Micaiah_Chang comments on Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: philh 26 August 2013 09:00PM

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Comment author: philh 26 August 2013 09:34:22PM *  7 points [-]

What (not necessarily LW-related) things do people find useful to Anki? (Or have Ankied but they turned out not to be useful, etc.)

Some things I have:

  • the NATO phonetic alphabet

  • mass of Earth/Moon/Sun, radius of Earth/Moon

  • log_2 of 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75, and log_10 of 2 through 9

  • The 68-95-99.7 rule

  • Some things that I noticed I had to keep looking up: which is which between SQL left and right joins; the argument order to python's datetime.datetime.strptime function; the spellings of irrelevant and separate

I think only the latter group have had any use worth speaking of so far, though the third and fourth are things that I have more than once wanted to know and not known. The first two may just be almost-useless (though I like knowing them, so not necessarily worthless).

Things I kind of want to remember but suspect they wouldn't be worth it include other alphabets, and locations of countries/US states/UK counties/London underground stops (the aggregate may be useful, but there's an awful lot of cards there).

Comment author: Antisuji 27 August 2013 01:27:12AM *  2 points [-]

Background: I've been using Anki for about 2.5 years. I have done the following:

  • (+3) assorted unusual English vocabulary (English is my first language)
  • (+1) the NATO phonetic alphabet
  • (+2) hiragana and katakana
  • (0) phone numbers of family and friends
  • (+2) the streets of San Francisco
  • (+1) assorted technical concepts, some LW-related

The numbers in parentheses are my rough impression of usefulness and/or enjoyment on a possibly familiar scale of -10 to +10. When I was first getting used to Anki and only using it for English, the usefulness was around (-1), for reasons I can get into if anyone's interested.

My biggest problems with Anki are first that it's a pain to input cards in a useful way, and second that for some things (e.g. hiragana and katakana) a more structured format would be strictly better.

Comment author: Micaiah_Chang 29 August 2013 08:11:18PM 1 point [-]

Using Antisuji's system:

  • (+3) Emacs Keybindings + Listing good usecases for the bindings
  • (+1) Git commands
  • (+2) Compound Kanji
  • (+1) Basic Unix Command Line
  • (+0/+0.5) C I/O Function prototypes
  • (+3) Gaussian Integrals
  • (+4) Addresses
  • (+1) GRE Vocabulary words (All of it from taking the GRE, not from general usage)

I've considered adding all of my family's birthday's to the list but 1) I'm too embarrassed to ask 2) Calenders are an easier solution. Has anyone else done something similar?

Also, indirectly, I teach a class of about 25~ students every quarter and while I don't put them in a deck, I make sure that I'm exposed to the entire classes' names in a roughly spaced repetition way (First class I attempt to say everyone's name twice, grade different assignments at the appropriate spacing and 'reset' my schedule for mistaken names). This has caused my students to respect me as a teacher much more (No other Teaching Assistant knows everyone's name!) and slightly deters people from being quiet when they don't understand something (as I can just call out their name).

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 30 August 2013 08:55:34PM 0 points [-]

Next time (right now?), why don't you try the students using anki and see how it compares? Does the school give you their pictures ahead of time?

Comment author: Micaiah_Chang 30 August 2013 10:07:30PM 1 point [-]

There's no pictures and the first time I get the dossier is on the day I teach my class. It's slightly premature optimization to start an anki before the first week of TAing, because about 5 or so students shuffle in an out during the first two or so weeks. Currently though, I'm applying for a physics major only class where there would be pictures and the class size is much more static.

Thanks for suggesting an out and out comparison. It hadn't really occurred to me to do this if I do land the other job.