I sometimes wonder if tools like Anki aren't just another form of procrastination. The time invested could probably be better spent.
If it's anything longer, then it's probably not a subject you should be using anki to learn or you're trying to remember too large a bloc of information at once.
I have absolutely no idea how this could be a form of procrastination, or how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized.
Outside of a schooling/testing context, memorization alone is rarely beneficial. You need to be able to practically apply the knowledge, which happens through experience; looking details up when you need them forms a natural kind of spaced repetition anyway that’s tuned to what you actually need to know.
Regularly looking things up is ok, but actively re-experiencing the thing you're trying to learn is a better way to make it stick.
On this we agree, but to me this means practical application in various contexts, rather than call-and-response memory drills.
Language learning is an obvious use case.
Also: law and medicine. Having knowledge mentally 'to hand' is pretty important if you've got a patient under general anaesthetic, or a judge asking you a very difficult question.
Memorizing word pairs can certainly be done with spaced repetition, but it’s unclear how much that translates to actual language ability. Second-language acquisition appears to be primarily dependent on reading (or listening to) the target language for content, and most words are learned via seeing them in context instead of being looked up in a dictionary.
I have no experience with law or medicine, but I expect the story is similar: practical knowledge is what you need to hand, and not book knowledge. Book knowledge is what gets you through the exams and into the practical part of your training.
Word pair is the easiest way to do it in anki, but it's not the only way to implement it.
Sometimes the thing holding you back from improvement is a lack of facts, and sometimes it’s poor understanding of theory. In my experience, however, the fastest way to get better at doing something is almost always to practice doing that thing; most of the time a sufficient collection of facts and theoretical understanding will come along as a side-effect of that work.
How much of their prior training was memorizing specific facts, and how much of it was drilling the mechanics of solving typical problems? The former is what most people use spaced repetition for and what I believe is of limited utility; the latter is incredibly valuable and I never meant to imply otherwise.
My time isn't so optimised that 15 minutes each day on Anki is otherwise going to be spent on deep work.
http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html This writeup estimates his usage of Anki is 4-7 minutes of review time for each card over 20 years. So, if it's worth taking 10 minutes to remember a fact, it's worth putting in Anki. (This writeup also explains it's not worth putting things you don't care about into Anki).
Anki seems well suited for domains where you need to quickly access facts from a wide domain, e.g. vocabulary for language learning.
It's harder to see as important for programming. If you're programming you'll be able to recall the things you have experience using.
What method do you use to format a datetime object in python:
strftime()
How do you create a new virtual env using python 3
python3 -m venv <NAME>
Those may seem stupid to you, but I was looking them up and now i do not need to. I also use them for other concepts when I want to know a language better. For example
What are the three prototypical methods of a js promise?
then, catch, finally
What does the constructor of a promise take?
and executor function
How many parameters does a executor take?
2
What are the two parameter of the executor function (constructor of a js promise)
resolve() and reject()
Things like this just help me as a programmer. I agree it's not for everyone, but I have the time an enjoying doing it.
Why not just `new Promise((res, rej) => ..)` instead of intermediate facts like "an executor takes 2 arguments"? I don't think I'd be able to recall what's meant by 'an executor' without first recalling that snippet.
---- What happen to slaves in Africa after the slave trade was abolished by the America/UK in the early + mid 1800s?
simply led to a redeployment of the slaves, who were now used within Africa rather than in the Americas
“So the abolition of the slave trade, rather than making slavery in Africa wither away, simply led to a redeployment of the slaves, who were now used within Africa rather than in the Americas. Moreover, many of the political institutions the slave trade had wrought in the previous two centuries were unaltered and patterns of behavior persisted. For example, in Nigeria in the 1820s and ’30s the once-great Oyo Kingdom collapsed. It was undermined by civil wars and the rise of the Yoruba city-states, such as Illorin and Ibadan, that were directly involved in the slave trade, to its south. In the 1830s, the capital of Oyo was sacked, and after that the Yoruba cities contested power with Dahomey for regional dominance. They fought an almost continuous series of wars in the first half of the century, which generated a massive supply of slaves. Along with this went the normal rounds of kidnapping and condemnation by oracles and smaller-scale raiding. Kidnapping was such a problem in some parts of Nigeria that parents would not let their children play outside for fear they would be taken and sold into slavery.”
Excerpt From: Daron Acemoglu. “Why Nations Fail.” iBooks.
----
What are two reasons why large scale wars no longer occur ?
1. Price of war has gone up because of Atomic weapons. 2. Weath is no longer is physical goods (gold,etc) but in the minds of the citizen (Silicon Valley).
Scholars have sought to explain this happy development in more books and articles than you would ever want to read yourself, and they have identified several contributing factors. First and foremost, the price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.
Secondly, while the price of war soared, its profits declined. For most of history, polities could enrich themselves by looting or annexing enemy territories. Most wealth consisted of material things like fields, cattle, slaves and gold, so it was easy to loot it or occupy it. Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital and organizational know-how. Consequently it is difficult to carry it off or conquer it by military force.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens (p. 372). Harper. Kindle Edition.
-----
Basically, I create cards with short answers but provide the context (usually the paragraph I found it in). This method works extremely well for remember everything you read. I could write a more technical blog post on this if people actually care and find this interesting.
Did you use spaced rep?
In the end, I got a lot more out of doing the research to create the cards than I did from the actually looking at the cards. I might even go so far as to say that after creating the cards, they were practically worthless.
This would be less true if the exam was further from the creation of the cards, though. It was within a month.
Someone else's cards might have helped a little, but not nearly as much.
Anki is basically meant for longer term studying. The criteria for when a card matures in Anki is when the interval becomes 21+ days.
Is becoming more knowledgable just "procrastination?" Is reading non-fiction outside your specialty procrastination?
I feel like for much of human history we've held people who have read an entire library's-worth of books in high esteem. Were they just procrastinating?
I still see where you're coming from. I used to think that people who meditated, or hiked the Appalachian Trail were "selfish," because they were doing something that benefitted only them. And I still find it hard to understand someone who decides to learn Mandarin at the age of 93. But people should be allowed to enlighten and actualize themselves however they wish, and it seems absurd to think that a planet full of more knowledgable people would be a bad thing.
I'm learning German and Anki is nothing short of amazing. I'm easily able to learn ~20 words a day primarily just practicing on my phone during bathroom breaks.
On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German.
I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Japanese.
There's at least great pre-made Japanese vocab decks. I'm about two months into one. Maybe less so for kanji (I at least don't have one), so that's probably something you need to do outside.
Because (for English speakers) Russian is harder than German. You need to reduce the number of words learned per day. Japanese is even harder to learn, but you have to be persistent. I spent more than an hour every single day for several years straight to learn the vocabulary.
Also there's a unique challenge with Russian is that nouns, verbs and adjectives are all conjugated, and the rules are quite complex. The noun cases would be completely foreign to non-Slavic language speaker. Even if you learn the vocabulary, using it in sentences is not trivial at all.
Modern Russian has 6 cases (with a couple more that pop up very rarely) with 3 genders and singular/plural endings. It's a total of 36 possible combinations, which is not that bad. Masculine and neuter also share most endings so there aren't actually 36 unique ones
Probably the most difficult thing about cases when I was learning Russian was remembering which verbs took a different case than I would expect, e.g. dative instead of accusative for what seems like a direct object.
Another incredibly tricky one for Slavic languages is imperfective vs perfective aspects. In most other languages, perfect vs imperfect is just a standard construction. In Polish (and Russian, though my examples here are Polish), you change the verb itself. How? Well, sometimes you put "po" in front of it, like rozmawiać / porozmawiać. Sometimes it's "z" (jeść / zjeść), sometimes "u", "na" or "wy". And sometimes you just give up, like oglądać (but obejrzeć in the perfective), widzieć (zobaczyć), mowić (powiedzieć).
(For this reason I have found it very hard to progress in Polish without conversation with native speakers who aren't too polite to correct me.)
36 isn't that bad but Russian also has 253 irregular verbs [0], each of which adds another set of combinations. A lot of them are just small tweaks and there are some that follow a set of patterns (e.g. идти with its various prefixes) but it still adds a lot of overhead.
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_irregular_ve...
> The noun cases would be completely foreign to non-Slavic language speaker.
Picking those up was actually fairly straightforward. Cases may be completely foreign but the grammatical concepts behind them aren't. For example Russian has nominative, accusative and dative but English has subjects, direct objects and indirect objects and I learned all those in school.
I think somewhat ironically, the biggest grammatical problem I had with Russian was the tenses. English has 12 and Russian has ~5 so it was hard to figure out how to express a given English sentence in Russian.
But I think the biggest problem is phoenetics. On the surface it looks simple (unstressed o -> a) but there are so many extra rules if you want to speak properly (e.g. voiced consonant before a voiceless consonant becomes voiceless).