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Comment by DecayingOrganic | Hacker News Reader

I've tried to "ankify" some books to increase my retention of the facts and concepts, in the hopes that I'd be able to talk about a book with friends and family in much more detail.

However, soon my misconception about how memory works made itself very clear.

Even though I made hundreds of cards regarding a book, when we started talking about it, I quickly realized that all of that information that I so meticulously added to Anki and studied was not available to me.

It was because I needed my retrieval cues, the questions I've used to create Anki cards, and I couldn't access the information I had in my brain without them.

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Try making cards that mimic the situations you plan on using the information in. Sort of like a choose-your-own adventure game. For example:

“You’re at a conference and you start talking to someone about [The Great Depression.] What are some key points to remember?”

Then have an outline or key points on the reverse card. This works better than simply filling in the blank Cloze cards.

Basically, every piece of information or memory has a trigger. The trick is to make this trigger relevant to the scenarios in which you want to use the information, rather than just other words in the Anki card.

I don’t think cards like that work over 10 years because they violate minimum information principle (rule 4 here: http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm). I agree though that you have to find the right cue to initialize recall or else the card is pointless. I think incrementalism in incremental reading is better for this since it’s easy to modify and improve your cards over time.

The link isn’t loading for me. I also don’t really see how that matters if your cue is inherent to the situation in which you will use the information. To use a real life example, returning to a place you haven’t been in twenty years still conjures up hidden memories.

You can also make multiple cards/cues for the same information.

Maybe this link will work: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

If we go with the example you mentioned as a card: “You’re at a conference and you start talking to someone about [The Great Depression.] What are some key points to remember?” there are a few issues

tl;dr by being complex but still a single card SRS isn’t actually going to strengthen the memory very well and you’ll be stuck with short intervals on a card that will take at least 10 seconds each rep. It will still work but it’ll take up much more time than it should. (The link explains it much better)

But it’s not a bad idea. If you answer the card and write out an answer, memorizing pieces of that answer in accordance with minimum information principle will leave better memory effect. While you might have 20 subcards, over time these will get much more accurate intervals from being atomic and actually take less times in rep than your massed question.

I'd generally recommend making more than one card per topic. But yes, it will take more time, but (in theory) it should be more effective.

recently I've been using the zettelkasten method to accomplish exactly this. Small cards, hyperlinked together with whatever other concepts you associate it with. This resource was really helpful: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

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