Normal flashcards should be all equally difficult: as easy as possible. The idea is to break everything down into atomic facts; this makes it so you can’t short-circuit a difficult card by just memorizing the answer; by memorizing all the parts, you still have the whole.
In my experience, I’ve found this to not be as true as it seems. I originally had many of my cards as atomic as possible, based on what Piotr Wozniak suggests, but while I had each individual part memorized, they all seemed to hang loosely connected, without a vivid thread holding it all together. Two clear examples for me are memorizing chess moves and poetry: Originally I’d memorize poems line by line, with each line shown in its surrounding context to prompt me, and chess games move-by-move, prompted by the state of the board at that moment.
I later experimented with more coarse chunks, where a single card would represent an entire stanza of a poem, or 10 ply of moves from a high-tier chess game. The cards took longer per interaction, but only a little longer (since I didn’t have to switch contexts, increasing short-term flow), and the relativly fewer number of cards needed to represent the information more than made up for the longer reviews. But the most important benefit was that things suddenly became much clearer for me. Instead of being vaguely aware of the contours of the poems, I would find myself reciting them wholesale in the shower, unprompted (even fairly long poems like Tennyson’s Ulysses, which clocks in at 70 lines—which, by the way, I shudder at the thought of trying to memorize line-by-line, like I have some shorter poems). Suddenly, I would see an entire series of chess moves as being deeply interconnected, in a way I never noticed trying to memorize those same moves one at a time.
The main benefit I thought atomization would provide, namely that each element would be readily available for combination with other, seemingly unrelated ideas, I don’t really notice much loss of. While each element is richly situated in an existing context, I can easily pluck that idea out of that context to join it with ideas from another, but the richness of the existing context makes it much easier to get a handle on that idea in the first place
Some more thoughts: there’s one card in my notes that asks:
“According to Ray Dalio, when you have a problem, you should ask yourself 6 questions:
What went wrong?
Have you made a mistake like this before?
What was the immediate cause of the problem?
What was the root cause of the problem?
What can you do to correct the problem in the short term?
What can you do to prevent problems like these in the long term?”
All 6 questions are hidden on the same card, so I have to provide all 6 in order to mark the card correct. Following the principle of atomization, I might have thought to create 6 different cards, one for each question to ask, but my experience with such atomized lists tends to be that each card is much more slippery, and the different items would all blend together in my mind (creating problems both during review and when the opportunity for application arises), whereas when the list is presented as a cohesive whole, it’s much easier to remember each part as a part of the whole, and makes each part contrast better with the other items
In my experience, I’ve found this to not be as true as it seems. I originally had many of my cards as atomic as possible, based on what Piotr Wozniak suggests, but while I had each individual part memorized, they all seemed to hang loosely connected, without a vivid thread holding it all together. Two clear examples for me are memorizing chess moves and poetry: Originally I’d memorize poems line by line, with each line shown in its surrounding context to prompt me, and chess games move-by-move, prompted by the state of the board at that moment.
I later experimented with more coarse chunks, where a single card would represent an entire stanza of a poem, or 10 ply of moves from a high-tier chess game. The cards took longer per interaction, but only a little longer (since I didn’t have to switch contexts, increasing short-term flow), and the relativly fewer number of cards needed to represent the information more than made up for the longer reviews. But the most important benefit was that things suddenly became much clearer for me. Instead of being vaguely aware of the contours of the poems, I would find myself reciting them wholesale in the shower, unprompted (even fairly long poems like Tennyson’s Ulysses, which clocks in at 70 lines—which, by the way, I shudder at the thought of trying to memorize line-by-line, like I have some shorter poems). Suddenly, I would see an entire series of chess moves as being deeply interconnected, in a way I never noticed trying to memorize those same moves one at a time.
The main benefit I thought atomization would provide, namely that each element would be readily available for combination with other, seemingly unrelated ideas, I don’t really notice much loss of. While each element is richly situated in an existing context, I can easily pluck that idea out of that context to join it with ideas from another, but the richness of the existing context makes it much easier to get a handle on that idea in the first place
Some more thoughts: there’s one card in my notes that asks:
“According to Ray Dalio, when you have a problem, you should ask yourself 6 questions: What went wrong? Have you made a mistake like this before? What was the immediate cause of the problem? What was the root cause of the problem? What can you do to correct the problem in the short term? What can you do to prevent problems like these in the long term?”
All 6 questions are hidden on the same card, so I have to provide all 6 in order to mark the card correct. Following the principle of atomization, I might have thought to create 6 different cards, one for each question to ask, but my experience with such atomized lists tends to be that each card is much more slippery, and the different items would all blend together in my mind (creating problems both during review and when the opportunity for application arises), whereas when the list is presented as a cohesive whole, it’s much easier to remember each part as a part of the whole, and makes each part contrast better with the other items