How did you decide against using Anki / spaced repetition? To me it seems like a trivially obvious choice if your goal is to actually memorize a bunch of small facts.
Anki makes it easy to memorize facts, but not necessarily to bring them to mind unless you’re explicitly searching for them.
I added the date of the first moon landing to my Anki deck with the intention of tweeting about it on the anniversary, and if you asked me when it was I could have told you: July 20th, 1969. But yesterday came and went, and I totally forgot. (Fortunately, I also remember that the first moonwalk was the day after the landing.)
Do you believe that Anki is worse in that regard than some other approach? I feel like Anki is far from perfect, but basically a strict improvement over just reading and occasionally re-reading stuff.
In other words, I interpret your criticism as “there must be a better system out there, waiting for someone to find”, not as “don’t use Anki”.
Yeah, I did do a bit of review (reading back through my notes), but I kind of fell out of that habit because I became too busy. I never got round to trying to implement a spaced repetition system because higher priorities took over.
I would suggest that if your desired metric is anything remotely like “total number of trivia facts I can recall easily from a suitable prompt”, then making Anki cards is obviously a better use of your time than reading more new articles. And extremely superior to making your own spaced repetition system. (That might change once you’ve used Anki enough to have identified shortcomings. But don’t let daydreams of perfect systems prevent you from moving from a bad system to a good one.)
How did you decide against using Anki / spaced repetition? To me it seems like a trivially obvious choice if your goal is to actually memorize a bunch of small facts.
Anki makes it easy to memorize facts, but not necessarily to bring them to mind unless you’re explicitly searching for them.
I added the date of the first moon landing to my Anki deck with the intention of tweeting about it on the anniversary, and if you asked me when it was I could have told you: July 20th, 1969. But yesterday came and went, and I totally forgot. (Fortunately, I also remember that the first moonwalk was the day after the landing.)
Which sounds useful for trivia. For example, I found Mnemosyne helpful studying for Quizbowl.
Do you believe that Anki is worse in that regard than some other approach? I feel like Anki is far from perfect, but basically a strict improvement over just reading and occasionally re-reading stuff.
In other words, I interpret your criticism as “there must be a better system out there, waiting for someone to find”, not as “don’t use Anki”.
Yeah, I did do a bit of review (reading back through my notes), but I kind of fell out of that habit because I became too busy. I never got round to trying to implement a spaced repetition system because higher priorities took over.
I would suggest that if your desired metric is anything remotely like “total number of trivia facts I can recall easily from a suitable prompt”, then making Anki cards is obviously a better use of your time than reading more new articles. And extremely superior to making your own spaced repetition system. (That might change once you’ve used Anki enough to have identified shortcomings. But don’t let daydreams of perfect systems prevent you from moving from a bad system to a good one.)