Not the OP, but as someone who uses both: in my mind, they’re categorically different. Anki is for memorisation of discrete chunks of knowledge, for rote responses (i.e. deliberately Cached Thoughts), and for periodic reminders of things.
Zettelkasten helps with information retention too, but that’s mostly a happy side-effect of the desired goal, which (for me) is synthesis. Every time I input a new chunk of knowledge, I have to decide where I should ‘hang’ it in my existing graph, what it rhymes with, whether it creates dissonance, and how it might be useful to current or future projects.
Once it’s hanging in the lattice somewhere, I can reference and remix it as often as I want, and effectively have a bunch of building blocks ready and waiting to stack together for writing projects or problem-solving. It’s fine if I can’t remember most of this stuff in detail; it’s much more of an ‘exo-brain’ than Anki, IMO.
One way to think about a notebook vs Anki/Mnemosyne is that Anki/Mnemosyne offers faster reads at the expense of slower writes.
if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it’s worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition. 5 minutes is the line that divides trivia from useful data.
In other words, with Anki/Mnemosyne, you have to spend ~5 minutes of additional effort writing the info to your brain (relative to just writing it in a notebook). But once it’s written to your brain, presumably it will be a bit faster to recall than if it’s in your notebook.
I’m a bit of an Anki/Mnemosyne skeptic for the following reasons:
I think it’s pretty rare that you will actually spend more than 5 minutes looking something up. Looking up e.g. a formula on Google is going to take on the order of 10 seconds. How many formulas are you going to realistically look up more than 30 times over the course of your life?
Remember, if you find yourself using a formula that often, you’ll plausibly find yourself accidentally memorizing it anyway! To help with this, you could always challenge yourself to recall things from memory before Googling for them. Sort of a “just in time”/opportunistic approach to building useful long-term memories.
I’m not totally convinced that it actually offers a substantial speedup for reads. Suppose I’ve “memorized” some formula using Anki. If I haven’t actually seen the card recently, it could easily take several seconds, perhaps even 10+ seconds, for me to recall it from memory.
Even if you think you recall a formula, if it’s an actually important application, you’ll likely want to look it up anyway to be sure.
Anki/Mnemosyne seem bad for knowledge which changes, such as research ideas.
If Anki/Mnemosyne have value, I think it is probably in constructing better mental chunks. It’s not about the cost of looking something up, it’s about the context switch when you’re trying to use that idea as a subcomponent of a larger mental operation.
You could also argue that the value in Anki/Mnemosyne comes from knowing that there is something there to look up, as opposed to not having to look it up. However, a good notebook structure can mitigate that problem (whenever you learn some interesting info, add it to the pages associated with whichever future situations it could be useful in, so you won’t have to remember to look it up when you’re in that situation). Additionally, I think Anki/Mnemosyne may be overkill for just knowing that something exists. (Though deeper understanding could be good for noticing deeper conceptual isomorphisms.)
Personally, I prefer to refine my mental chunks through doing problems, or just directly using them for the purpose I acquired them for (just-in-time learning), rather than reciting info. I think this builds a deeper level of understanding and helps you see how concepts are related to each other in a way which is harder to do than with Anki. I’m a big believer in structuring one’s learning and thinking process to incidentally incorporate an element of spaced repetition the way Dan Sheffler describes.
I think Anki is great at learning specific facts, even quite complex ones—I have used it extensively to learn languages—but it doesn’t offer any opportunities to link ideas together. It’s basically an efficient method of taking facts—even complex facts like “what does this sentence mean?” or “what did people say in this short video clip?”—and putting them sufficiently into long-term memory that you can then use them in the real world. This final step is crucial as it allows these Anki facts to come alive and become much richer as they become part of rich semantic web.
Anki offers no possibility of linking up and developing ideas. It’s basically a very efficient memory device.
How do you suppose this compares to the likes of Anki or Mnemosyne?
Not the OP, but as someone who uses both: in my mind, they’re categorically different. Anki is for memorisation of discrete chunks of knowledge, for rote responses (i.e. deliberately Cached Thoughts), and for periodic reminders of things.
Zettelkasten helps with information retention too, but that’s mostly a happy side-effect of the desired goal, which (for me) is synthesis. Every time I input a new chunk of knowledge, I have to decide where I should ‘hang’ it in my existing graph, what it rhymes with, whether it creates dissonance, and how it might be useful to current or future projects.
Once it’s hanging in the lattice somewhere, I can reference and remix it as often as I want, and effectively have a bunch of building blocks ready and waiting to stack together for writing projects or problem-solving. It’s fine if I can’t remember most of this stuff in detail; it’s much more of an ‘exo-brain’ than Anki, IMO.
Right, I agree with this. I never managed to keep using Anki-like software for anything, but, the purpose is quite different.
One way to think about a notebook vs Anki/Mnemosyne is that Anki/Mnemosyne offers faster reads at the expense of slower writes.
Source.
In other words, with Anki/Mnemosyne, you have to spend ~5 minutes of additional effort writing the info to your brain (relative to just writing it in a notebook). But once it’s written to your brain, presumably it will be a bit faster to recall than if it’s in your notebook.
I’m a bit of an Anki/Mnemosyne skeptic for the following reasons:
I think it’s pretty rare that you will actually spend more than 5 minutes looking something up. Looking up e.g. a formula on Google is going to take on the order of 10 seconds. How many formulas are you going to realistically look up more than 30 times over the course of your life?
Remember, if you find yourself using a formula that often, you’ll plausibly find yourself accidentally memorizing it anyway! To help with this, you could always challenge yourself to recall things from memory before Googling for them. Sort of a “just in time”/opportunistic approach to building useful long-term memories.
I’m not totally convinced that it actually offers a substantial speedup for reads. Suppose I’ve “memorized” some formula using Anki. If I haven’t actually seen the card recently, it could easily take several seconds, perhaps even 10+ seconds, for me to recall it from memory.
Even if you think you recall a formula, if it’s an actually important application, you’ll likely want to look it up anyway to be sure.
Anki/Mnemosyne seem bad for knowledge which changes, such as research ideas.
If Anki/Mnemosyne have value, I think it is probably in constructing better mental chunks. It’s not about the cost of looking something up, it’s about the context switch when you’re trying to use that idea as a subcomponent of a larger mental operation.
You could also argue that the value in Anki/Mnemosyne comes from knowing that there is something there to look up, as opposed to not having to look it up. However, a good notebook structure can mitigate that problem (whenever you learn some interesting info, add it to the pages associated with whichever future situations it could be useful in, so you won’t have to remember to look it up when you’re in that situation). Additionally, I think Anki/Mnemosyne may be overkill for just knowing that something exists. (Though deeper understanding could be good for noticing deeper conceptual isomorphisms.)
Personally, I prefer to refine my mental chunks through doing problems, or just directly using them for the purpose I acquired them for (just-in-time learning), rather than reciting info. I think this builds a deeper level of understanding and helps you see how concepts are related to each other in a way which is harder to do than with Anki. I’m a big believer in structuring one’s learning and thinking process to incidentally incorporate an element of spaced repetition the way Dan Sheffler describes.
I think Anki is great at learning specific facts, even quite complex ones—I have used it extensively to learn languages—but it doesn’t offer any opportunities to link ideas together. It’s basically an efficient method of taking facts—even complex facts like “what does this sentence mean?” or “what did people say in this short video clip?”—and putting them sufficiently into long-term memory that you can then use them in the real world. This final step is crucial as it allows these Anki facts to come alive and become much richer as they become part of rich semantic web.
Anki offers no possibility of linking up and developing ideas. It’s basically a very efficient memory device.