divia

I'm a big fan of spaced repetition software. There's a lot I could say about how awesome I think it is and how much it has helped me, but the SuperMemo website covers the benefits better than I could. I will mention two things that surprised me. First, I had no idea how much fun it would be; I actually really enjoy doing the reviews every day. (For me this is hugely important, since it's unlikely I would have kept up with it otherwise.) Second, it's proven more useful than I had anticipated for maintaining coherence of beliefs across emotional states. I've tried memorizing a variety types of things such as emacs commands, my favorite quotations, advice about how to communicate with children, and characters from books. One of my more recent projects has been making notecards of the lesswrong sequences. I tried to follow the rules for formulating knowledge from the SuperMemo website, but deciding which bits to encode and how is subjective. For reference, I asked my boyfriend to make a few too so we could compare, and his looked pretty different from mine. So, with those caveats, I thought I might as well share what I'd come up with. As Paul Buchheit says, "'Good enough' is the enemy of 'At all'". If you download Anki, my favorite spaced repetition software (free and cross-platform) and go to Download > Shared Deck in the Menu, you should be able to search for and get my Less Wrong Sequences cards. I also put them up here, with the ones my boyfriend made of the first post for comparison. I had read all the sequences before, but I have found that since I've started using the cards I've noticed the concepts coming up in my life more often, so I think my experiment has been useful. Let me know what you think!