(Sensations of potential are fascinating to me. I noticed a few weeks ago that after memorizing a list of names and faces, I could predict in the first half second of seeing the face whether or not I’d be able to retrieve the name in the next five seconds. Before I actually retrieved the name. What??? I don’t know either.)
Right! When telling people about Anki, I often mention the importance of not self-deluding about whether one knows the answer. But sometimes I also mention how I mark a card as ‘Easy’ before I’ve retrieved or subvocalized the answer. It definitely felt like the latter was not self-delusion (especially when Anki was asking me what the capital of the UK was, say). But I felt unable to communicate why it was not self-delusion, and worried that without the other person understanding that mental phenomenon, they would think I was self-deluding and conclude that self-delusion is actually okay after all.
I vaguely noticed that awkwardness to some degree, but I still need to work on the skill of noticing such impasses and verbalizing them. And I certainly wasn’t conscious enough of it, or didn’t dwell enough on it, to think more about noticing.
It definitely felt like the latter was not self-delusion (especially when Anki was asking me what the capital of the UK was, say). But I felt unable to communicate why it was not self-delusion,
Wild speculation: it’s possible to notice that a node in a representational graph is well-connected and thus likely to be close to another node, without following any actual edges (this is very close to a general metric of familiarity but doesn’t actually require representing that metric). Something similar might be going on in your head: you haven’t retrieved what the capital of the UK is yet, but you know you know a lot about the UK.
But sometimes I also mention how I mark a card as ‘Easy’ before I’ve retrieved or subvocalized the answer. It definitely felt like the latter was not self-delusion (especially when Anki was asking me what the capital of the UK was, say).
For that reason I have set all my Anki cards for typing. If you actually type the city name and you get it wrong you notice. Even when I already pressed “easy” Anki allows going back via Crtl+z.
That does happen frequently enough for my for me to think that you are probably sometimes deluding yourself. There are cards where you think you know the right answer but get the card wrong.
It has the added bonus of training typing speed ;) I still have an average answer speed of 16 cards/minute over the last month so I don’t think it slows me down much.
I found typing to be a massive deterrent personally. Lots of my Anki is done in bed or on trains on my phone, and I found Memrise (on a laptop) much less compelling and harder to get myself to do than Anki because of all the typing, multiple choice, and drag-n-drop (and it would switch between those which would break my focus). I don’t want to have to type ‘London’ when I’m asked what the capital of the UK is or click it on a multiple choice. Maybe if it were just typing on a fully-fledged computer, like you describe, it wouldn’t be so bad?
I still don’t think I self-deluded to any actionable extent, but I probably should mention that sometimes I would mark a card as Easy, see the answer and Just Know the answer was different from what I would have answered, undo, and mark the card as Again. I can see how you’d be much more confident I was self-deluding without that detail, which I forgot.
In my personal experience with Memrise is that it does a lot of overtesting for new words. It shows you a card that you have seen the first time and marked as true again in the same session.
I agree that dragging and clicking on multiple choice items don’t work well on the laptop. Typing doesn’t work well on phones.
Multitouch is simple a completely different way of interacting with a device.
On a multitouch device you would want ideally to have to a map and simple click on the country on the map to select it. Speed Anatomy does that really well but it doesn’t do spaced repetition.
At the moment I’m working on getting binary choices on phones right and afterwards I will go to challenges such as clicking on items on a map.
As those kinds of answers can be scored automatically I’m also getting rid of self evaluation. I want to instead replace it with calculating confidence in the card via things like pressure, time taking to answer and where a button get’s pressed. If you want you can then click all buttons for card where you are sure on the top and all buttons where you are unsure on the bottom and the App will automatically learn your pattern.
Smart users who want to tell the App their confidence (so that the app calculates intervals better) can and the average user that doesn’t care isn’t distracted and the app might even find unconscious patterns.
This post is brilliant.
Right! When telling people about Anki, I often mention the importance of not self-deluding about whether one knows the answer. But sometimes I also mention how I mark a card as ‘Easy’ before I’ve retrieved or subvocalized the answer. It definitely felt like the latter was not self-delusion (especially when Anki was asking me what the capital of the UK was, say). But I felt unable to communicate why it was not self-delusion, and worried that without the other person understanding that mental phenomenon, they would think I was self-deluding and conclude that self-delusion is actually okay after all.
I vaguely noticed that awkwardness to some degree, but I still need to work on the skill of noticing such impasses and verbalizing them. And I certainly wasn’t conscious enough of it, or didn’t dwell enough on it, to think more about noticing.
Wild speculation: it’s possible to notice that a node in a representational graph is well-connected and thus likely to be close to another node, without following any actual edges (this is very close to a general metric of familiarity but doesn’t actually require representing that metric). Something similar might be going on in your head: you haven’t retrieved what the capital of the UK is yet, but you know you know a lot about the UK.
This matches my experience extremely well.
For that reason I have set all my Anki cards for typing. If you actually type the city name and you get it wrong you notice. Even when I already pressed “easy” Anki allows going back via Crtl+z.
That does happen frequently enough for my for me to think that you are probably sometimes deluding yourself. There are cards where you think you know the right answer but get the card wrong.
It has the added bonus of training typing speed ;) I still have an average answer speed of 16 cards/minute over the last month so I don’t think it slows me down much.
I found typing to be a massive deterrent personally. Lots of my Anki is done in bed or on trains on my phone, and I found Memrise (on a laptop) much less compelling and harder to get myself to do than Anki because of all the typing, multiple choice, and drag-n-drop (and it would switch between those which would break my focus). I don’t want to have to type ‘London’ when I’m asked what the capital of the UK is or click it on a multiple choice. Maybe if it were just typing on a fully-fledged computer, like you describe, it wouldn’t be so bad?
I still don’t think I self-deluded to any actionable extent, but I probably should mention that sometimes I would mark a card as Easy, see the answer and Just Know the answer was different from what I would have answered, undo, and mark the card as Again. I can see how you’d be much more confident I was self-deluding without that detail, which I forgot.
In my personal experience with Memrise is that it does a lot of overtesting for new words. It shows you a card that you have seen the first time and marked as true again in the same session.
I agree that dragging and clicking on multiple choice items don’t work well on the laptop. Typing doesn’t work well on phones. Multitouch is simple a completely different way of interacting with a device.
On a multitouch device you would want ideally to have to a map and simple click on the country on the map to select it. Speed Anatomy does that really well but it doesn’t do spaced repetition. At the moment I’m working on getting binary choices on phones right and afterwards I will go to challenges such as clicking on items on a map.
As those kinds of answers can be scored automatically I’m also getting rid of self evaluation. I want to instead replace it with calculating confidence in the card via things like pressure, time taking to answer and where a button get’s pressed. If you want you can then click all buttons for card where you are sure on the top and all buttons where you are unsure on the bottom and the App will automatically learn your pattern.
Smart users who want to tell the App their confidence (so that the app calculates intervals better) can and the average user that doesn’t care isn’t distracted and the app might even find unconscious patterns.