Hey, I’m new here and have really been enjoying reading lots of posts on here. My views have certainly updated on a variety of things!
I’ve been exploring using Anki flashcards to codify my thought processes when I have a-ha moments. After reading about cached thoughts, I started thinking that most of executing procedural knowledge is just having lots of cached thoughts about what to do next. I understand that this is not exactly the type of cached thought in the post, but I think it is interesting nonetheless. I have been making Anki cards like Physics: what should you do if you get something as a function of x instead of a function of t to solve a problem//use conservation of energy instead to speed up the process of learning new procedures (like solving physics problems).
I used Anki a bunch during university, with some moderate success, but always ended up adding too many cards, plus content too rough to be considered a proper card, to the point that I eventually stopped using the app, even though it definitely worked when I put in the time to use it.
I even made lots of Anki cards about LW sequences content, with the same results.
… Now that I think about it, there’s probably one (or ten) AI services by now which can turn arbitrary text into Anki cards, too. I’m skeptical how well they might work, but they presumably can’t do any worse than dumping text into cards and not editing them at all.
I’m actually working on this problem right now. There are a lot of those services, but they usually generate bad cards. I’m researching how to use AI to make good cards.
This essay has some tips on that, starting from the “More patterns of Anki use”. There are also various LW articles about Anki under the Spaced Repetition tag, some of them such as My Anki Patterns have card design tips.
Hey, I’m new here and have really been enjoying reading lots of posts on here. My views have certainly updated on a variety of things!
I’ve been exploring using Anki flashcards to codify my thought processes when I have a-ha moments. After reading about cached thoughts, I started thinking that most of executing procedural knowledge is just having lots of cached thoughts about what to do next. I understand that this is not exactly the type of cached thought in the post, but I think it is interesting nonetheless. I have been making Anki cards like
Physics: what should you do if you get something as a function of x instead of a function of t to solve a problem//use conservation of energy insteadto speed up the process of learning new procedures (like solving physics problems).Have others done something similar?
I used Anki a bunch during university, with some moderate success, but always ended up adding too many cards, plus content too rough to be considered a proper card, to the point that I eventually stopped using the app, even though it definitely worked when I put in the time to use it.
I even made lots of Anki cards about LW sequences content, with the same results.
… Now that I think about it, there’s probably one (or ten) AI services by now which can turn arbitrary text into Anki cards, too. I’m skeptical how well they might work, but they presumably can’t do any worse than dumping text into cards and not editing them at all.
I’m actually working on this problem right now. There are a lot of those services, but they usually generate bad cards. I’m researching how to use AI to make good cards.
This essay has some tips on that, starting from the “More patterns of Anki use”. There are also various LW articles about Anki under the Spaced Repetition tag, some of them such as My Anki Patterns have card design tips.