Having an Anki deck is kind of useless in my view as engaging with the ideas is not the path of least resistance. There’s a tendency to just go “oh, that’s useful” and do nothing with it because Anki/Supermemo are about memorisation. Using them for learning, or creating, is possible with the right mental habits. But for an irrational person, that’s exactly what you want to instill! No, you need a system which fundamentally encourages those good habits.
Which is why I’m bearish about including cards that tell you to drill certain topis into Anki since the act of drilling is itself a good mental habit that many lack. Something like a curated selection of problems that require a certain aspect of rationality, spaced out to aid retention would be a good start. But
Unfortunately, there’s a trade off between making the drills thorough and reducing overhead on the designer’s part. If you’re thinking about an empircally excellent, “no cut corners” implementation of teaching total newbs mental models, I’d suggest DARPA’s Digital Tutor. As to how you’d replicate such a thing, the field of research described in here seems a good place to start.
Here’s the re-written version, and thanks for the feedback.
Having an Anki deck is kind of useless in my view. When you encounter a new idea, you need to integrate it with the rest of your thoughts. For a technique, you must integrate it with your unconscious. But often, there’s a tendency to just go “oh, that’s useful” and do nothing with it. Putting it into space repitition software to view later won’t accomplish anything since you’re basically memorising the teacher’s password. Now suppose you take the idea, think about it for a bit, and maybe put it into your own words. Better both in terms of results and using Anki as you’re supposed to.
But there are two issues here. One, you haven’t integrated the Anki cards with the rest of your thoughts. Two, Anki is not designed such that the act of integrating is the natural thing to do. Just memorising it is the path of least resistance, which a person with poor instrumental rationality will take. So the problem with using Anki for proper learning is that you are trying to teach insturmental rationality via a method that requires instrumental rationality. Note its even worse teaching good research and creative habits, which requires yet more instrumental rationality. No, you need a system which fundamentally encourages those good habits. Incremental reading is a litttle better, if you already have good reading habits which you can use to bootstrap your way to other forms of instrumental rationality.
Now go to pargraph two of the original comment.
P.S. Just be thankful you didn’t read the first draft.
Haha, thanks for the rewrite, makes much more sense now.
tradeoff cognitive buck
Completely agree: too easy to cram mindlessly with Anki, I think in large part because of how much work it takes to make cards yourself.
I’m a bit skeptical of the drilling idea because cards taking more than 5 seconds to complete tend to become leeches and aren’t the kind of thing you could do long-term, especially with Anki’s algorithm. Still worth trying though, would be interested to hear if you or anyone else you know has gotten much benefit from it.
With the thoroughness vs. designer complexity, I think all the options with Anki kind of suck (mainly because I don’t think they would work for my level of conscientiousness, at least).
If end users make their own cards, they’ll give up (or at least most people would, I think. It’s not very fun making cards from scratch).
If you design something for end users (possibly with some of the commoncog tacit knowledge stuff) I think it’s sort of beneficial but you wouldn’t get same coherence boost as making stuff yourself. Too easy to learn cards but not actually integrate them, usably. It also seems like a pain to make.
For declarative knowledge, I think the best balance for learning is curating content really well for incremental reading alongside (very importantly) either coaching* or more material on meta-skills of knowledge selection to prevent people from FOMO memorizing everything. I think with SuperMemo it wouldn’t be hard to make a collection of good material for people to go through in a sane, inferential distance order. Still a fair bit of work for makers but not hellish.
I’m very, very, very curious about the tacit knowledge stuff. I still haven’t gotten through all of the commoncog articles on tacit knowledge, though I’ve been going through them for a while, but in terms of instrumental rationality they seem very pragmatic. (I particularly enjoyed his criticism of rationalists in Chinese Businessmen: Superstition Doesn’t Count [by which he means, superstition doesn’t mess much with instrumentality]. I still have yet to figure out how to put any of it to use.
*while teaching people how to do IR, I’ve found direct feedback while people are trying it works well. It took me ages to be any good at IR (5 months to even start after buying supermemo and then another like 3 to be sort of proficient) while I can get someone to me after 1-2 month proficiency in a single ~2 hour session. Works wonders in areas where you can do lots of trial/error with quick feedback.
I think one crux between us is the degree to which “memory is the foundation of cognition”, as Michael Nielsen once put it. Coming from the perspective that this is true, it seems to me that a natural consequence of a person memorizing even a simple sentence, and maintaining that memory with SRS, is that the sentence needs to be compressed in the mind to ensure that it has high stability, and can be recalled even after having not been used for many months, or even years.
In order to achieve this compression, it is inevitable that the ideas represented by the sentence will become internalized and integrated deeply with other parts of the mind, which is exactly what is desired. This process is a fundamental part of how the human mind works, and applies even in the mind of a person with low “rationality”.
Recall that memories are pathway dependant i.e. you can remember an “idea” when given verbal cues but not visual ones. Or given cues in the form of “complete this sentence ” and “complete this totally different sentence expressing the same concept”. If you memorise a sentence and can recall it any relevant context, I’d say you’ve basically learnt it. But just putting it into SRS on its own won’t do that. Like, that’s why supermemo has such a long list of rules and heuristics on how to use SRS effectively.
Agree on this, memory coherence is pretty important. Cramming leads to results sort of like how you can’t combine the trig you learned in highschool with some physics knowledge: there aren’t good connections between the subjects, leaving them relatively siloed.
It requires both effort and actually wanting to learn a thing for the thing to integrate well. We tend to forget easily the things we don’t care about (see school knowledge).
Having an Anki deck is kind of useless in my view as engaging with the ideas is not the path of least resistance. There’s a tendency to just go “oh, that’s useful” and do nothing with it because Anki/Supermemo are about memorisation. Using them for learning, or creating, is possible with the right mental habits. But for an irrational person, that’s exactly what you want to instill! No, you need a system which fundamentally encourages those good habits.
Which is why I’m bearish about including cards that tell you to drill certain topis into Anki since the act of drilling is itself a good mental habit that many lack. Something like a curated selection of problems that require a certain aspect of rationality, spaced out to aid retention would be a good start. But
Unfortunately, there’s a trade off between making the drills thorough and reducing overhead on the designer’s part. If you’re thinking about an empircally excellent, “no cut corners” implementation of teaching total newbs mental models, I’d suggest DARPA’s Digital Tutor. As to how you’d replicate such a thing, the field of research described in here seems a good place to start.
Could you rewrite some of the first paragraph? I read it 2-3 times and was still kind of confused.
Funny you linked commoncog, was about to link that too. Great blog.
Here’s the re-written version, and thanks for the feedback.
Having an Anki deck is kind of useless in my view. When you encounter a new idea, you need to integrate it with the rest of your thoughts. For a technique, you must integrate it with your unconscious. But often, there’s a tendency to just go “oh, that’s useful” and do nothing with it. Putting it into space repitition software to view later won’t accomplish anything since you’re basically memorising the teacher’s password. Now suppose you take the idea, think about it for a bit, and maybe put it into your own words. Better both in terms of results and using Anki as you’re supposed to.
But there are two issues here. One, you haven’t integrated the Anki cards with the rest of your thoughts. Two, Anki is not designed such that the act of integrating is the natural thing to do. Just memorising it is the path of least resistance, which a person with poor instrumental rationality will take. So the problem with using Anki for proper learning is that you are trying to teach insturmental rationality via a method that requires instrumental rationality. Note its even worse teaching good research and creative habits, which requires yet more instrumental rationality. No, you need a system which fundamentally encourages those good habits. Incremental reading is a litttle better, if you already have good reading habits which you can use to bootstrap your way to other forms of instrumental rationality.
Now go to pargraph two of the original comment.
P.S. Just be thankful you didn’t read the first draft.
Haha, thanks for the rewrite, makes much more sense now.
tradeoff cognitive buck
Completely agree: too easy to cram mindlessly with Anki, I think in large part because of how much work it takes to make cards yourself.
I’m a bit skeptical of the drilling idea because cards taking more than 5 seconds to complete tend to become leeches and aren’t the kind of thing you could do long-term, especially with Anki’s algorithm. Still worth trying though, would be interested to hear if you or anyone else you know has gotten much benefit from it.
With the thoroughness vs. designer complexity, I think all the options with Anki kind of suck (mainly because I don’t think they would work for my level of conscientiousness, at least).
If end users make their own cards, they’ll give up (or at least most people would, I think. It’s not very fun making cards from scratch).
If you design something for end users (possibly with some of the commoncog tacit knowledge stuff) I think it’s sort of beneficial but you wouldn’t get same coherence boost as making stuff yourself. Too easy to learn cards but not actually integrate them, usably. It also seems like a pain to make.
For declarative knowledge, I think the best balance for learning is curating content really well for incremental reading alongside (very importantly) either coaching* or more material on meta-skills of knowledge selection to prevent people from FOMO memorizing everything. I think with SuperMemo it wouldn’t be hard to make a collection of good material for people to go through in a sane, inferential distance order. Still a fair bit of work for makers but not hellish.
I’m very, very, very curious about the tacit knowledge stuff. I still haven’t gotten through all of the commoncog articles on tacit knowledge, though I’ve been going through them for a while, but in terms of instrumental rationality they seem very pragmatic. (I particularly enjoyed his criticism of rationalists in Chinese Businessmen: Superstition Doesn’t Count [by which he means, superstition doesn’t mess much with instrumentality]. I still have yet to figure out how to put any of it to use.
*while teaching people how to do IR, I’ve found direct feedback while people are trying it works well. It took me ages to be any good at IR (5 months to even start after buying supermemo and then another like 3 to be sort of proficient) while I can get someone to me after 1-2 month proficiency in a single ~2 hour session. Works wonders in areas where you can do lots of trial/error with quick feedback.
I think one crux between us is the degree to which “memory is the foundation of cognition”, as Michael Nielsen once put it. Coming from the perspective that this is true, it seems to me that a natural consequence of a person memorizing even a simple sentence, and maintaining that memory with SRS, is that the sentence needs to be compressed in the mind to ensure that it has high stability, and can be recalled even after having not been used for many months, or even years.
In order to achieve this compression, it is inevitable that the ideas represented by the sentence will become internalized and integrated deeply with other parts of the mind, which is exactly what is desired. This process is a fundamental part of how the human mind works, and applies even in the mind of a person with low “rationality”.
Recall that memories are pathway dependant i.e. you can remember an “idea” when given verbal cues but not visual ones. Or given cues in the form of “complete this sentence ” and “complete this totally different sentence expressing the same concept”. If you memorise a sentence and can recall it any relevant context, I’d say you’ve basically learnt it. But just putting it into SRS on its own won’t do that. Like, that’s why supermemo has such a long list of rules and heuristics on how to use SRS effectively.
Agree on this, memory coherence is pretty important. Cramming leads to results sort of like how you can’t combine the trig you learned in highschool with some physics knowledge: there aren’t good connections between the subjects, leaving them relatively siloed.
It requires both effort and actually wanting to learn a thing for the thing to integrate well. We tend to forget easily the things we don’t care about (see school knowledge).