Augmenting Long-Term Memory

It's particularly worth avoiding lonely orphans: single questions that are largely disconnected from everything else. Suppose, for instance, I'm reading an article on a new subject, and I learn an idea that seems particularly useful. I make it a rule to never put in one question. Rather, I try to put at least two questions in, preferably three or m... See more

I'm not sure what's responsible for this effect. I suspect it's partly about focus. When I made mistakes with the combined question, I was often a little fuzzy about where exactly my mistake was. That meant I didn't focus sharply enough on the mistake, and so didn't learn as much from my failure. When I fail with the atomic questions my mind knows ... See more

If you feel you could easily find something more rewarding to read, switch over. It's worth deliberately practicing such switches, to avoid building a counter-productive habit of completionism in your reading. It's nearly always possible to read deeper into a paper, but that doesn't mean you can't easily be getting more value elsewhere. It's a fail... See more

Put another way: if a paper is so uninteresting that it's not possible to add 5 good questions about it, it's usually better to add no questions at all.

I therefore have two rules of thumb. First, if memorizing a fact seems worth 10 minutes of my time in the future, then I do it*

* I first saw an analysis along these lines in Gwern Branwen's review of spaced repetition: Gwern Branwen, Spaced-Repetition. His numbers are slightly more optimistic than mine – he arrives at a 5-minute rule of thumb, rath... See more

This places us in a curious situation: we have enough understanding of memory to conclude that a system like Anki should help a lot. But many of the choices needed in the design of such a system must be made in an ad hoc way, guided by intuition and unconfirmed hypotheses. The experiments in the scientific literature do not yet justify those design... See more

Simon estimated chess masters learn between 25,000 and 100,000 of these chunks during their training, and that learning the chunks was a key element in becoming a first-rate chess player. Such players really see chess positions very differently from beginners.

Speed of associative thought is, I believe, important in creative work. – John Littlewood

What you Ankify is not a trivial choice: Ankify things that serve your long-term goals. In some measure we become what we remember, so we must be careful what we remember*

* With apologies to Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”.

. This is always true, but Anki makes it especiall... See more