However, if you add some good spaced repetition software to one of these e-notebooks then I think you will have finally surpassed pen and paper for note taking.
I'm thinking of something like, you take a note on a page and then save it. A week later the page of notes you wrote is presented to you again and you can draw boxes around parts of the page and blur / hide bits of text, etc; these then become your spaced repetition items. I've heard of studies showing that hand written notes are superior for memory, this is the best of both worlds, hand written and then automatic spaced repetition.
And how much easier is it to surrender your life to a spaced repetition algorithm when it is it's own dedicated device? The idea of being able to memorize math, and other visual information, in addition to the usual written content (which is, again, better remembered if hand written) is so promising I'd happily pay hundreds of dollars for such a device.
I know there are some fairly hackable e-ink tables out there, has anyone done this?
Happy to discuss improvements for your workflow if it's an Android-based e-ink tablet via Discord[2]/GitHub issues.
[0] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/9363
[1] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Third-Party-A...
So it might be better to draw the boxes up front, but I like the concept.
https://www.remnote.io/ tries to do something like this but with textual notes.
I didn't mean present the entire page, although a link back to the entire page for context would be nice.
Also, being able to remember things by their spacial layout on the page is an advantage, not a flaw. It allows you to employ your spacial and visual memory to help in memorizing concepts and facts.
The reMarkable (by reports) and Onyx BOOX (by direct experience) both satisfy this requirement.
I picked up the BOOX as an e-book reader, not a note-taking device. It turns out that the note-taking functionality is really, really good.
I still have the objection that notes are stuck in an application-specific interface. Though on balance that's not all bad.
There's also the inherent privacy risk of having an electronic rather than physical record.
You can get a great deal from rehearsal
If it just has the proper dispersal
You would just be an ass
To do it en masse
Your remembering would turn out much worsal.
Also, tangentially related: I really love Woz's wiki, which is filled with interesting insights on learning: https://supermemo.guru
I have some doubts that there is a 'perfect' forgetting curve that maps over all items equally that this would matter to such a degree.
I.e. if it comes back after 3 days then 9 in Anki, or 2 days and 10 in SM18.
What matters is showing up and spending the time with your SR tool, as well as adding high quality cards.
I had always been reluctant to use memorization but I found it helped immensely. Especially as a returning graduate student.
Also, do you continue to use it for math-like subjects?
Great job on your exams though!
Looking through the shared decks this one looks promising: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1377287053
It seems a lot more effective than spaced repetition, but also a much higher level of commitment and a higher learning curve. It's sort of like using a power tool. I haven't tried it, but this is a good reminder that I should.
This is a tool meant to help with incremental reading, with support for generating Anki flashcards.
For example, if you have a list of 50 PDFs and you want to incrementally read them, Polarized doesn't have a way of scheduling when you're going to read all 50 PDFs. Supermemo, you don't have worry about that. IMO, that's the key feature of Incremental Reading.
I can chuck dozens of articles at a time into Supermemo, and do not have to worry about forgetting to read them. They'll show up in my reviews over time.
I'd love to have something for it on mobile, because that's where I spend all my reading time, and that was one of the main advantages of Anki.
Augmenting Long Term Memory http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706776 - Aug 2018 (208 comments)
If I don't know its utility value, I won't even be able to recall it an hour later. On the other hand, if I can see the utility, I might be able to remember it decades later after a single exposure.
If I'm using a map with GPS on my phone to find my way around a city, I won't be able to recall any of the buildings or landmarks later and I won't be able to find my way around even after many journeys. On the other hand, if I use street signs and ask around for directions, I will remember everything. In the former case, my brain knows that it can rely on the map and GPS so it doesn't waste resources trying to remember streets, buildings and landmarks.
I can kind of tell the difference between 'towels' and 'rags'.
Most mathematicians seem to be able to remember anything regardless of utility value. I guess that's why I chose a more engineering/business career.
This would have been a godsend had I known about it during college.
To give some examples, it's used heavily in US med schools, and I achieved great academic results using it to study CS in university.
Often, I will read about something. Say designing a PCB, or to play an instrument. I will then watch a video, read, and or attempt the task just to get the lay of the land.
At that moment, if I really power through and reach a goal, the learning is useful. I can retain and recall very reasonably.
However, say I attempt and do not reach a goal. Maybe just exploring, or for lack of time. If I remain interested, I will continue to read and or listen to audio, or video or talk to people about it.
On a future attempt not made too far in the future from last visit to the subject matter, many more things seem familiar! My ability to navigate new skills and or recall rules, details is better than I would expect. Sometimes I feel as if it is actually good to do that, let just a little time pass and then I will feel like I want to do it, and maybe that want is my mind having assembled new info seeks expression of it, a use.
Usually, I am overall more effective than I was on the initial attempt despite not being hands on.
This sales model is also interesting and notable:[1]
Older versions of SuperMemo are successively released as freeware.
By purchasing any of these freeware items you get registered in this store and become eligible to instantly upgrade to SuperMemo 17 (see Freeware Upgrade). In the future, you will also be able to upgrade to any SuperMemo at a big discount.
Your cheapest pathway to new SuperMemos is: order SuperMemo 15 Freeware below (or any other collector item) if you like SuperMemo 15, use Freeware Upgrade to get SuperMemo 17 in the future, keep upgrading to new versions of your choice (once registered in this store, you are perpetually eligible)
Well done!
Pre-made Anki decks vary in quality. Some are great. But none that I've found have the "themes" that personally keep me motivated to language learn long term.
Man refines memory techniques; dissapears beneath event-horizon of information density.
But when you look into tests people have done to see how much better it is exactly, it's around 30% more efficient.
I still use Anki and am grateful for its existence, but this is a huge difference in efficiency. I wish there was a better open source scheduling algorithm available.
Also, if Anki is open-source, I'm surprised that there is no unofficial port that uses SM-17. But maybe I'm just ignorant of how much work that would involve.
... having used it for the last 4 years to try to memorize vocabulary in certain languages (Spanish & French, recently started Chinese), I think it's a base layer... (much like how Bitcoiners like to talk about BTC's Blockchain). Reasons:
1. I've tired of it. I need a layer that makes me excited to use it.
2. I've found it far-far less useful for learning other things than rote vocabulary memorization. It needs a layer that makes it easy to store and "pull up" everything I need to know.
For every word you want to learn, add a few idiomatic and representative sentences in Anki. You can do the same for every new grammatical concept you want to learn.
And don't forget to use Anki's text-to-speech tools to practice listening as well as speaking.
Does it replace other forms of learning entirely? No, but it can be a great component of learning a new language.
When learning Japanese grinding vocab was extremely boring but did a fantastic job of bridging the gap between textbook literature and actually being able to read simpler (middle school level) native literature / comics / news stories.
And I didn't even need that many words to bridge that gap. Maybe like 1000 or so over what I'd already picked up from textbooks.
Now? There's no way in heck I'm going back to grinding vocab and instead slowly pick up new words by reading tons and tons of books.
I still need to rote memorize a bunch of kanji since picking them up naturally is pretty brutal, but like with vocabulary I'll only do it to the point where I can stumble through YA-level books without looking something up every other sentence.
Instead of just 1 to 1 vocab mapping, look for chinese tv shows that you enjoy and start to slowly build up vocabulary by mining sentences.
Then when you do reviews, not only will you remember the vocabulary, you will also remember when it occurred in the story and have a cool memory of some of your favorite tv shows / books / etc.
To your first point, it has basically become a habit for me. The key is to really commit to it for the first several weeks and establish the habit, then you won't feel tired of it as reviewing your cards daily becomes something you "just do".
Definitely agree with point 2. The Anki practice really shines when I combine it with my conversational practice. Memorizing the words alone doesn't make me a better speaker, but it does mean there's a lot fewer "what's the word?" moments in the middle of a conversation.
I believe Anki memorization + regular conversational practice is second only to full immersion as the best learning strategy.
(Please don't squish my website HN)
I'm pretty sure Anki is FOSS, though perhaps you just don't like the AGPL?
It seems like you skim through an article, extract a few facts, and add them to your memorization schedule. Would it really help you summarize the article, or help you synthesize the arguments and follow the logic leading to a conclusion?
The second principle is the spaced repetition. That works for learning the muscle memory as well as the memorization, but let's just address memorization.
First I divide a piece into arbitrary sections, often pages but in information-dense music you've got to go a couple lines at a time. I do not usually divide at a sensible musical stopping point, because we remember the starts and ends of what we do much better than the middles. Choosing weird places to start and end helps get some of those middles into our heads; plus it's really easy to mentally track what you've done if it's at a page or line boundary.
Then, with sections A through, say, D, I'll go in roughly this order, with "A" meaning I play all notes in section A in the proper sequence, even if I have to wait a few seconds sometimes to recall what happens next.
A A A; B B B A A; C C C B B A; D D D C C B A; D D C B; D C; D
...adjusting sometimes to accommodate the different information densities of the different sections. After this you'll need some mental downtime because it sucks a lot out of you to recall so much. Later you can do sections E through H, etc.
By the time you've done that, you're halfway to your goal. You can then start increasing the tempo toward performance quality by responsible metronome practice. I like to do
(1) the above routine out of tempo, waiting as long as necessary before notes
(2) the above routine at any tempo with metronome, doesn't matter how ridiculously slow
(3) increasing the tempo gradually from there, not deviating from the "note-perfect" requirement
Not exactly example code, but the algorithm is well-described near the end. It should be sufficiently detailed to implement that particular variation.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm...
Is one of the SuperMemo algorithms, particularly SM-2, described in pseudocode form. Again, should be enough to implement it yourself.
Other algorithms can be seen as variations on these themes. Like with Anki's implementation (and I believe also SuperMemo's) there is jitter added to the schedule so that too many cards don't show up together over and over. This is to avoid the issue of remembering something because of what it's with and not on its own. With language learning, say you enter a dozen cards on colors and review them all in one day, strictly speaking they could all end up recurring at the same time in the future. By adding jitter they get spread out so you can avoid accidental "topic" days and end up with a proper mix of cards for study.
There's a link on the page to some info on how to use it as well, since it may not be obvious!
This is a plugin for Roam Research that allows you to do spaced repetition inline with your Roam graph. It keeps its state alongside your notes, and if you want to change your notes while doing a review session that's seamless.
Essentially you're creating a set of reminders/events with linear or exponential spacing between. A common pattern appears to be 1, 3, and 6 days after first learning, which is also 1, 2, and 3 days apart from each other.
... he's built these through decades of thinking of and tinkering and working on this singular problem. SM-2 is from 1987 for SM for DOS 1.0, and is fairly simplistic comparatively.
1 Topics: https://youtu.be/1ZNsn8IL-TM 2 Incremental Reading core analogy: https://youtu.be/Wme2RLm1jWY 3 How Incremental Reading makes micro learning easy: https://youtu.be/piqq1kwYL5s
Spoiler alert: basically incremental reading is like using save states when playing a game with an emulator. As one might save their game state before and after a challenging section in a game, when you find a difficult to understand/explain idea, incremental reading makes it easy to pause and synthesize that idea before moving on. Yes at the end also it’s good to summarize the ideas to yourself and simplify that explanation, and then use SuperMemo to memorize that explanation. Incremental reading is hard to explain why it is so useful, I’ve been using SuperMemo every day for 15 years and I still feel like I am learning new things
Some things I could find just now:
Anki vs. SM-8: https://anki.tenderapp.com/discussions/effective-learning/12...
SM-2 vs. SM-17: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Universal_metric_for_cross-compa...
Anki vs. custom machine learning scheduler: https://old.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/d0i8uy/improved_algor...
Anki vs SM-17: https://unrelatedwaffle.medium.com/battle-of-the-spaced-repe...
SuperMemo seems to fall behind Anki in the short term (<6 months), but eventually makes up for it. Some of the links reflect that.
As for open-source implementations, there this: https://github.com/slaypni/SM-15
Again, I think spaced repetition is a killer feature that could finally distinguish an e-ink tablet from paper. I think this idea has more potential for improving learning than almost all the multi-million dollar learning websites out there. It can systematically take you to savant levels of recollection in any topic. And right now this tool is locked behind some clunky text focused UI. (Yes, latex and pictures exist, but they suck when compared to drawing on a page.)
Perhaps this was a reaction to my previous approach to learning, which completely shunned memorization.
From the way you described it, you change all statements/theorems/etc. in the book into questions? To put inside you mnemosyne deck. So your deck in the end has a lot of prove this statement/theorems/etc. and the problems that come with the book.
I was expecting some magical shortcut. But it's the usual tip of doing shitton of problems. Your way is especially comprehensive of course since you basically memorize/know/practice how to prove/solve everything in a book.
Impressive. This takes a lot of time and discipline.
Please read this article about learning math with spaced repetition. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
I'd extend this:
Memory + Synthesis = Useful learning strategy
That said, with Anki or any other tool these rules are incredibly handy:
https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...
I'll also be checking online now that you've spurred my curiosity, just curious if you have ones that you like too.