-repetition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iocMeRcSKf3gAxsTh/self-progr...
- istjohn 6y agoI think we've all found ourselves looking up a command line option for that one bash utility for the upteenth time. Throw it in a flash card and never look it up again. The same with text editor shortcuts, API's, etc. My shop teacher would tell us to write down when we needed to borrow a tool. If we had to borrow a tool twice, it was time to go and buy it. I think the same rule is useful for spaced repetition. Even if you'd learn it eventually by regular use, once you have it in Anki you'll never forget it, even if you spend a couple years away from that particular technology. When you come back, you'll still have those configuration flags at the tip of your fingers.
- xupybd 6y agoThat's a good point. I'll try it out for that. See if I can't finally get tar down. https://xkcd.com/1168/ https://xkcd.com/1168/
- AstralStorm 6y agoAnd you have used hours of training on a thing used once every blue moon. Congratulations, I guess? Generally something is worth optimizing it this much when you're going to use it more than 10 times. Insert obligatory xkcd chart here: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ There are things that are this useful, but they're generally in category of mathematics, potentially physics, chemistry or linguistics. Learning parameters of a shell command, especially all of them, is a waste. Learn useful things first. This is the main problem SuperMemo and Anki sets face, the ordering is by difficulty only and not by product of difficulty times usefulness.
- istjohn 6y agoSomeone calculated they expect to spend a total of around 5 minutes over their entire life studying each new Anki card. That's not such a high bar for inclusion. Spaced repetition is very efficient. Of course, it's still not reasonable to memorize entire man pages.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- btrask 6y agoI say this with all the kindness that I have... this article/guy is really sad. First of all, if you think you've found the world's ultimate fighting technique, don't try to show it to random people for approval. Use it. Anki yourself in secret until you're a super-saiyan, and then unleash your strength on the quivering masses. Hear the lamentation of their women, until they are begging you for mercy and also to teach them about spaced repetition. That brings us to the second problem... spaced repetition doesn't work. Or rather, it does work, but it does the wrong thing. If you want to be a walking encyclopedia, maybe SR is a good approach. But if you want to understand the world, be able to do things, be funny and gregarious, know the answer but also know when to play dumb... SR can't help you. Even if you want to learn a language, if you can't learn it by using it, do you even need it? I was excited about SuperMemo, Anki, etc. too at one point. Eventually I decided that they just aren't that good. Now here's the thing: if you really think SR is the best thing ever, don't argue with people - prove us wrong.
- ketzo 6y agoIt reinforces something I think I’m slowly learning: tools are just tools, nothing more. Anki has its place, as does an impact driver; neither will make you a better person by itself.
- eindiran 6y agoI don't think anyone promised that spaced repetition would turn you into The Most Interesting Man in The World™, and if they did you would be rightfully disappointed. But SR is good at getting you to remember things and sometimes that's the problem you need to solve. Not everything can be solved with a hammer, but sometimes you have a bunch of nails that need to be hammered-in.
- FPGAhacker 6y agoI use it to lubricate my ability. Basically every time I have to google something to do my job I toss it in anki. Not having to look up syntax and what not is a far better productivity improvement than editor hacks for example.
- ryanobjc 6y ago
- jagrsw 6y agoAncdata-o-story similar to what the author describes in the article. 2-3 months ago I was about to take the Goethe B1 exam (German language). I would had probably passed it anyway, but wanted to be sure. I downloaded the official Goethe B1 wordlist (2.5k words), and one week before the exam I started learning it in Anki. I spent on avg. 2.5h per day, and out of those 2.5k words, I didn't know maybe 800. I've learnt them. Many of those words appeared later during the exam. I told about it my German teacher, somewhat excited, and she was sort-a 'meh, whatever, you can also learn in other ways'. I tried to explain, that "800 words, and in a week, and so fast", but as much as she loved my good exam results, she had no intention to recommend this way of learning to others.
- moksly 6y agoDo you still know those 800 words today?
- jagrsw 6y agoGerman -> English (or my mother tongue) is easy. I probably remember >90%. But the other way it's harder. I remember maybe half of those German words, further 1/4 I can recall after some mental effort, and probably 1/4 are lost or they would require say >10 min thinking (actually possible to recover them with some techniques). In any case I use many of those words actively today (e.g. during my German classes). E.g. yesterday, I tried to use word 'horizontal' in German, as it was on the list, and couldn't recall it quickly. My teacher gave me the word ('waagrecht'), and I should have obviously know it, and would know the meaning if somebody used it in German, but couldn't recall it easily.
- keiferski 6y agoSRS is the classic technical user situation. Anki looks like it’s from 1995 and has a massive initial learning curve with specialized vocabulary to learn (Cloze, decks, etc.) When it’s advertised, the copy is overly technical and confusing to the average person. Just look at SuperMemo’s home page, for an example: https://www.supermemo.com/en https://www.supermemo.com/en To get widespread SRS adoption, two things need to happen: 1. The primary software needs to be simplified and prettified. The aesthetics of Anki are unappealing to pretty much everyone. And just using it has a learning curve far greater than basically every other popular app. 2. The marketing message needs to be about benefits, not features. No one cares about the forgetting curve or the intricacies of available card types. Everyone cares about saving time and money, learning cool stuff, and having fun.
- henrikeh 6y agoI’m always curious about the “Anki should be prettier” comment. I use Anki a lot, so I’m not in the best position to judge its first-hand impression. But, what would you say should change? Both in terms of visuals and interaction? Genuinely asking.
- EE84M3i 6y agoAnki has _way_ too many knobs and options. It is overwhelming, and they are also footguns. The success of WaniKani for example is notable because you can effectively make the exact same thing for free using Anki (and the unofficial decks are available) but it is still quite popular to pay for the managed experience.
- henrikeh 6y agoI’m sorry for being dense, but I don’t quite understand the issue. From the workflow of downloading Anki and adding to the default deck, how do the settings and knobs factor into it? I’m not here to just argue. I am legitimately interested. I just don’t want to assume too much.
- refactor_master 6y ago
- teekert 6y agoWhen I first got into Linux I was like this. I regret it, now I very rarely recommend someone to try it and almost never help them set it up. I guest most people here understand why, tfa is very recognizable to me. Now 20 years later I run all my infrastructure from my basement, no cloud dependency for me, my OS does not spy on me and all tools I need for day to day life are Free... Freedom!!! See I proved them wrong, they should have gotten into it... Right? Wrong! Nobody cares!
- elevenoh 6y ago>Right? Wrong! Nobody cares! Until they're obviously affected by the implications (e.g. of depencies & privacy) :)
- notduncansmith 6y agoI’m sorry you feel like nobody cares. I relate to your message, and I think soon many people will appreciate the benefit of private/wholly-owned infrastructure.
- teekert 6y agoYeah there are indeed people that care, thinly scattered around the world. I found soms nice communities, like the Jupiter broadcasting and Ubuntu podcast communities. This is where I vent my enthusiasm nowadays, and I get much better responses :)
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago> See I proved them wrong, they should have gotten into it... Right? Wrong! Nobody cares! Same experience. But now I found having a cynical mentality is actually liberating, it allowed me to mostly ignore arguments and holy wars among people regarding to the platforms I'm using. I can only say, "It's simply my personal preference, and I fully accept any good or bad consequences of my choices. Talk to me only if you are genuinely interested." Now my main computer is not even running a standard distro anymore, but QubesOS, an experimental security operating system. When I first installed QubesOS, I found I was unable to work on my personal projects because some features I needed was missing. Instead of writing an angry blogpost (it sucks!) or defending my choice (this view is unfair for a project with limited resources!), I immediately cloned the git repository and spent a week hacking the source code to make it work for me without saying anything. Objectively, is it a good user experience? Not at all, but I'm personally okay with that, and hacking code is much more enjoyable than advocating the platform in an argument. I guess this mentality is not good for encouraging improvements, and I fully respect those who choose to actively engage, but for me, I need to have a rest.
- moksly 6y agoWhy is this on the front of HN? It’s a boring blog post about some, seemingly entitled, person who’s on a rant about people not wanting to listen to Jehovah’s witnesses. It’s not remotely useful. Changing hearts and minds is a skill in itself. It’s why people spend 3-5 years in a university to pick up skills on how to do it. Yet here we have some anecdotal story about someone who fails to convince strangers about some method of learning that is described as “99% of people never learn learning, you can be the 1% by doing this...”, and lets be honest, those people aren’t the authors friends, because actual friends don’t just shrug off your interests. I feel like I’ve just read an article on a subreddit about cringe or niceguys/gals about someone socially awkward who don’t understand why people don’t think they are the greatest. Maybe it’s just me, but I sure wish I hadn’t ever read this.
- piefayth 6y agoI started learning Korean during our age of perpetual quarantine, and the first thing I did when I sat down to start was ask myself, “How do I study?” I’m a decade or so out from my last bit of formal education, and I haven’t had to sit down and study since. If you research that question - “how to study?”- a bit, you will immediately be inundated with dozens of resources swearing by spaced repetition. Once you use it for a few weeks, it’s clear that the practice itself is helpful for retention. However, flashcards alone are simply not going to teach you a full language. You need reading exercises, speaking exercises, listening exercises, and writing exercises. These are rarely, if ever, all found in one place, and I quickly found myself following a few different programs, each teaching part of the full puzzle. People don’t want a tool. They want a silver bullet. Anki is very much just a tool, and like other tools, it requires you to do work with the tool to get a desired output. Making good cards is a time consuming nightmare if you want images and sounds, and getting those cards to sync across devices is non-trivial; you’re lucky when a mobile app supports importing all your media in your decks, or lets you study reversed cards in a sensible way. Proponents will say, “You can just import some great premade decks!” This might be useful for an intermediate, but as a beginner, having a deck full of vocabulary that deviates from the words I’m being taught in my other lessons is nearly useless. I can see how it’s tempting to tell the world - “You could learn so much faster with this one weird trick!” And the author knows that sale works; it’s easy to get someone to try Anki. Those users quickly realize that there are barriers to reaching the point where they have a net productivity increase, so why would they change what was working just fine for them already?
- arcsin 6y agoI think probably the main issue is that a lot of people just don't enjoy studying with flashcards. You could tell them it will literally make them 2x more efficient, and even if they believe you they still won't want to use it.
- boltefnovor 6y agoThe older I get, the less I care about influencing other people in any way.
- WA 6y agoSimilar experience here. Different domain, but a topic that could be useful for most people, but isn’t interesting for most people. Solution: don’t talk too much about it. Casually drop a sentence or two and then let them figure out the rest. Your goal should be that someone hears of your important topic at all. Because it’s often just random chance whether or not we stumble over something that is interesting or good for us. That’s why the randomness of HN is so appealing. 95% is useless for one specific person, but once in a while that person stumbles upon a gem that is exactly right for them. And sometimes, it is the right info but not the right time and they might come back to you later to ask more, although this rarely happens. Make a website for people that are already interested in the topic. The rest of your effort should be spend just mentioning the sheer existence of your topic. Don’t lecture anyone. That is enough. OP talks for 10 minutes about SRS. Yes, nobody gives a shit. Instead say: I use Anki, because it helps me to learn XYZ a lot faster. Then change the topic. Not mentioning it at all is bad, because it robs the other person of the chance that this is the gem they actually need right now.
- bnralt 6y agoOne of the things that's always thrown me off about the LessWrong community (I assume this article is adjacent to it because of the mention of Yudkowsky and the "I too have cognitive biases" confession) is that members supposedly strive to be aware of their own biases, but often seem extremely hostile to people with differing opinions. For instance, the reaction this article to the author's friends disinterest isn't for the author to question their own beliefs, but to complain about their friends not seeing the truth. I'm often left with the impression that discussion of biases for many ironically becomes a way to reinforce biases. I've even seen people argue as much - "I'm aware of my biases, and you're not, which is why I'm correct, and you're wrong."
- loopz 6y agoThe first link details how it's easy to fall into the trap of preaching the gospel to others and even making them feel bad about themselves: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6NvbSwuSAooQxxf7f/beware-of-other-optimizing https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6NvbSwuSAooQxxf7f/beware-of-... I think maybe you conflate complaining with hostility. Humans, even rational ones, complain when things go counter to their expectations. It's normal human behaviour, and everyone, everyone does it. It's so universal and basic, an AI would probably not be complete without it.
- sibeliuss 6y agoThere's lots of useful things, and everybody is into their own stuff. Sometimes it intersects with ones own interests, but most of the time you're on your own. However... think about it like this: If just one (1) of the dozens of people the author mentioned Anki to took it up and learned a whole new skill, their life would be changed. Thats pretty cool! And reward enough.
- jhanschoo 6y agoWith respect to learning definitions of words for language alone, I wonder if reading books accompanied with a dictionary would be a more sustainable approach. I see two immediate comparative benefits - Only very few have the temperament and external motivation to practice with SRS. - Learning by reading texts reinforces vocabulary at exactly the right strength: you learn the more common words sooner.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoI've used this kind of software I wrote myself when I was preparing for University. The results were spectacular for the subjects where memorization was crucial. But frankly, using it for learning things like maths is a PITA. I found out I learn much better with traditional exercise books, comparing my answers with the key.
- brailsafe 6y agoTaking Anki out of it, it's certainly challenging to be circumspect about the things you're enthusiastic about just not mattering either to anyone or just to the specific person you're droning in about it to. Likewise if someone asks, they might just be doing so because they know it's something you're enthusiastic about, and aren't looking for your lit review on the subject. "Oh you skateboard? I was thinking of getting into that" is now met with a meager acknowledgement and nothing more. "Can you teach me?" is now met with "No", because people just don't really give a damn and they have other stuff going on that they might not realize in the moment. Replace skateboarding with programming or anything else and you have feigned interest, so it's best to turn it around and ask them what they're into. Bringing Anki back into it for a second, I did not have any success with Anki software or really any software. It just did not help me beyond giving me access to long lists of words. Instead, SR with written flash cards and questions seems like night and day.