At the moment I find that the cards I made in my first year of using Anki haven’t been what I know consider to be simple facts.
I frequently delete old cards where when I think they don’t make sense anymore.
For example I used to belief that the card:
?(port is red)? with the possible answer Yes and No is simple. ?()? was a shorthand for not having to write the sentence.
Now I find that “port is ?(green/red)?” is much more simple. The ?(X)? gets colored blue to make it stand out to the eye when I see the card. Sister cards: Starboard is ?(green/red)? ?(starboard/port )? is green ?(starboard/port )? is red
It seems to be very near to the ideal of redundant minimum information chuncks. Formatting might be improved but the information of every card seems close to optimum.
It took me years to learn the Zen of making simple Anki cards. Old cards that get badly formatted or represent knowledge that isn’t useful get either reformated or deleted.
In the last week I had to relearn the meaning of dative and accusative. I think I probably learned those concepts in school. But I didn’t make any Anki cards for it. I forgot that knowledge.
I also lost a lot of French vocubulary. Take animals. [fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means dog [fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means cat [fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means cow [fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means horse
Four very simple cards. I would also make the reverse English to French cards. I could have written them easily to learn French in school. I think a 8 year old might have enough cognitive capacity to write those four cards and learn them. He might have a challenge to learn them and might not be as fast as I’m now when I’m learning them, but they wouldn’t provide him trouble.
When it comes to teaching the 8-year-old Anki I would encourage them to write cards in that style that have 2 to 6 choices and that require the user to write down his choice every time when a computer is available. When he uses Anki via a phone of course writing down the words isn’t necessary.
If you follow that principle learning languages, learning biology or learning whatever gets a nice game. Seperate the knowledge into groups and put them into Anki.
Aren’t you worried about your brainspace?
Research indicates that brainspace isn’t limited. On the contary, saving a lot of information in your brain makes it less likely that you will get Alzheimer’s. Badly formatted cards that cost time because they get forgotten are a issue brainspace isn’t.
This post will be less confusing to English speakers if you replace “backboard” (presumably backformed from the German ‘Backbord’) with ‘port’. :)
Which does raise the etymological question of why English has the Germanic starboard meaning “right, but on a ship” (German Steuerbord, Norwegian styrbord) but not the corresponding “left”—German Backbord, Norwegian babord. What’s this “port” stuff?
I suspected you would say so, as this is thought to be common knowledge. I’d like to see what this kind of research would even look like.
If brainspace isn’t limited, then why do people forget things? Does it make evolutionary sense? There are many examples of people with exceptional memories, who are severely limited otherwise. I’m not sure I’ve come across of examples of people who are proven to remember everything but are otherwise normal. Then again, the speed at which such an anomaly of a person learns things is probably a lot faster than a normal individual can learn with Anki, so maybe it’s not an issue.
I suspected you would say so, as this is thought to be common knowledge. I’d like to see what this kind of research would even look like.
It the academic consensus as far as I know, and I visited neuroscience university lectures. I’m not particularly big on the detail but the gist is that there’s no sign of brainspace limitation found anywhere.
If brainspace isn’t limited, then why do people forget things? Does it make evolutionary sense?
People don’t really forget. They fail to remember. Most of the information is accessible via hypnosis.
Our brain is not optimized for retrieving long term information from our memory. A hunter gatherer doesn’t need to remember that much.
He needs to remember the location on which a certain tree that procudes good nuts grows. That why the loci method is a easy way to store information in your brain in a way that makes the information easy to remember.
There also the issue of pattern matching. Say I give you 4 apples. You don’t need to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4.
The hunter gather does much better if his brain merges those 4 distinct objects into one category called apple_n. In practice that means that whenever the brain get queried how apple_1 looks like the brain return apple_n. You might say that this means that the hunter gatherer has forgotten how apple_1 looks like but’s not a fair representation of what the brain does.
Some of the people who have no problem remembering everything fail to generalise from apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 into apple_n. Being able to remember every single apple that you encounter on it’s own is not worth not having a generalised apple concept. Being able to generalise is valuable in the evolutionary sense.
When using Anki, trying to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 is not what we are going for.
We might learn a concept of green apples and one of red apples. A hunter gather is also likely to learn different concepts and be able to distinguish different kinds of apples but he will never need to recall every single apple he has seen in his life.
To be able to learn a concept of green apples versus red apples, we need to learn to distinguish red from green beforehand and we need to learn to distinguish apples from other fruits.
Having a lot of concepts makes it easier to learn advanced concepts such as green apples and red apples.
If you for example learn biochemistry one of the most important concepts is to be able to distinguish:
lipids/carbohydrates/peptides/nucleic acids.
Once you learned that part you can learn to distinguish different lipids but if you don’t have those basics distinctions you will suffer trying to learn biochemistry. That’s the secret of learning for you ;).
Also memory interference could become a problem with huge Anki decks.
It a design problem. I don’t think a huge issue with any of the card I listed. They are all well designed to escape interference. Should interference become still an issue, you solve it by adding additional cards.
Let’s say I’m learning German, French and English and there a possible interference between the French chat[Katze] and the English chat[Gespräch]. In French chat can also mean the same as in English.
I will add a card like: [en->de]?(cat/chat)? means Gespräch
I will also add a card: [fr/en]chat means cat in ?(French/English)?
I might add a bunch of cards to cover the interference.
This might be true. I’ve also learned it’s possible that education doesn’t prevent the degenerative process, but helps you cope with it longer.
A second languages give you an additional four years before getting alzheimers.
People don’t really forget. They fail to remember. Most of the information is accessible via hypnosis.
Do you think that this is strong evidence? What does “most” of the information mean? I know the “consensus” gets casually mentioned in the lectures, but I don’t think it’s strong. How would you design an experiment to test infinite memory capacity? Keeping memories stored requires energy, how does it make evolutionary sense to store memories you never recall?
(I think wedrifid’s “physics says otherwise” makes this discussion rather pointless.)
A second languages give you an additional four years before getting alzheimers.
From the link you provided: “The physical effects of the disease in the brain were found to be more advanced in the bilinguals’ brains, even though their mental ability was roughly the same.”
I think this also means that their tests for mental ability just failed to capture what they were losing with that brain matter.
Do you think that this is strong evidence? What does “most” of the information mean? How would you design an experiment to test infinite memory capacity?
One of the classic ways to demonstrate that a lot of knowledge can be retrieved is to retrieve from a person the number of steps in the stairway of the house in which he lived as a child.
I personally have IRC and ICQ and MSN messanger transcripts that go a long time back with contents that you could potentially retrieve.
The fact that you get in some savants total memory recall of some particular type after damaging their brain is also good evidence.
(I think wedrifid’s “physics says otherwise” makes this discussion rather pointless.)
As far as physics is concered maybe a human being that’s 1,000,000 years old runs into problems with storing his memories. That doesn’t mean that an issue for human operating in todays world.
Keeping memories stored requires energy, how does it make evolutionary sense to store memories you never recall?
Because the main evolutionary reason that we store information in our brain isn’t to recall memories. It’s to pattern match what we experience into categories and make decisions based on those categories. For pattern matching it’s useful to keep storing all information but unnecessary to retrieve individual instances of memories.
One of the central rules of academic biology, is that most biological statements are context specific. For the value of limited I spoke about my statement is correct.
At the moment I find that the cards I made in my first year of using Anki haven’t been what I know consider to be simple facts.
I frequently delete old cards where when I think they don’t make sense anymore.
For example I used to belief that the card: ?(port is red)? with the possible answer Yes and No is simple. ?()? was a shorthand for not having to write the sentence.
Now I find that “port is ?(green/red)?” is much more simple. The ?(X)? gets colored blue to make it stand out to the eye when I see the card. Sister cards:
Starboard is ?(green/red)?
?(starboard/port )? is green
?(starboard/port )? is red
It seems to be very near to the ideal of redundant minimum information chuncks. Formatting might be improved but the information of every card seems close to optimum.
It took me years to learn the Zen of making simple Anki cards. Old cards that get badly formatted or represent knowledge that isn’t useful get either reformated or deleted.
In the last week I had to relearn the meaning of dative and accusative. I think I probably learned those concepts in school. But I didn’t make any Anki cards for it. I forgot that knowledge.
I also lost a lot of French vocubulary. Take animals.
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means dog
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means cat
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means cow
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means horse
Four very simple cards. I would also make the reverse English to French cards. I could have written them easily to learn French in school. I think a 8 year old might have enough cognitive capacity to write those four cards and learn them. He might have a challenge to learn them and might not be as fast as I’m now when I’m learning them, but they wouldn’t provide him trouble.
When it comes to teaching the 8-year-old Anki I would encourage them to write cards in that style that have 2 to 6 choices and that require the user to write down his choice every time when a computer is available. When he uses Anki via a phone of course writing down the words isn’t necessary.
If you follow that principle learning languages, learning biology or learning whatever gets a nice game. Seperate the knowledge into groups and put them into Anki.
Research indicates that brainspace isn’t limited. On the contary, saving a lot of information in your brain makes it less likely that you will get Alzheimer’s. Badly formatted cards that cost time because they get forgotten are a issue brainspace isn’t.
This post will be less confusing to English speakers if you replace “backboard” (presumably backformed from the German ‘Backbord’) with ‘port’. :)
Which does raise the etymological question of why English has the Germanic starboard meaning “right, but on a ship” (German Steuerbord, Norwegian styrbord) but not the corresponding “left”—German Backbord, Norwegian babord. What’s this “port” stuff?
I did.
The english language is messed up as usual.
I suspected you would say so, as this is thought to be common knowledge. I’d like to see what this kind of research would even look like.
If brainspace isn’t limited, then why do people forget things? Does it make evolutionary sense? There are many examples of people with exceptional memories, who are severely limited otherwise. I’m not sure I’ve come across of examples of people who are proven to remember everything but are otherwise normal. Then again, the speed at which such an anomaly of a person learns things is probably a lot faster than a normal individual can learn with Anki, so maybe it’s not an issue.
Also memory interference could become a problem with huge Anki decks.
This might be true. I’ve also learned it’s possible that education doesn’t prevent the degenerative process, but helps you cope with it longer.
It the academic consensus as far as I know, and I visited neuroscience university lectures. I’m not particularly big on the detail but the gist is that there’s no sign of brainspace limitation found anywhere.
People don’t really forget. They fail to remember. Most of the information is accessible via hypnosis.
Our brain is not optimized for retrieving long term information from our memory. A hunter gatherer doesn’t need to remember that much.
He needs to remember the location on which a certain tree that procudes good nuts grows. That why the loci method is a easy way to store information in your brain in a way that makes the information easy to remember.
There also the issue of pattern matching. Say I give you 4 apples. You don’t need to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4. The hunter gather does much better if his brain merges those 4 distinct objects into one category called apple_n. In practice that means that whenever the brain get queried how apple_1 looks like the brain return apple_n. You might say that this means that the hunter gatherer has forgotten how apple_1 looks like but’s not a fair representation of what the brain does.
Some of the people who have no problem remembering everything fail to generalise from apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 into apple_n. Being able to remember every single apple that you encounter on it’s own is not worth not having a generalised apple concept. Being able to generalise is valuable in the evolutionary sense.
When using Anki, trying to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 is not what we are going for. We might learn a concept of green apples and one of red apples. A hunter gather is also likely to learn different concepts and be able to distinguish different kinds of apples but he will never need to recall every single apple he has seen in his life.
To be able to learn a concept of green apples versus red apples, we need to learn to distinguish red from green beforehand and we need to learn to distinguish apples from other fruits. Having a lot of concepts makes it easier to learn advanced concepts such as green apples and red apples.
If you for example learn biochemistry one of the most important concepts is to be able to distinguish: lipids/carbohydrates/peptides/nucleic acids.
Once you learned that part you can learn to distinguish different lipids but if you don’t have those basics distinctions you will suffer trying to learn biochemistry. That’s the secret of learning for you ;).
It a design problem. I don’t think a huge issue with any of the card I listed. They are all well designed to escape interference. Should interference become still an issue, you solve it by adding additional cards.
Let’s say I’m learning German, French and English and there a possible interference between the French chat[Katze] and the English chat[Gespräch]. In French chat can also mean the same as in English.
I will add a card like:
[en->de]?(cat/chat)? means Gespräch
I will also add a card:
[fr/en]chat means cat in ?(French/English)?
I might add a bunch of cards to cover the interference.
A second languages give you an additional four years before getting alzheimers.
Do you think that this is strong evidence? What does “most” of the information mean? I know the “consensus” gets casually mentioned in the lectures, but I don’t think it’s strong. How would you design an experiment to test infinite memory capacity? Keeping memories stored requires energy, how does it make evolutionary sense to store memories you never recall?
(I think wedrifid’s “physics says otherwise” makes this discussion rather pointless.)
From the link you provided: “The physical effects of the disease in the brain were found to be more advanced in the bilinguals’ brains, even though their mental ability was roughly the same.”
I think this also means that their tests for mental ability just failed to capture what they were losing with that brain matter.
One of the classic ways to demonstrate that a lot of knowledge can be retrieved is to retrieve from a person the number of steps in the stairway of the house in which he lived as a child.
I personally have IRC and ICQ and MSN messanger transcripts that go a long time back with contents that you could potentially retrieve.
The fact that you get in some savants total memory recall of some particular type after damaging their brain is also good evidence.
As far as physics is concered maybe a human being that’s 1,000,000 years old runs into problems with storing his memories. That doesn’t mean that an issue for human operating in todays world.
Because the main evolutionary reason that we store information in our brain isn’t to recall memories. It’s to pattern match what we experience into categories and make decisions based on those categories. For pattern matching it’s useful to keep storing all information but unnecessary to retrieve individual instances of memories.
Physics and biology research says otherwise.
One of the central rules of academic biology, is that most biological statements are context specific. For the value of limited I spoke about my statement is correct.
You are a victim of memory interference.
I am, no doubt frequently. This is one of the ways in which brainspace limitations become problematic.