blog-post-augmenting-long-term-memory
http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
Second, and superseding the first, if a fact seems striking then into Anki it goes, regardless of whether it seems worth 10 minutes of my future time or not. The reason for the exception is that many of the most important things we know are things we're not sure are going to be important, but which our intuitions tell us matter. This doesn't mean we should memorize everything. But it's worth cultivating taste in what to memorize. ^not-sure-will-be-important
Provided my mind is reasonably relaxed to begin with, I find the review experience meditative. ^anki-is-meditative
I had trouble getting started with Anki. Several acquaintances highly recommended it (or similar systems), and over the years I made multiple attempts to use it, each time quickly giving up. In retrospect, there are substantial barriers to get over if you want to make it a habit. ^trouble-starting
What made Anki finally "take" for me, turning it into a habit, was a project I took on as a joke. I'd been frustrated for years at never really learning the Unix command line. I'd only ever learned the most basic commands. Learning the command line is a superpower for people who program, so it seemed highly desirable to know well. So, for fun, I wondered if it might be possible to use Anki to essentially completely memorize a (short) book about the Unix command line. It was! ^memorize-cli
Choosing this rather ludicrous, albeit extremely useful, goal gave me a great deal of confidence in Anki. It was exciting, making it obvious that Anki would make it easy to learn things that would formerly have been quite tedious and difficult for me to learn. ^ludicrous-goal
Many people treat memory ambivalently or even disparagingly as a cognitive skill: for instance, people often talk of "rote memory" as though it's inferior to more advanced kinds of understanding. I'll argue against this point of view, and make a case that memory is central to problem solving and creativity x link not tracked ^memory-not-inferior-skill
The reason for the exception is that many of the most important things we know are things we're not sure are going to be important, but which our intuitions tell us matter. This doesn't mean we should memorize everything. But it's worth cultivating taste in what to memorize.
I began reading it quickly, almost skimming. I wasn't looking for a comprehensive understanding. Rather, I was doing two things. One, I was trying to simply identify the most important ideas in the paper. What were the names of the key techniques I'd need to learn about? Second, there was a kind of hoovering process, looking for basic facts that I could understand easily, and that would obviously benefit me. Things like basic terminology, the rules of Go, and so on. ^steps-to-reading-alphago-paper
while these facts were easy to pick up in isolation, they also seemed likely to be useful in building a deeper understanding of other material in the paper. ^useful-in-building-deeper-understanding
And so using Anki in this way gives confidence you will retain understanding over the long term. This confidence, in turn, makes the initial act of understanding more pleasurable, since you believe you're learning something for the long haul, not something you'll forget in a day or a week. ^more-pleasurable
It's notable that I was reading the AlphaGo paper in support of a creative project of my own, namely, writing an article for Quanta Magazine. This is important: I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project. ^in-service-of-a-personal-creative-project
It's particularly helpful to extract Anki questions from the abstract, introduction, conclusion, figures, and figure captions.
Of course, instead of using Anki I could have taken conventional notes, using a similar process to build up an understanding of the paper. But using Anki gave me confidence I would retain much of the understanding over the long term.
And so using Anki in this way gives confidence you will retain understanding over the long term. This confidence, in turn, makes the initial act of understanding more pleasurable, since you believe you're learning something for the long haul, not something you'll forget in a day or a week.
Rather than spending days on a paper, I'll typically spend 10 to 60 minutes, sometimes longer for very good papers. Here's a few notes on some patterns I've found useful in shallow reading. ^shallow-reading
Typically I will extract anywhere from 5 to 20 Anki questions from the paper. It's usually a bad idea to extract fewer than 5 questions – doing so tends to leave the paper as a kind of isolated orphan in my memory. Later I find it difficult to feel much connection to those questions. Put another way: if a paper is so uninteresting that it's not possible to add 5 good questions about it, it's usually better to add no questions at all. ^shallow-read-paper-five-to-twenty-questions
I have an Anki question which simply says: "Visualize the graph Jones 2011 made of the probability curves for physicists making their prizewinning discoveries by age 30 and 40". The answer is the image shown above, and I count myself as successful if my mental image is roughly along those lines
But most papers don't fit this pattern, and you quickly saturate. If you feel you could easily find something more rewarding to read, switch over. It's worth deliberately practicing such switches, to avoid building a counter-productive habit of completionism in your reading. ^completionism
So, to get a picture of an entire field, I usually begin with a truly important paper, ideally a paper establishing a result that got me interested in the field in the first place.
It's particularly helpful to extract Anki questions from the abstract, introduction, conclusion, figures, and figure captions.
Over time, this is a form of what Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren dubbed syntopic reading** In their marvelous "How to Read a Book": Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, "How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading" (1972). I build up an understanding of an entire literature: what's been done, what's not yet been done. ^syntopical-reading
And, sometimes, I identify what seem to me to be field-wide blind spots. I add questions about all these to Anki as well. ^open-questions-in-anki
In a sense, it's an emotional prosthetic, actually helping create the drive I need to achieve understanding. It doesn't do the entire job – as mentioned earlier, it's very helpful to have other commitments (like a creative project, or people depending on me) to help create that drive. Nonetheless, Anki helps give me confidence that I can simply decide I'm going to read deeply into a new field, and retain and make sense of much of what I learn. This has worked for all areas of conceptual understanding where I've tried it ^emotional-prosthetic
Now I have confidence that I can go into a new field and quickly attain a good, relatively deep understanding, an understanding that will be durable. ^durable-understanding
If you feel you could easily find something more rewarding to read, switch over. It's worth deliberately practicing such switches, to avoid building a counter-productive habit of completionism in your reading
Of course, it's not literally reading an entire literature. But functionally it's close. I start to identify open problems, questions that I'd personally like answered, but which don't yet seem to have been answered. I identify tricks, observations that seem pregnant with possibility, but whose import I don't yet know. And, sometimes, I identify what seem to me to be field-wide blind spots. I add questions about all these to Anki as well.
When I made mistakes with the combined question, I was often a little fuzzy about where exactly my mistake was. That meant I didn't focus sharply enough on the mistake, and so didn't learn as much from my failure. When I fail with the atomic questions my mind knows exactly where to focus.
But it becomes an integrative question, part of a hierarchy of questions building up from simple atomic facts to more complex ideas.
Part of developing Anki as a virtuoso skill is cultivating the ability to use it for types of understanding beyond basic facts. Indeed, many of the observations I've made (and will make, below) about how to use Anki are really about what it means to understand something. Break things up into atomic facts. Build rich hierarchies of interconnections and integrative questions. Don't put in orphan questions.
When I began using Anki, at first I felt somewhat silly putting questions about names for things into the system. But now I do it enthusiastically, knowing that it's an early step along the way to understanding.
fluid access to memory is at the foundation of so much creative thought.
But for creative work and for problem-solving there is something special about having an internalized understanding. It enables speed in associative thought, an ability to rapidly try out many combinations of ideas, and to intuit patterns, in ways not possible if you need to keep laboriously looking up information.
I used to believe such tropes about the low importance of memory. But I now believe memory is at the foundation of our cognition. ^memory-is-foundation-of-cognition
I found it almost unsettling how much easier Anki made learning such subjects. I now believe memory of the basics is often the single largest barrier to understanding. If you have a system such as Anki for overcoming that barrier, then you will find it much, much easier to read into new fields. ^much-easier-if-you-have-the-basics
In other words, having more chunks memorized in some domain is somewhat like an effective boost to a person's IQ in that domain. X link not tracked
it seems plausible that regular use of systems such as Anki may speed up the acquisition of the high-level chunks used by experts** To determine this it would help to understand exactly how these chunks arise. That still seems to be poorly understood. I wouldn't be surprised if it involved considerable analysis and problem-solving, in addition to long-term memory.. And that those chunks are then at the heart of effective cognition, including our ability to understand, to problem solve, and to create.
References link not tracked and link not tracked and link not tracked
left off at "More patterns of Anki use"