[...] I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project.
It's tempting instead to use Anki to stockpile knowledge against some future day, to think "Oh, I should learn about the geography of Africa, or learn about World War II, or […]". These are goals which, for me, are intellectually appealing, but which I'm not emotionally invested in. I've tried this a bunch of times. It tends to generate cold and lifeless Anki questions, questions which I find hard to connect to upon later review, and where it's difficult to really, deeply internalize the answers. The problem is somehow in that initial idea I "should" learn about these things: intellectually, it seems like a good idea, but I've little emotional commitment. By contrast, when I'm reading in support of some creative project, I ask much better Anki questions. I find it easier to connect to the questions and answers emotionally. I simply care more about them, and that makes a difference. So while it's tempting to use Anki cards to study in preparation for some (possibly hypothetical) future use, it's better to find a way to use Anki as part of some creative project.
Does the article seem likely to contain substantial insight or provocation relevant to my project – new questions, new ideas, new methods, new results? If so, I'll have a read.
- Spend a few minutes assessing the article.
- Extract between 5 or 20 Anki questions about the paper. Below 5, the paper will remain an isolated orphan in the memory.
So, to get a picture of an entire field, I usually begin with a truly important paper, ideally a paper establishing a result that got me interested in the field in the first place. I do a thorough read of that paper, along the lines of what I described for AlphaGo. Later, I do thorough reads of other key papers in the field – ideally, I read the best 5-10 papers in the field. But, interspersed, I also do shallower reads of a much larger number of less important (though still good) papers. In my experimentation so far that means tens of papers, though I expect in some fields I will eventually read hundreds or even thousands of papers in this way.
In a sense, [Anki] it's an emotional prosthetic, actually helping create the drive I need to achieve understanding.
- Make most Anki questions and answers as atomic as possible
- Anki use is best thought of as a virtuoso skill, to be developed
- Anki isn't just a tool for memorizing simple facts. It's a tool for understanding almost anything.
- Use one big deck (mixing cards is creatively stimulating, even for unrelated fields. I.e., cooking a chicken with JavaScript).
- Avoid orphan questions (avoid tangential material, as they won't be interconnected with the main creative memory).
- Don't share decks (personal information help remembering, and personal cards can be useful)
- Construct your own decks (see article for explanation)
- Cultivate strategies for elaborative encoding / forming rich associations
- Don't fall in the Anki improvement rabbit hole.
- Use quotas when you want to use Anki on a specific subject
- To learn knowledge, you need to invest your emotions into it.
- Ankify paper's claims as what they are: claims, not facts. Otherwise, you may be actively making yourself stupider.