But if someone else studies something and makes cards to fill in their own gaps, that means that what you’re studying may not cover material that you don’t know you don’t know.
This get’s Anki wrong. You are not supposed to make cards about things that you don’t know. That sets you up for cards that you forget. Anki exist to prevent forgetting of newly learned information.
The first two rules of SRS are according to Wozniak:
Do not learn if you do not understand
Learn before you memorize
When one starts sharing decks it frequently happens that people violate those rules and try to learn Anki cards for material that they haven’t learned beforehand.
Exactly. However, it could be useful to go through someone else’s Anki deck after you’ve already learned the material yourself. Everyone who’s ever taken a test after making your own study guide knows that when questions are worded differently from your study guide, you have to think harder about it to answer the question. I suspect that it would help reinforce the learning or fill gaps you may have missed.
I totally agree. Shared decks encourage a lot of SRS vices.
But, given that they exist and that people are going to use them, is there a way to raise the quality of a shared deck significantly above the average? You can page through the shared decks on Anki’s shared decks page and dredge up extremely low quality. If you look at the repository of decks by LW users, the average quality is much better, but could still be improved.
I propose that the MIRI courses are valuable, and that people learning them could benefit from Anki decks. I think the best way to make these Anki decks is a wiki-style collaborative effort.
When one starts sharing decks it frequently happens that people violate those rules and try to learn Anki cards for material that they haven’t learned beforehand.
Fortunately there are enough exceptions to Wozniak’s guideline that violating rule 2 can often be beneficial. For me this applies to any information that I am able to understand (rule 1) from the terse information in the cards themselves. In the same way I tended to learn most efficiently from practice exams when studying.
For material that is too complicated (or simply insufficiently specified) to learn from the Anki deck I do honor rules 1 and 2. This means I keep the deck in my active reviews only if (and when) I am sufficiently curious about the subject matter that I will naturally be inspired to look up every term I encounter and do not understand. Just In Time learning is viable.
This get’s Anki wrong. You are not supposed to make cards about things that you don’t know. That sets you up for cards that you forget. Anki exist to prevent forgetting of newly learned information.
The first two rules of SRS are according to Wozniak:
Do not learn if you do not understand
Learn before you memorize
When one starts sharing decks it frequently happens that people violate those rules and try to learn Anki cards for material that they haven’t learned beforehand.
Exactly. However, it could be useful to go through someone else’s Anki deck after you’ve already learned the material yourself. Everyone who’s ever taken a test after making your own study guide knows that when questions are worded differently from your study guide, you have to think harder about it to answer the question. I suspect that it would help reinforce the learning or fill gaps you may have missed.
I totally agree. Shared decks encourage a lot of SRS vices.
But, given that they exist and that people are going to use them, is there a way to raise the quality of a shared deck significantly above the average? You can page through the shared decks on Anki’s shared decks page and dredge up extremely low quality. If you look at the repository of decks by LW users, the average quality is much better, but could still be improved.
I propose that the MIRI courses are valuable, and that people learning them could benefit from Anki decks. I think the best way to make these Anki decks is a wiki-style collaborative effort.
Fortunately there are enough exceptions to Wozniak’s guideline that violating rule 2 can often be beneficial. For me this applies to any information that I am able to understand (rule 1) from the terse information in the cards themselves. In the same way I tended to learn most efficiently from practice exams when studying.
For material that is too complicated (or simply insufficiently specified) to learn from the Anki deck I do honor rules 1 and 2. This means I keep the deck in my active reviews only if (and when) I am sufficiently curious about the subject matter that I will naturally be inspired to look up every term I encounter and do not understand. Just In Time learning is viable.