Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

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You're doing SRS right!

Geeks like us love to get into SRS algorithms and chase after the 1% improvements with a cleverer repetition algorithm or a better input method. The real failure mode is much more mundane: People give up.

I see it all the time. People cram thousands of cards into Anki in their first month learning something. After a month or two they are so overwhelmed with reviews and the reviews become such a chore that they just give up. (Of course, there are people who manage to add thousands of cards every month for years and years. These are the people who would probably do nearly as well with just a pen and paper. )

Two pieces of advice that make all the difference: Make your cards a little bit 'too' easy and be rather selective with your cards.

When you first make a card you're probably actively studying the subject of the card. You're very familiar with it and it's all in your head right now. The temptation is to make a card that is fun and challenging for you right now. Resist! Instead, make a card that feels slightly too easy, so that in a week or two it will be enough to tickle your memory rather than confuse you.

Also, people dump entire books worth of sentences into Anki. I like to use the metaphor of walking through an orchard: take your time, look around and grab one or two of the nicest apples you find. If you try to grab everything you're only going to slow yourself down. Also, if you pick up a rotten apple (uninteresting/too difficult card) it pollutes your entire deck. You start to resist review your flashcards.

> The real failure mode is much more mundane: People give up.

The other major failure mode is similarly boring: sometimes it's just not useful to blindly memorize things. The exact problem that spaced repetition solves is pretty niche, and while it can be "close enough" to be beneficial in adjacent endeavors, it's also extremely subject to Goodharting. The more hardcore you go into optimizing your SRS procedure, the likelier it gets that the metrics you're optimizing for depart from your actual goal.

> sometimes it's just not useful to blindly memorize things

Specially for language: https://thehardway.guide/srs (own content)

I’ve been looking for this specific website for almost 2+ months after vaguely remembering it. I figured I’d just hope to run across it while sifting through hackernews. Thanks so much lol

Is there really any solid research determining the "best" algorithm, or even ranking them? As best I can tell, any process to repeat wrong answers more often and the correct answers less often, and does so with some amount of increasing time delta, will work. But I have yet to see any proof that one algorithm is better than another.

I mean this any process that you suggest is a set of algorithms. It would seem logically strange to suggest that when a method is not within the set of algorithms it will not work, but as soon as any method is used that repeats "wrong answers more often and the correct answers less often, and does so with some amount of increasing time delta" it will work equally well with other methods.

I would suspect if this does appear to be the case that there probably is an optimal algorithm to start with but that all methods chosen here decrease in utility if you stay with the same variables (repetition frequency of wrong answers, repetition frequency of correct answers, time delta) for too long, the same way there are beneficial exercise methods for getting specific results when starting out that need to be varied if you want to keep getting results in that area without a decrease in the quality of the results.

I don’t know if there is, but the forgetting process follows the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

Ali Abdaal claimed in one video that memories are strengthened more when something is only just remembered than when it is easily remembered, so as late card prompt as you can get, before actually forgetting. I don’t remember his source for that.

And there’s simply limited time, a thing which repeats wrong answers more but not as much as you need is wasting your time and a thing which doesn’t reduce correct answers as quickly as possible is having you waste time reciting things you know.

So there seems to be room for ways to rank different algorithms.

We can compare algorithms by their accuracy. Here is a benchmark: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-benchmark

Yeah that's fine, but I meant peer-reviewed neuroscience.

I found some analysis of the confidence intervals on this data that showed the results are not meaningful for ranking as they have shown

It would be nice if you could report this on Github. You can do it here: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/issues/n...

I've shared it here in the original ticket that added the benchmark confidence intervals https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-benchmark/iss...

Are there any guides or content or examples that yourself (or anyone else here), who's used Anki not for language learning?

For example, learning from books or mathematics?

What even is a good progression for creating cards? Only add them slowly and optimise for having a few cards in your review queue and only add after several days or weeks of no cards? Find a good text and just add them?

Sorry, it appears that the people in this thread are clearly deriving value from SRS and speaking as someone who's tried SRS and Anki on multiple occasions and failed to keep it up, it would be helpful to get insights =)...

I used it to self-study some maths a few years ago. As I was reading a textbook, I'd add cards, usually things like definitions, examples and counterexamples, a few simple proofs.

At some point I even added some more advanced proofs, which actually go the opposite route of what's recommended here - they were cards which weren't immediately answerable, but required some thought. I experimented with some different ways of doing this - I created my own "Math Proof" notes, which allowed you to write a bunch of steps, and you'd then get one prompt to remember a "proof statement" (what you're trying to prove), one prompt for the proof overview/steps, and then one card for each specific step.

At some point life overwhelmed me, and I couldn't continue with Anki (work + kids). But I've actually been getting back into it in the last month, and having all those cards has been an incredibly great way to relearn a bunch of math I'd semi-forgotten, fairly easily.

I also use Anki for:

- Memorizing Geography stuff (all the countries and capitals).

- Memorizing songs.

- Memorizing random misc facts that I run across (usually things like history, politics, etc).

Huh, memorising songs is interesting, how do you do this? Split it into a set of cards per verse where each card in the set is of a different line hidden?

Useful approach of going through a textbook as well thanks! I'll try it.

After writing out the original message I thought about using ChatGPT to suggest solutions, the execution leaves something to be desired, but the kinds of solutions it's suggesting are interesting.

For example giving it a block of text and asking it to generate questions, use that to find questions I find interesting and then answer them and turn that question / answer pair into a card.

It does seem that figuring how to not fall off the bandwagon is the biggest thing to work out first.

> Huh, memorising songs is interesting, how do you do this? Split it into a set of cards per verse where each card in the set is of a different line hidden?

I'm trying to find the best way to do this in 2024. What I used to do is use a plugin called "Cloze Overlapper", which helps generate these automatically - you give it all the lines, and it creates cards where you get one line before, and need to guess the next line. Unfortunately this plugin is behind a paywall or something, unclear if it still works.

There are alternatives today, a popular one is something like Lyrics Cloze Generator, which does something similar but ends up working a bit worse IMO.

Btw, I use this both to memorize songs I randomly feel like learning, but also to memorize songs in another language, as a way of learning more vocab in a fun way. Not sure if it's optimal but I figure I might as well, if it's a song I want to learn anyway.

This is a great idea, I'm beginning to realise that there's a lot wider space for using Anki than I originally expected, people are also using it to sight read music for example.

I think I should have another crack at it starting small with some of these and see where it takes me =)...

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