Overview of Spaced Repetition
I really like that this article has many specific examples to demonstrate its principles. As the author said, what people struggle is how to turn specific piece of information into a set of flashcards
Main point
- For spaced repetition to be useful, it has to be a habit.
- Don’t try to memorize what you don’t understand
- Write Atomic Flashcards
Highlights
- There’s a lot of advice on the Internet on how to do it effectively, most of which is phrased in terms of very general principles, but very few concrete examples. But what people struggle with is: how do I turn this specific, concrete piece of information into a set of flashcards (View Highlight)
- A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it, and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review (View Highlight)
- Don’t try to memorize what you don’t understand (View Highlight)
- A common source of frustration is cards that are too long to recall quickly, and thus feel like a chore. Break big cards down into smaller cards. It feels good to be able to fly through the cards quickly (View Highlight)
- Organize content by source, not topic.
The reason is you’ll often bring in information from multiple sources: multiple textbooks, plus Wikipedia, plus lecture notes, etc. Each one of these sources likely has a different way of organizing knowledge.
Don’t waste time trying to find the perfect ontology (View Highlight)
- Note: Or maybe just use one big deck? There are reasons for multiple decks (for information that can become useless later, or for “private” card), but I put most things in a single deck
- Write Atomic Flashcards (View Highlight)
- This is the most important thing. By far the worst failure mode is to put too much in a flashcard (View Highlight)
- • Larger cards are harder to remember. • It’s harder to objectively grade yourself: when you reveal the answer, you might have got some things right and some things wrong. (View Highlight)
- When possible, ask questions in two directions (View Highlight)
- Note: Anki’s “basic and reverse cards” is great, though it is still kind of inconvenient that I can’t ask the reverse question with different phrasing
- Ask questions in multiple ways. Ask for formal and informal definitions of terms. Ask for the formal and informal statements of a theorem. Ask questions forwards and backwards. Add contextual questions: “what is the intutition for [concept]?”. Add questions that link different concepts across your knowledge graph. (View Highlight)
- A lot of knowledge is hierarchical, of the form “Foo can be either A, B, or C”, or, dually, “A is a kind of Foo”. By analogy to OOP: these concepts are joined by superclass and subclass relations. The idea is to ask questons in the top down direction (“What are the subclasses of Foo?”) and the bottom-up direction (“What is Bar a subclass of?”) (View Highlight)
- In general, to learn a sequence (A1,…,An)(A_1, \dots, A_n)(A1,…,An), you want to generate the following flashcards for each i∈[1,n]i \in [1,n]i∈[1,n]: Question Answer What is the iii-th element? AiA_iAi What is the position of AiA_iAi? iii What element comes after AiA_iAi? Ai+1A_{i+1}Ai+1 What element comes before AiA_iAi? Ai−1A_{i-1}Ai−1 (View Highlight)
- Avoid trying to memorize long sequences (View Highlight)
- Avoid trying to memorize big unordered sets of things (View Highlight)
- Redundancy is good. Do repeat yourself (View Highlight)