Comment by branweb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by branweb | Hacker News Reader

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As a long-time SRS user, I've really enjoyed Michael's recent essays on the subject though I haven't had much luck using SRS to learn structured, abstract things, despite several attempts. These days I use it mostly for things that are naturally atomic--vocabulary words, quotations, etc.

It seems he and I approach SRS very differently. I see it as a place to drop bits of information I want to remember, and once the info is in there, I no longer have to think about it, outsourcing the effort of remembering to the algorithm. He seems to use it as a tool to mentally digest a subject, constantly revising his understanding and readjusting his cards. That process isn't foreign to me, but I prefer to use something besides SRS for it. If I had to constantly revise my cards, that would seem to defeat the purpose of using SRS anyway.

Very interesting to get a different perspective on this though, so I'll have to think more about his approach. I'm also interesting in the creation details of his math-cards. Does he use LaTex? Maybe he goes into it in one of his earlier posts...

Glad you enjoyed the essays. On LaTeX - I sometimes cut-and-paste screenshots, but usually just write raw LaTeX or pseudo-LaTeX (i.e., something LaTeX-like that wouldn't compile, but is easier to read). It'd be much, much better to use some kind of plugin that turned it into images, but I've been too lazy to try.

This has, incidentally, made many of my matrix-based Anki cards rather ugly. I'll probably update a bunch of answers with cut-and-paste from this essay.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's pretty bad I'm using raw LaTeX in this way - I'm sure it hurts my understanding! On the other hand, I've written so much LaTeX over the years that reading it seems really natural.

You wouldn't even need la plugin. Anki supports [latex][/latex] out of the box, provided you install LaTeX in a way that Anki can find it.

https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#latex-support

Anki also supports Mathjax natively, so you can put the latex-ish code between a \(\) or \[\] and you don't need the image file step.

I think it doesn't work in Android version

I have this at the bottom of my card templates. Works on desktop and Android: https://pastebin.com/uqUrJBdZ

I write my cards on Linux, review on Linux and android. The latex support is definitely helpful, but yeah, you need to 'render' it on desktop to get the images

Thanks for following up. It's definitely a hard problem to solve. I've considered just writing whatever expression I want to learn on an ipad with an apple pencil, then figuring out some nice way to pipe that into my SRS.

It would be easier to use SRS to "mentally digest" things if it had dependency support - a feature where they "show card X only if card Y, Z, W... have reached long repeat intervals". I'm surprised that Anki doesn't easily allow this, for instance.

Even in something as basic as language learning, it would allow to commit idioms and common collocations (words "often used together") to memory once you know the original words - a nice "next step" after pure vocab.

That's a really intriguing idea! Though even equipped with a tool like this, I think it would be difficult to use SRS for learning math or computer science concepts. The process might look something like:

1. learn the concept

2. break it into atomic question/answer pairs

3. define some dependence relation for all these pairs (X is foundational to Y and Z but not A)

4. input them into your SRS of choice

Each of these steps require significant amounts of time and brainpower. Also it would be harder if you were still learning the concept since you'd continually need to go back and redefine relations as your understanding grew.

On the one hand all this would be a great way to understand a subject. On the other, one could argue that it's very inefficient, and it would be better to not bring SRS into it all all. Compare this to say a vocabulary card, which you make, enter into SRS, then you're done. So far this (the vocab thing I mean) is the only SRS use-case that makes sense for me.

Thing is, many people use SRS to keep things memorized that they don't want to forget about. For this use case, you don't need to care much about dependencies and the like, so making your own deck should be quite simple. The "learn/figure out new stuff" case is somewhat different, and plenty of people use pre-made decks with advanced features e.g. to learn vocab, or some sort of basic knowledge in some other subject.

Another possibility might be to show X, and then if the user fails, work back through the dependencies.

The hard part might be the UI for finding and selecting the dependencies for a new item.

> If I had to constantly revise my cards, that would seem to defeat the purpose of using SRS anyway.

There's actually an addon to help out with that - one I'm personally really satisfied with.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1199027445

Long story short: Take notes in a LaTeX document (or take notes somewhere else and then put them in a LaTeX document, this will be your ground truth). If you format your document based on the addon's guidelines, you can automatically "compile" your document to Anki flash cards. That way if you have to change stuff, just change the document and recompile.

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