Would you mind sharing the flashcards you generated to build this intuition? I've been using Anki for a while and really trying to focus now on improving my prompt writing; would love to see how you managed it for this problem.
It's not that I set out to understand this specific thing but that I had studied statistics with flashcard support for a year and that happened to work after a few attempts.
When making flashcards I draw a lot from the softer type of theory-building they do in social sciences. I ask questions like
- What are the properties of this?
- What variants of this exist? I.e. how would I recognise this in the wild, or in other shapes?
- What subcomponents can this be deconstructed into?
- Into which bigger picture does this fit?
- What are the consequences of this? What are its antecedents?
- What is this a special case of? What would a generalisation of this look like?
- Which are other related things? What are their similarities and differences?
- In what context might I need to know this?
Whenever I encounter what seems like a significant thing I loosely ask some of these questions, and try to construct atomic, focused flashcards from the answers.
I say loosely because it would take forever to to through all questions for all flashcards I make, so there's some bit of intuition that attracts me to which I think are the most significant questions for any given thing.
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One trick to make flashcards more specific that I use (maybe even abuse) is putting part of the answer into the prompt. Instead of prompting "What is the property of subexponential distributions I found meaningful in this book?" I might prompt "What behaviour do subexponential distributions have around high barriers that others don't?" -- I'm giving away part of the answer by including "high barrier" in the prompt, but I'm okay with that.
If I'm concerned about that, I might create a second flashcard prompting something like "What can a subexponential distribution do in one step that a more well-behaved distribution needs many steps to do?" with the answer "clear a high barrier". That captures both sides of the property without making too general a prompt.
I also do this a lot with "why" questions. Instead of prompting "what is the definition of y?" I might prompt "why is the definition of y=f(x)?" That gives away essentially the entire answer but focuses on the why instead.