Anki on Mac in 60 seconds

lukeprog

Spaced repetition - like the 'Anki' program does - is one of the most efficient ways to learn new things. (For research citations, see 'Study methods', here.)

I previously explained how to get up and running with Anki on an Android phone. Here's the guide for using Anki on a Mac:

Go here and click 'Download Latest Release' (or here if you're on PowerPC).
Open the downloaded .dmg file, drag the Anki icon into your Applications folder in the dock, and then run the Anki application. (Click 'Open' when warned that the application was downloaded.)
Click 'Download' and search the list of decks for 'Less Wrong'. Download the 'Less Wrong Sequences' deck.
Set your review options as desired, then click 'Review.'

That's it!

(This full process will take longer than 60 seconds because of download speed, but will probably require only 60 seconds of interaction with the phone.)

Spaced repetition - like the 'Anki' program does - is one of the most efficient ways to learn new things. (For research citations, see 'Study methods', here.)

I previously explained how to get up and running with Anki on an Android phone. Here's the guide for using Anki on a Mac:

Go here and click 'Download Latest Release' (or here if you're on PowerPC).
Open the downloaded .dmg file, drag the Anki icon into your Applications folder in the dock, and then run the Anki application. (Click 'Open' when warned that the application was downloaded.)
Click 'Download' and search the list of decks for 'Less Wrong'. Download the 'Less Wrong Sequences' deck.
Set your review options as desired, then click 'Review.'

That's it!

(This full process will take longer than 60 seconds because of download speed, but will probably require only 60 seconds of interaction with the phone.)

Yes! Good essay! It never occurred to me to think of calculating whether I'll save minutes over my life by memorizing versus looking up.

In that essay you touched on the possibility of creating practice problems that generate a new puzzle each time to build skills. When I was trying to find or imagine the best way to create something to study tesuji I ran into this. Would it be better to memorize 150 specific positions and where each one's best move is or have a new one every time and practice? I suspect the memory research that justifies spaced repetition might not apply to skill development as opposed to simple recognition and recall. This might simply require experimentation to settle? I dunno.

Something that occurred to me yesterday after jogging was that the best things to memorize are probably meta-reference material that's likely to be stable, like the library of congress non-fiction classification system... what subject is NZ? What are the three best selling non-fiction titles under NZ? That kind of thing. That way you might hope to have instantaneous recall that something in the library will help when you run across a specific problem that books exist for. You can find and scan the books based on running into the problem in real life, but the existence of the books will (hopefully) be trigger by the simpler memories.

Similar reasoning suggests that, it might be good to memorize the name and purpose of all the commonly tools that can be installed and run library in debian from the command line, and all the libraries that exist in one's preferred programming language.

I suspect the memory research that justifies spaced repetition might not apply to skill development as opposed to simple recognition and recall. This might simply require experimentation to settle? I dunno.

I think that the theory that 'procedural memory decay at the same rate as declarative memory' is a reasonable default theory, and I haven't noticed any real difference in average grade (accuracy of recall) for my programming cards and my more normal flashcards. But certainly I pay attention to any research I come across which seems like it might be ge... (read more)

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Anki on Mac in 60 seconds

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Anki on Mac in 60 seconds

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