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Does anyone have any insight into deciding what information should be memorised, and what information it is sufficient to simply store in a searchable digital k

Does anyone have any insight into deciding what information should be memorised, and what information it is sufficient to simply store in a searchable digital knowledge base for rapid retrieval when needed? Takes a lot of effort to commit my notes from a book into my head, but a tiny amount of resources to store them on my computer.

rjh29 4y ago
Language is really the ideal use case, you cannot stop and look up words every few seconds when talking to someone. And doing it while reading or watching TV spoils the enjoyment somewhat. You need to frontload a ton of data into your mind and flashcards are the best way to do it. Another good use case is country flags, because you can't easily look those up (other than pulling up an image of ALL the country flags)
- bluGill 4y ago
  Only at the beginner levels. Once you get beyond beginner you realize that many words have 20 different definitions, and each definition maps to a different word in the other language - and the problem happens when you reverse as well.
  - rjh29 4y ago
    I'm not a beginner (12k cards, 10 years). What works for me personally: 1) test word -> meaning, not word -> word in other language 2) I don't test reverse most of the time, unless I really want to remember how to say something - output tends to emerge by itself given enough input 3) When a word has multiple meanings I add context (usually a related word or colocation as a hint - whole sentences can cause you to associate the sentence with the word but not recall it in other situations). Words with lots of meanings (in Japanese I guess that would be stuff like 引く or in English 'run'?) tend to be very common words so you don't need to use flash cards so much anyway.
outlace 4y ago
Ask yourself if the cost of having to look it up at a potentially inconvenient time (e.g. in the middle of a busy work day) is greater than the cost of memorizing it during scheduled less busy times (e.g. doing flashcards while eating dinner or during a bus commute).
_dain_ 4y ago
Gwern's classic monograph[1] addresses this: >The most difficult task, beyond that of just persisting until the benefits become clear, is deciding what’s valuable enough to add in. In a 3 year period, one can expect to spend “30–40 seconds” on any given item. The long run theoretical predictions are a little hairier. Given a single item, the formula for daily time spent on it is Time = 1⁄500 × nthYear−1.5 + 1⁄30000. During our 20th year, we would spend t = 1⁄500 × 20−1.5 + 1⁄3000, or 3.557e-4 minutes a day. This is the average daily time, so to recover the annual time spent, we simply multiply by 365. Suppose we were interested in how much time a flashcard would cost us over 20 years. The average daily time changes every year (the graph looks like an exponential decay, remember), so we have to run the formula for each year and sum them all; in Haskell: sum $ map (\year -> ((1/500 * year**(-(1.5))) + 1/30000) * 365.25) [1..20] # 1.8291 >Which evaluates to 1.8 minutes. (This may seem too small, but one doesn’t spend much time in the first year and the time drops off quickly55.) Anki user muflax’s statistics put his per-card time at 71s, for example. But maybe Piotr Woźniak was being optimistic or we’re bad at writing flashcards, so we’ll double it to 5 minutes. That’s our key rule of thumb that lets us decide what to learn and what to forget: if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it’s worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition. 5 minutes is the line that divides trivia from useful data.56 [1] https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
- rjh29 4y ago
  I have definitely wasted lots of time creating and reviewing cards for words that I never see again (the long tail) or don't strictly need to know. But the feeling of coming across a word that you learned and -knowing- it is amazing. It also helps if you enjoy the process of creating and reviewing cards - tending to your knowledge garden, so to speak.

rjh29 4y ago

Language is really the ideal use case, you cannot stop and look up words every few seconds when talking to someone. And doing it while reading or watching TV spoils the enjoyment somewhat. You need to frontload a ton of data into your mind and flashcards are the best way to do it. Another good use case is country flags, because you can't easily look those up (other than pulling up an image of ALL the country flags)

bluGill 4y ago
Only at the beginner levels. Once you get beyond beginner you realize that many words have 20 different definitions, and each definition maps to a different word in the other language - and the problem happens when you reverse as well.
- rjh29 4y ago
  I'm not a beginner (12k cards, 10 years). What works for me personally: 1) test word -> meaning, not word -> word in other language 2) I don't test reverse most of the time, unless I really want to remember how to say something - output tends to emerge by itself given enough input 3) When a word has multiple meanings I add context (usually a related word or colocation as a hint - whole sentences can cause you to associate the sentence with the word but not recall it in other situations). Words with lots of meanings (in Japanese I guess that would be stuff like 引く or in English 'run'?) tend to be very common words so you don't need to use flash cards so much anyway.

outlace 4y ago

Ask yourself if the cost of having to look it up at a potentially inconvenient time (e.g. in the middle of a busy work day) is greater than the cost of memorizing it during scheduled less busy times (e.g. doing flashcards while eating dinner or during a bus commute).

_dain_ 4y ago

Gwern's classic monograph[1] addresses this: >The most difficult task, beyond that of just persisting until the benefits become clear, is deciding what’s valuable enough to add in. In a 3 year period, one can expect to spend “30–40 seconds” on any given item. The long run theoretical predictions are a little hairier. Given a single item, the formula for daily time spent on it is Time = 1⁄500 × nthYear−1.5 + 1⁄30000. During our 20th year, we would spend t = 1⁄500 × 20−1.5 + 1⁄3000, or 3.557e-4 minutes a day. This is the average daily time, so to recover the annual time spent, we simply multiply by 365. Suppose we were interested in how much time a flashcard would cost us over 20 years. The average daily time changes every year (the graph looks like an exponential decay, remember), so we have to run the formula for each year and sum them all; in Haskell: sum $ map (\year -> ((1/500 * year**(-(1.5))) + 1/30000) * 365.25) [1..20] # 1.8291 >Which evaluates to 1.8 minutes. (This may seem too small, but one doesn’t spend much time in the first year and the time drops off quickly55.) Anki user muflax’s statistics put his per-card time at 71s, for example. But maybe Piotr Woźniak was being optimistic or we’re bad at writing flashcards, so we’ll double it to 5 minutes. That’s our key rule of thumb that lets us decide what to learn and what to forget: if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it’s worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition. 5 minutes is the line that divides trivia from useful data.56 [1] https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition

rjh29 4y ago
I have definitely wasted lots of time creating and reviewing cards for words that I never see again (the long tail) or don't strictly need to know. But the feeling of coming across a word that you learned and -knowing- it is amazing. It also helps if you enjoy the process of creating and reviewing cards - tending to your knowledge garden, so to speak.