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Comment by tyrust | Hacker News Reader

This is the opposite of what the commenter is suggesting.

If you’re modifying the cards to fit your needs and ChatGPT is basing them off of your personal notes then I’m not sure you understood the commenters suggestion you’re referring to.

One of the biggest roadblocks to using anki or cards in general is coming up with good cards. Automating that part lets you use anki a lot more, which is a win. If you want to connect with the question you can still manually transcribe the card.

The biggest failure mode is adding to many notes at once, which leads to non obvious increased future workload. Automating card creation sounds like would worsen this issue unless extreme care is taken.

Using Anki is not a goal in itself. It's just a tool to help you cram facts into your brain. Once you have done that, you can and should build associations and knowledge on top of them. Reviews ensure that less-often used facts are not forgotten. Anki is fine for that.

But creating Anki cards is effectively a form of review as well. If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces, which is required to come up with good cards.

> If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces

Why wouldn't you get this? You just don't have to do it in order to make Anki cards.

> which is required to come up with good cards

Yes, and ChatGPT does this for you.

This isn't theoretical. I've used this to get As in multiple classes in college. This works.

I would rather get cards that are really well designed ___as cards__ (which chat gpt will do better than me given the time I want to spend) even if there is some loss of "value" from not breaking the material into cards myself, because I will make it up on the back end by studying the cards more, and having cards that are more correctly designed for optimal study. Who cares if I did the work of breaking the material into cards myself if it results in shitty cards that aren't good study aids and thus you never use.

Why would you end up with shitty cards if you did them yourself? And how can you even tell whether ChatGPT made good ones? And how much of a difference do the "better" cards even make?

There is not necessarily a tradeoff here. Sure, you will make some errors, but if you find a card to be so bad that it's useless for SRS (unlikely, unless the answer is very vague or too long to quickly validate) you will just delete it and replace it with a better one.

There is a "skill" to everything, and my card making skill is probably a 3. It takes me some time to identify nuggets that will be long enough not to be trivial but also short enough to make good cards and salient enough to bother with. ChatGPT on the other hand is probably a 7.5-8 in making cards, and it can crank them out. On top of that it can suggest things that you are probably going to be tested on given the stuff in your notes that you might miss if you just created cards from the contents of your notes. If you have a famous teacher at a public university who teaches every semester for a big core class, it can even go far beyond that in ways that will surprise you.

Of course you don't have to create your own cards, but they would work better if you did. You can use ChatGPT to automate onerous tasks, but have to compensate for it by engaging with the material in other ways. I doubt that grinding decks is enough. Depends on the activity and the goal I guess. Acing exams, sure, without doubt.

A concept applies here where you really don't want to spend unbound time studying. It's a great way to burn out. "A" students, when interviewed, frequently reference doing "enough" and then stopping.

Optimizing your study time by taking the "boring" work, e.g. building flashcards of material you organized yourself, cuts down on time spent not doing work that's maximally effective (memorizing flashcards).

If a person had infinite time, making flashcards would be just one more thing on an unbound list of things they could do to learn the material better. But people don't have infinite time, and considering you're already "familiar" with the material since you wrote and organized it, building flashcards is something you can't really afford to spend time on.

When I went back to school to get my undergrad, I focused on optimizing my time, because procrastination was a huge problem for me the first time around. Being efficient and not spending a single second longer than I have to in order to get an "A" is important to me, and using ChatGPT to help me with that has been wildly successful so far.

I’m offering my experience, while agreeing with the larger point that you need to customize your cards to your situation.

I'm not sure it is. Not if chatgpt is operating off of the notes you already took yourself

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