Spaced repetition/Anki is one of those things that seems obvious and like it makes perfect sense. However, my experiences have been pushing me further and further away from thinking that it is usually something that is useful.
I spent a year or so self-studying full time. I also spent a few months studying Leetcode stuff for FAANG interviews half-time. In both experiences I spent months using Anki, perhaps 100-200 cards where I would study the cards pretty consistently every day.
I know this might go against the research on spaced repetition, but I’ve found that the stuff I used to study often just doesn’t stick. On the other hand, there are things that I never really did spaced repetition on that have stuck remarkably well. My impression and experiences is that obtaining a deep understanding is a lot more fruitful than doing spaced repetition.
Also, thinking along the lines of a sanity check and the outside view, are there examples of people becoming very successful due to Anki? My impression is that it doesn’t happen all too often, and when it does it is because Anki happens to be a great fit for the situation, eg. passing med school exams.
Completing The Whole Textbook Is Usually a Big Waste of Time, Please Don’t Do It
Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense, and is the mindset I’ve had for a while. I agree that the end worth seeking are those central concepts rather than memorizing certain details. However, I think that playing around with those annoying details might be a good means to the end of grasping central concepts. I spent a lot of time telling myself, “It’s only the big concepts that matter, so you can skip this section, you don’t have to answer these questions, you don’t have to do these practice problems.”
Well, it’s also true that you could take memorizing details too far (I’m looking at you organic chemistry). I guess it’s just a matter of judgement, and that the insight of “wait, it’s really only the big concepts that I need to care about” is likely to lead to failure modes where you undervalue the details.
Read Easier Textbooks Instead of Struggling Valiantly
Strongly agree. Seems like a failure mode that is common. I love “X for Dummies” types of books/posts. Reminds me of Explainers Shoot High, Aim Low:
A few years ago, an eminent scientist once told me how he’d written an explanation of his field aimed at a much lower technical level than usual. He had thought it would be useful to academics outside the field, or even reporters. This ended up being one of his most popular papers within his field, cited more often than anything else he’d written.
“are there examples of people becoming very successful due to Anki?”
It’s hard to answer that kind of question, because there are plenty of examples of people becoming successful without SRS, and people who use SRS don’t only use SRS.
Personally, I use Anki for professional development (so not to pass exams, but for long-term mastery). My biggest topics are math, algorithms (ex. machine learning research topics), and programming.
It’s got a number of advantages. Sometimes it helps by keeping technical details (like trig identities or programming syntax) close to the surface, so I can finish a project faster or plow through whiteboarding a problem with a colleague. Other times it helps by cementing a deep conceptual intuition strongly, so that I can focus on doing more advanced things (instead of rehashing the same slippery basics). Or by just increasing the breadth of what I know is available, so I don’t have to agonize over the right Google terms. Sometimes it helps by making it easier to remember people’s names, accelerating my ability to network (I recommend mnemonics here, since names are rote memorization, and rote memorization is difficult with Anki).
But above all, it ensures that I can keep learning, even if I only have 20 minutes a day to spare for deep/slippery topics like quantum computing; or 10 minutes a day to capture a fleeing professional experience that would otherwise be in one ear/out the other. I’m just 32 years old, but that’s old enough that I’ve forgotten much more than I’ve learned. Anki changes that: it acts like compound interest for knowledge. This spring (after a few years of regular SRS use) I’ll reach 40,000 cards, with no sign of slowing down.
It’s hard to reproduce that kind of growth with traditional learning methods.
Hm, I seem to have different experiences than you have had.
Sometimes it helps by keeping technical details (like trig identities or programming syntax) close to the surface, so I can finish a project faster or plow through whiteboarding a problem with a colleague.
My experience as a programmer (from myself and from talking to others) is that you pick up syntax pretty quickly. For a new language there’s a learning curve. Perhaps SRS would help with that, although that doesn’t seem too useful. Eg. I use JavaScript every day and rarely use Python. I could use SRS for Python. Alternatively, I could wait until I need to use Python, take a few days getting familiar with the syntax, and then be fine, which seems better.
Other times it helps by cementing a deep conceptual intuition strongly
Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I can’t recall doing SRS over and over again ever cementing a deep conceptual intuition for me. I think looking at the same thing from different angles is often helpful, but with SRS, a given card is largely looking at the concept from one angle.
Here’s an example. I’m learning functional programming right now. In functional programming, operators like + and * are just functions. Instead of 2 + 3 you can do (+) 2 3 just like you’d do add 2 3. Similarly, you could call functions using infix notations by using backticks like this 2 `add` 3 and it behaves like an operator. This really cemented for me what an operator is in such a way that I don’t think SRS ever could, and it did so much faster.
But above all, it ensures that I can keep learning, even if I only have 20 minutes a day to spare for deep/slippery topics like quantum computing; or 10 minutes a day to capture a fleeing professional experience that would otherwise be in one ear/out the other… It’s hard to reproduce that kind of growth with traditional learning methods.
It sounds like your point is moreso that it’s hard to be as productive without SRS, but I’d like to note that there are other ways you can use a spare 15 minutes to learn rather than SRS.
There’s definitely a tradeoff between breadth and depth/speed. On a real-world project, you can attain great speed and/or great depth on the narrow set of techniques/concepts that are directly relevant to the work you do every day.
It’s very expensive to maintain that kind of fluency. I’ve never done any programming in a language that uses infix vs. prefix operators, yet I know the difference just from a couple minutes total studying the concept at a few different widely-spaced points in time. This concept would not pose a challenge to me were I to pick up a functional programming language, although it would take time to build a habit of using them.
When you overinvest in study-through-practice in a concept you’ve already mastered, you will forget a lot of the more broad knowledge. Anki gives you a way to retain it, or to get it back when you’re ready for it. If you see yourself as having no need for a broad knowledge-base—if you see your career as being a happy code monkey banging out programs that are within the wheelhouse you’ve already established, then you’re probably good.
But if you have a different vision for your career, it’s possible that broad knowledge will be really helpful. And spaced repetition/Anki gives you a set of tools to build and maintain that broad knowledge-base.
I’m really glad you posted this objection to Anki, because I think it’s probably common. It’s also a fair point: sometimes, we don’t care about building a broad knowledge base. We’re just trying to become fluent in the narrow set of skills that let us execute a technical project. Clarifying that distinction is very valuable from the perspective of budgeting your study time wisely.
Interestingly, this comment made me more excited about using Anki again (my one great success with it was memorizing student names, which it’s well-suited for, and I found it pretty useless for other things), because this comment has a great idea with a citation that I probably won’t be able to find again unless I remember some ancillary keywords (searching “blurry to sharp” on Google won’t help very much). But if I have it in an Anki deck, not only will be it more likely to be remembered, but also I’ll have the citation recorded somewhere easy to search.
my one great success with it was memorizing student names
+1, I used Anki before my CFAR workshop. had to remind myself not to call people by their names before they even had their nametags on. This was great, because remembering names is generally a source of very mild social anxiety for me.
My impression and experiences is that obtaining a deep understanding is a lot more fruitful than doing spaced repetition.
I don’t see why these should be mutually exclusive, or even significantly trade off against each other. This sounds like saying “drinking water is more important than getting good sleep”, which is also true in a literal sense, but which implies some kind of strange tradeoff that I haven’t encountered. I aim to get a deep / intuitive understanding, and then use Anki to make myself use that understanding on a regular basis so that I retain it.
However, I think that playing around with those annoying details might be a good means to the end of grasping central concepts. I spent a lot of time telling myself, “It’s only the big concepts that matter, so you can skip this section, you don’t have to answer these questions, you don’t have to do these practice problems.”
I agree, and I’m not trying to tell people to not sweat the details. It’s more like, you don’t have to do every single practice problem, or complete all the bonus sections / applications which don’t interest you. Which is a thing I did—e.g. for Linear Algebra Done Right, and then I forgot a lot of linear algebra anyways.
Another approach is, you start with the papers you want to understand, and then backchain into the concepts you have to learn in a big tree. Then you’re guaranteed not to waste time. I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds very sensible and I mean to try it soon.
I don’t see why these should be mutually exclusive, or even significantly trade off against each other… I aim to get a deep / intuitive understanding, and then use Anki to make myself use that understanding on a regular basis so that I retain it.
Because that time you spend using Anki to retain it is time that you could spend seeking deep understandings elsewhere.
It’s more like, you don’t have to do every single practice problem, or complete all the bonus sections / applications which don’t interest you.
Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like we made opposite mistakes :)
Another approach is, you start with the papers you want to understand, and then backchain into the concepts you have to learn in a big tree. Then you’re guaranteed not to waste time. I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds very sensible and I mean to try it soon.
I’ve tried that. I think it’s an approach to have in your toolkit, but for me it’s not really my style.
Eg. in learning Haskell I’ve been trying to skim a book, then work on practice problems, then backtrack when I notice a concept I haven’t learned yet that I need to solve the problem. I always seem to get lost/overwhelmed in doing the backtracking. So I pivoted to reading the 1000+ page Haskell Programming from First Principles book, which is exactly what the title implies, and it’s going well for me.
Also from a more motivational perspective rather than a pedagogical one, I find that I can get into a flow state more easily with the first principles approach. With the backtracking approach, I often get stuck. With the first principles approach, it may be slow at times, but at least I’m continuing to take small steps forward and not getting stuck.
Because that time you spend using Anki to retain it is time that you could spend seeking deep understandings elsewhere.
Right, but part of having deep understandings of things is to have the deep understanding, and if I just keep acquiring deep understanding without working on retention, I’ll lose all but an echo. If I don’t use Anki, I won’thave the deep understanding later. I therefore consider Anki to help with the long-term goal of having deep understanding, even if moments spent making Anki cards could be used on object-level study.
I guess the crux is about Anki helping with retention. If you’d lose a lot of your understanding without Anki, I agree it’s worthwhile. If you’d only lose a little, it seems like a better use of time to seek deep understandings elsewhere.
Because that time you spend using Anki to retain it is time that you could spend seeking deep understandings elsewhere.
In my personal experience, a deep-understanding seeking study session is not portable (hard to take notes when you don’t have a surface) and if it’s less than an hour long, it’s usually not very good (need time to ‘warm up’ and fully focus). Anki, on the other hand, is perfect for quick study during a break/short commute/being in a queue.
Also creating flashcards in itself makes a great interactive reread of things.
Spaced repetition/Anki is one of those things that seems obvious and like it makes perfect sense. However, my experiences have been pushing me further and further away from thinking that it is usually something that is useful.
I spent a year or so self-studying full time. I also spent a few months studying Leetcode stuff for FAANG interviews half-time. In both experiences I spent months using Anki, perhaps 100-200 cards where I would study the cards pretty consistently every day.
I know this might go against the research on spaced repetition, but I’ve found that the stuff I used to study often just doesn’t stick. On the other hand, there are things that I never really did spaced repetition on that have stuck remarkably well. My impression and experiences is that obtaining a deep understanding is a lot more fruitful than doing spaced repetition.
Also, thinking along the lines of a sanity check and the outside view, are there examples of people becoming very successful due to Anki? My impression is that it doesn’t happen all too often, and when it does it is because Anki happens to be a great fit for the situation, eg. passing med school exams.
Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense, and is the mindset I’ve had for a while. I agree that the end worth seeking are those central concepts rather than memorizing certain details. However, I think that playing around with those annoying details might be a good means to the end of grasping central concepts. I spent a lot of time telling myself, “It’s only the big concepts that matter, so you can skip this section, you don’t have to answer these questions, you don’t have to do these practice problems.”
Well, it’s also true that you could take memorizing details too far (I’m looking at you organic chemistry). I guess it’s just a matter of judgement, and that the insight of “wait, it’s really only the big concepts that I need to care about” is likely to lead to failure modes where you undervalue the details.
Strongly agree. Seems like a failure mode that is common. I love “X for Dummies” types of books/posts. Reminds me of Explainers Shoot High, Aim Low:
A few years ago, an eminent scientist once told me how he’d written an explanation of his field aimed at a much lower technical level than usual. He had thought it would be useful to academics outside the field, or even reporters. This ended up being one of his most popular papers within his field, cited more often than anything else he’d written.
Reminds me of the blurry-to-sharp approach:
“are there examples of people becoming very successful due to Anki?”
It’s hard to answer that kind of question, because there are plenty of examples of people becoming successful without SRS, and people who use SRS don’t only use SRS.
Personally, I use Anki for professional development (so not to pass exams, but for long-term mastery). My biggest topics are math, algorithms (ex. machine learning research topics), and programming.
It’s got a number of advantages. Sometimes it helps by keeping technical details (like trig identities or programming syntax) close to the surface, so I can finish a project faster or plow through whiteboarding a problem with a colleague. Other times it helps by cementing a deep conceptual intuition strongly, so that I can focus on doing more advanced things (instead of rehashing the same slippery basics). Or by just increasing the breadth of what I know is available, so I don’t have to agonize over the right Google terms. Sometimes it helps by making it easier to remember people’s names, accelerating my ability to network (I recommend mnemonics here, since names are rote memorization, and rote memorization is difficult with Anki).
But above all, it ensures that I can keep learning, even if I only have 20 minutes a day to spare for deep/slippery topics like quantum computing; or 10 minutes a day to capture a fleeing professional experience that would otherwise be in one ear/out the other. I’m just 32 years old, but that’s old enough that I’ve forgotten much more than I’ve learned. Anki changes that: it acts like compound interest for knowledge. This spring (after a few years of regular SRS use) I’ll reach 40,000 cards, with no sign of slowing down.
It’s hard to reproduce that kind of growth with traditional learning methods.
Hm, I seem to have different experiences than you have had.
My experience as a programmer (from myself and from talking to others) is that you pick up syntax pretty quickly. For a new language there’s a learning curve. Perhaps SRS would help with that, although that doesn’t seem too useful. Eg. I use JavaScript every day and rarely use Python. I could use SRS for Python. Alternatively, I could wait until I need to use Python, take a few days getting familiar with the syntax, and then be fine, which seems better.
Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I can’t recall doing SRS over and over again ever cementing a deep conceptual intuition for me. I think looking at the same thing from different angles is often helpful, but with SRS, a given card is largely looking at the concept from one angle.
Here’s an example. I’m learning functional programming right now. In functional programming, operators like
+and*are just functions. Instead of2 + 3you can do(+) 2 3just like you’d doadd 2 3. Similarly, you could call functions using infix notations by using backticks like this2 `add` 3and it behaves like an operator. This really cemented for me what an operator is in such a way that I don’t think SRS ever could, and it did so much faster.It sounds like your point is moreso that it’s hard to be as productive without SRS, but I’d like to note that there are other ways you can use a spare 15 minutes to learn rather than SRS.
There’s definitely a tradeoff between breadth and depth/speed. On a real-world project, you can attain great speed and/or great depth on the narrow set of techniques/concepts that are directly relevant to the work you do every day.
It’s very expensive to maintain that kind of fluency. I’ve never done any programming in a language that uses infix vs. prefix operators, yet I know the difference just from a couple minutes total studying the concept at a few different widely-spaced points in time. This concept would not pose a challenge to me were I to pick up a functional programming language, although it would take time to build a habit of using them.
When you overinvest in study-through-practice in a concept you’ve already mastered, you will forget a lot of the more broad knowledge. Anki gives you a way to retain it, or to get it back when you’re ready for it. If you see yourself as having no need for a broad knowledge-base—if you see your career as being a happy code monkey banging out programs that are within the wheelhouse you’ve already established, then you’re probably good.
But if you have a different vision for your career, it’s possible that broad knowledge will be really helpful. And spaced repetition/Anki gives you a set of tools to build and maintain that broad knowledge-base.
I’m really glad you posted this objection to Anki, because I think it’s probably common. It’s also a fair point: sometimes, we don’t care about building a broad knowledge base. We’re just trying to become fluent in the narrow set of skills that let us execute a technical project. Clarifying that distinction is very valuable from the perspective of budgeting your study time wisely.
Interestingly, this comment made me more excited about using Anki again (my one great success with it was memorizing student names, which it’s well-suited for, and I found it pretty useless for other things), because this comment has a great idea with a citation that I probably won’t be able to find again unless I remember some ancillary keywords (searching “blurry to sharp” on Google won’t help very much). But if I have it in an Anki deck, not only will be it more likely to be remembered, but also I’ll have the citation recorded somewhere easy to search.
+1, I used Anki before my CFAR workshop. had to remind myself not to call people by their names before they even had their nametags on. This was great, because remembering names is generally a source of very mild social anxiety for me.
How do you do that? Do you take their picture beforehand or something?
There was a names/faces doc circulated before the workshop.
Thanks for all of these thoughts!
I don’t see why these should be mutually exclusive, or even significantly trade off against each other. This sounds like saying “drinking water is more important than getting good sleep”, which is also true in a literal sense, but which implies some kind of strange tradeoff that I haven’t encountered. I aim to get a deep / intuitive understanding, and then use Anki to make myself use that understanding on a regular basis so that I retain it.
I agree, and I’m not trying to tell people to not sweat the details. It’s more like, you don’t have to do every single practice problem, or complete all the bonus sections / applications which don’t interest you. Which is a thing I did—e.g. for Linear Algebra Done Right, and then I forgot a lot of linear algebra anyways.
Another approach is, you start with the papers you want to understand, and then backchain into the concepts you have to learn in a big tree. Then you’re guaranteed not to waste time. I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds very sensible and I mean to try it soon.
Because that time you spend using Anki to retain it is time that you could spend seeking deep understandings elsewhere.
Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like we made opposite mistakes :)
I’ve tried that. I think it’s an approach to have in your toolkit, but for me it’s not really my style.
Eg. in learning Haskell I’ve been trying to skim a book, then work on practice problems, then backtrack when I notice a concept I haven’t learned yet that I need to solve the problem. I always seem to get lost/overwhelmed in doing the backtracking. So I pivoted to reading the 1000+ page Haskell Programming from First Principles book, which is exactly what the title implies, and it’s going well for me.
Also from a more motivational perspective rather than a pedagogical one, I find that I can get into a flow state more easily with the first principles approach. With the backtracking approach, I often get stuck. With the first principles approach, it may be slow at times, but at least I’m continuing to take small steps forward and not getting stuck.
Right, but part of having deep understandings of things is to have the deep understanding, and if I just keep acquiring deep understanding without working on retention, I’ll lose all but an echo. If I don’t use Anki, I won’t have the deep understanding later. I therefore consider Anki to help with the long-term goal of having deep understanding, even if moments spent making Anki cards could be used on object-level study.
I guess the crux is about Anki helping with retention. If you’d lose a lot of your understanding without Anki, I agree it’s worthwhile. If you’d only lose a little, it seems like a better use of time to seek deep understandings elsewhere.
In my personal experience, a deep-understanding seeking study session is not portable (hard to take notes when you don’t have a surface) and if it’s less than an hour long, it’s usually not very good (need time to ‘warm up’ and fully focus). Anki, on the other hand, is perfect for quick study during a break/short commute/being in a queue.
Also creating flashcards in itself makes a great interactive reread of things.
+1 for this response. I particularly like the blurry-to-sharp nugget, to which I wanted to add:
“low-res-breath > high-res-depth”