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

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: Emile 28 August 2013 11:32:26AM 0 points [-]

Some stuff I used Anki for:

  • Japanese (I have decks for kana, vocabulary, grammar rules...), that's the one I've used the most consistently for the past six months or so.
  • Paris subway map (which color is line 8? Which is the green subway line? What lines pass at Montparnasse-Bienvenue? What is the east terminus of line 1?); not particularly useful but should help consolidate my mental map of Paris; I haven't been reviewing that very consistenly but know it pretty well by now.
  • A few misc. facts in AI and robotics; I made the mistake of putting too much stuff I don't really care about, and despite a few cleanups haven't been reviewing this consistently

A couple years ago I had used Anki with some pre-made decks (German, Lesswrong sequences), but reviewing it started feeling like a chore, and I stopped. It's easier to stay focused with cards I made myself.

When I'm in Japan I jot down all the phrases I learn on a piece of paper, and then later on enter them into Anki (I also have a running list of "things I would like to be able to say").

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