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Proposal: Community Curated Anki Decks For MIRI Recommended Courses

5 iconreforged 07 May 2014 06:48PM

Spaced repetition is optimal for recalling factual information. It won't necessarily teach you anything that you haven't already learned. It helps you retain knowledge, and won't necessarily help you develop skills. But, within the domain of factual information that you can already comprehend, spaced repetition systems are pretty optimal. So, if you want to train your brain on a bunch of Spanish-to-English sentence translations, or stock market tickers, or definitions, or sample questions, you should use something like Anki. 

Once you start using spaced repetition, you learn that one of the biggest limits is the card-making process. Making your own cards is time-consuming, although experience will make you much faster. Experience will also teach you what makes a better card. The 20 Rules of Formatting Knowledge pretty much spells it out for you, but I still had to make my own cards, find the sticking points, and edit them until I got a good sense for proper context and suitably short, distinct answers. 

You can find other people's shared decks and skip the card making process yourself, but not without some new problems. First, you are going to learn more making the cards yourself than studying someone else's. If it's subtle material, you can make cards that fill in the gaps in your particular understanding. But if someone else studies something and makes cards to fill in their own gaps, that means that what you're studying may not cover material that you don't know you don't know. It would be nice if everyone's shared decks were a completely thorough treatment of the material, but, alas, it is not so. And the only way that you can tell is by comparing the deck and the material during your own studying.

Shared decks also just aren't all that good sometimes. Someone, I can't recall who, wrote a script to scrape the entire LW wiki and then cloze-delete the title from the article. I appreciate the idea of SRSing the LW wiki, and scripting the whole thing was undoubtedly really efficient. However, the result was usually question and answer text hundreds of words long, with tables of content in the middle, and probably too many cards of insufficient value. 

Despite their problems, I think that shared decks have way more potential than their current use suggests. A well-crafted deck that gives its subject matter a thorough treatment could be more valuable than a textbook, and about as difficult to compose. But, looking at some of the best Anki decks I've come across, it will likely take more than one person to get such a deck off the ground. 

Anki's .apkg files are sorta unwieldy to edit collaboratively, because there's not really a way to merge edits from multiple contributors. Luckily, we can export and import decks as text, and use version control like GitHub to do the same thing. With a GitHub-hosted collaborative deck, a team of people studying a textbook, like Thinking and Deciding, could all make flashcards as they go, add them all to the same deck, remove redundant cards, standardize the layout, tag cards appropriately, and share them with whomever else comes along. Then, anyone else who wants to study the textbook has a high-quality Anki deck to use in conjunction, and if they know how a question can be asked better, or if they find an error, or if the seventh chapter didn't really get much coverage, they can contribute to the deck, too. 

This huge list of material put together by Louie Helm should be Anki-fied. Hopefully we can unite the efforts of many autodidacts and start to curate decks for each of the areas covered. Maybe a group of friends is about to work through a course on Quantum Computing or Set Theory. The rest of LW would benefit from their work making flashcards, but especially so if they leave the project open to collaboration. 

So, the things needed to move forward:

  • Someone learned in IP tell me what kind of licensing or copyright applies here. Should people post these with a Creative Commons or a GPL? Obviously we don't want to start plagiarizing or copyright-violating in the process of making this work. We don't want to abscond with other people's decks and start building on them, I think.
  • If you're about to tackle an area of study on the MIRI courses list, make a GitHub repo for it.
  • If this interests you in the slightest way, please contact me. iconreforged@gmail.com 
  • I'm working through the dull details of hosting an Anki deck in text form on GitHub myself with the copious number of Russian flashcards I made in three semesters of Russian classes. Hopefully that can provide some kind of template. If I'm feeling ambitious, I might start a Heuristics and Biases deck based on Thinking and Deciding.

A vote against spaced repetition

47 ancientcampus 10 March 2014 07:27PM

LessWrong seems to be a big fan of spaced-repetition flashcard programs like Anki, Supermemo, or Mnemosyne. I used to be. After using them religiously for 3 years in medical school, I now categorically advise against using them for large volumes of memorization.

 

[A caveat before people get upset: I think they appropriate in certain situations, and I have not tried to use them to learn a language, which seems its most popular use. More at the bottom.]

 

A bit more history: I and 30 other students tried using Mnemosyne (and some used Anki) for multiple tests. At my school, we have a test approximately every 3 weeks, and each test covers about 75 pages of high-density outline-format notes. Many stopped after 5 or so such tests, citing that they simply did not get enough returns from their time. I stuck with it longer and used them more than anyone else, using them for 3 years.

 

Incidentally, I failed my first year and had to repeat.

 

By the end of that third year (and studying for my Step 1 boards, a several-month process), I lost faith in spaced-repetition cards as an effective tool for my memorization demands. I later met with a learning-skills specialist, who felt the same way, and had better reasons than my intuition/trial-and-error:

  • Flashcards are less useful to learning the “big picture”
  • Specifically, if you are memorizing a large amount of information, there is often a hierarchy, organization, etc that can make leaning the whole thing easier, and you loose the constant visual reminder of the larger context when using flashcards.
  • Flashcards do not take advantage of spatial, mapping, or visual memory, all of which the human mind is much better optimized for. It is not so well built to memorize pairs between seemingly arbitrary concepts with few to no intuitive links. My preferred methods are, in essence, hacks that use your visual and spatial memory rather than rote.

 

Here are examples of the typical kind of things I memorize every day and have found flashcards to be surprisingly worthless for:

  • The definition of Sjögren's syndrome
  • The contraindications of Metronidazole
  • The significance of a rise in serum αFP

 

Here is what I now use in place of flashcards:

  1. Ven diagrams/etc, to compare and contrast similar lists. (This is more specific to medical school, when you learn subtly different diseases.)
  2. Mnemonic pictures. I have used this myself for years to great effect, and later learned it was taught by my study-skills expert, though I'm surprised I haven't found them formally named and taught anywhere else. The basic concept is to make a large picture, where each detail on the picture corresponds to a detail you want to memorize.
  3. Memory palaces. I recently learned how to properly use these, and I'm a true believer. When I only had the general idea to “pair things you want to memorize with places in your room” I found it worthless, but after I was taught a lot of do's and don'ts, they're now my favorite way to memorize any list of 5+ items. If there's enough demand on LW I can write up a summary.

 

Spaced repetition is still good for knowledge you need to retrieve immediately, when a 2-second delay would make it useless. I would still consider spaced-repetition to memorize some of the more rarely-used notes on the treble and bass clef, if I ever decide to learn to sight-read music properly. I make no comment on it's usefulness to learn a foreign language, as I haven't tried it, but if I were to pick one up I personally would start with a rosetta-stone-esque program.

 

Your mileage may vary, but after seeing so many people try and reject them, I figured it was enough data to share. Mnemonic pictures and memory palaces are slightly time consuming when you're learning them. However, if someone has the motivation and discipline to make a stack of flashcards and study them every day indefinitely, then I believe learning and using those skills is a far better use of time.

Another Anki deck for Less Wrong content

14 MondSemmel 22 August 2013 07:31PM

Anki decks of Less Wrong content have been shared here before. However, they felt a bit huge (one deck was >1500 cards) and/or not helpful to me. As I go through the sequences, I create Anki cards, and I've decided they are at a point where I can share them. Maybe someone else will benefit from them.

Current content: The deck currently consists of 186 Anki cards (82 Q&A, 104 cloze deletion), covering the following Less Wrong sequences: The Map and the Territory, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, How to Actually Change Your Mind, A Human's Guide to Words, and Reductionism.
All cards contain an extra field for their source, usually 1-2 Less Wrong posts, rarely a link to Wikipedia. Some mathy cards use LaTeX. I don't know what happens if you don't have LateX installed. Though if this is a problem, I think I can convert the LaTeX code to images with an Anki plugin.

Important caveats:

  1. My cards tend to have more context than those I've seen in most other decks, to the point that one might consider them overloaded with information. That's partly due to personal preference, and partly because I need as much context as possible so I memorize more than just a teacher's password.
  2. In contrast to previously shared Anki decks of Less Wrong content, I do not aim to make this deck comprehensive. Rather, I create cards for content which I understood and which seems suitable for memorization and which seemed particularly useful to me. Conversely, I did not create cards when I couldn't think of a way to memorize something, or when I did not understand (the usefulness of) something. (For instance, Original Seeing and Priming and Contamination did not work for me.)
  3. I've tried a few shared decks so far, and everybody seems to create cards differently. So I'm not sure to which extent this deck can be useful to anyone who isn't me.

Open question: I'm still not sure to which extent I'm memorizing internalized and understood knowledge with these cards, and to which extent they are just fake explanations or attempts to guess at passwords.

And a final disclaimer: The content is mostly taken verbatim from Yudkowsky's sequences, though I've often edited the text so it fit better as an Anki card. I checked the cards thoroughly before making the deck public, but any remaining errors are mine.

I'm thankful for suggestions and other feedback.

LessWrong Wiki as Anki deck

3 mapnoterritory 05 September 2012 09:11PM

I've ported the Less Wrong Wiki into an Anki deck. I hope this will be useful for new members as an alternative way to get acquainted with many interesting LessWrong concepts (Newcomb's problem? Superexponential conceptspace?).

A disclaimer: this an automatized scrape and therefore it might not always look great. In particular lot's of cards don't really conform the "simple and specific" rules for spaced repetition cards (see e.g. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm) - the deck it is thus not meant for memorizing the definitions, but rather for reading/browsing/recognizing the concepts. Nonetheless, I hope this still will be useful for some of us (certainly for me). 

I did a semi-automatic sanitization of the cards, but if you find some bogus ones (or any other problem) please let me know and I'll fix it.

The scraped Wiki version is from 01/09/2012 and there are currently 628 cards. There are "forward" format cards (name front, description back) and also "reverse" cards (in cloze format where it was possible, i.e. where the concept name comes up in the description text).

The deck is here:

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B6GcntZeZpBHVjRkVUE2Uko2Vk0/edit

The link also contains a .txt version of the cards (tab separated) which might be used to import to other repetition software than Anki.

The deck can be supplemented e.g. by the "List of Cognitive Biases and Fallacies" and "42 Logical Fallacies" decks as well as other decks mentioned on the spaced repetition wiki page.

What are the best ways of absorbing, and maintaining, knowledge?

17 [deleted] 03 November 2011 02:02AM

Recently, I've collapsed (ascended?) down/up a meta-learning death spiral -- doing a lot less of reading actual informative content, than figuring out how to manage and acquire such content (as well as completely ignoring the antidote). In other words, I've been taking notes on taking notes. And now, I'm looking for your notes on notes for notes.

What kind of scientific knowledge, techniques, and resources do we have right now in the way of information management? How would one efficiently extract useful information possible out of a single pass of the source? The second pass? 

The answers may depend on the media, and the media might not be readily apparent. Example: Edward Boyden, Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab, recommends recording in a notebook every conversation you ever have with other people. And how do you prepare yourself for the serendipity of a walk downtown? I know I'm more likely to regret not having a notebook on hand than spending the time to bring one along.

I'll conglomerate what I remember seeing on the N-Back Mailing List and in general: I sincerely apologize for my lack of citation.

Notes

  • I'm on the fence about Shorthand as a note-taking technique, given the learning overhead, but I'm sure that the same has been said for touch-typing. It would involve a second stage of processing if you can't read as well as you write, but given the way I have taken notes (... "non-linearly"...), that stage would have to come about anyway. The act of translation may serve as a way of laying connective groundwork down.
  • Livescribe Pens are nifty for those who write slowly, but they need to be combined with a written technique to be of any use (otherwise you're just recording the talk, and would have to live through it twice without any obvious annotation and tagging).
  • Cornell Notes or taking notes in a hierarchy may have been the method you were taught in high school; it was in mine. The issue I have had with this format is that I found it hard to generate a structure while listening to the teacher at the same time.
  • Mind-Mapping.
  • Color-coding annotations of text has been remarked to be useful on Science Daily.
Reading
  • Speed Reading Techniques  or removing sub-vocalization would seem to have benefits.
  • Once upon a time someone recommended me the book, "How to Read a Book". Nothing ground-breaking -- outline the author's intent, the structure of his argument, and its content. Then criticize. In short, book reverse-engineering.
Retention
  • Spaced Repetition. I'm currently flipping through the thoughts of  Peter Wozniak, who seems to have made it his dire mission to make every kind of media possible Spaced Repetition'able. I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on incremental reading or  video; also, how to possibly translate the benefits of SRS to dead-tree media, which seems a bit cumbersome.

(I've also heard a handful of individuals claim that SRS has helped them "internalize" certain behaviors, or maybe patterns of thought, like Non-Violent Comunication or Bayes Theorem... any takers on this?)

  • Wikis, which seem like a good format for creating social accountability, and filing notes that aren't note-carded.  But what kind of information should that be?
  • Emotionally charged stimuli, especially stressful, tends to be remembered to greater accuracy.
  • Category Brainstorming.Take your bits of knowledge, and organize them into as many different groups as you can think of, mixing and matching if need be. Sources for such provocations could include Edward De Bono's "Lateral Thinking" and Seth Godin's "Free Prize Inside", or George Polya's "How to Solve It". I'm a bit ambivalent of deliberately memorizing such provocations -- does it get in the way of seeing originally? -- but once again, it could lay down the connective framework needed for good recall.
  • Mnemonics to encode related information seems useful.
Any other information gathering, optimising and retaining techniques worthy of mention?