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Comment by goerz | Hacker News Reader

The key insight that Nielsen is advocating for is to use spaced repetition for concepts, not just facts. Understanding comes first, and then you deliberately try to cement a rich network that understanding in your long term memory. Personally, I’ve found this a revolutionary approach to learning.

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As another commenter below notes, a recommendation is to spend one second reviewing each card. Thus, your cards are generally quite simple. This can very easily lead to a patchwork of simple details, but no glue holding them together. I’ve come to believe that the mental effort it takes to understand something should be prioritised over memorisation. If you’re relatively busy and spending a lot of time doing Anki cards, you may be limiting your opportunities for this kind of challenge.

I don't see why cards need to be quite that simple. I generally take about 10-15 seconds for reviewing each card. A lot of my cards are why/how/what questions (typical examples: "Why are bras covariant?"/"How are Green's functions used in solving linear differential equations?"/"What is Q-Learning?") The problem with skipping memorization of concepts after having understood something is that two months later, you'll have forgotten those concepts. So, all that effort will have been in vain. I typically don't create much more than 10 cards a day, or maybe 20 on a day where I'm taking in a lot of information, and I typically have less than 50 cards to review. It's really not a huge time investment - especially if you're "busy".

> The problem with skipping memorization of concepts after having understood something is that two months later, you'll have forgotten those concepts.

The key realization, for me, is that conceptual understanding, intuitions, and key insights are themselves just pieces of information that can be memorized.

E.g.: Q: How to derive Bayes' Theorem? A: Write P(A and B) two different ways.

Understanding beats rote learning every time: it's always possible to reconstruct the learning. You can generalize and customize it. But how much quicker if you also have that at your fingertips!

Perhaps, a bit like writing a very clear and well thought-out solution on SO... and later googling for it.

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