This entry focuses on the notes and observations around Michael Nielsen’s essay “Augmenting Long-term Memory”.
Introduction
- Attempts to augment memory using computers have been around for a long time:
- Memex in 1945.
- Even the internet itself was due to Tim Berner-Lee’s employer seeking to develop a “collective institutional memory”.
- Anki is a modern attempt at augmenting memory.
- “Anki makes memory a choice, rather than a haphazard event, to be left to chance”.
- “I’ll discuss how to use Anki to understand research papers, books and much else.”
- One of the biggest concerns I have personally about using Anki is that you can use it to augment knowledge, but not understanding.
- “the essay [is] a how-to guide aimed at helping develop virtuso skills with personal memory systems”.
The Anki System
- Anki is better than conventional flashcards because it manages the review schedule.
- Reduces the time learning each card: 4-7 minutes per card with Anki, over 2 hours with normal flashcards.
- Two rules of thumb:
- If memorising a fact seems worth 10 minutes of time in the future, then I’ll do it.
- If a fact seems striking then it should go into Anki regardless of the time cost.
- What can Anki be used for:
- Learn papers and books
- Learn from talks and conferences
- Recall interesting things learned in conversation
- Remember key observations made while doing everyday work
- Facts relevant to social life
- City and travel
- Hobbies
- Made 10,000 cards in 2.5 years of regular use. Takes about 15-20 minutes a day.
- If it goes about 20 minutes a day, slow down.
- Review anki cards while:
- Walking to get morning coffee
- Waiting in line
- On tranist
- The review experience can be meditative if your mind is relaxed
Why is Anki better than conventional flashcards??
Because it manages the review schedule.
How long does a conventional flashcard take to review over 20 years??
2 hours.
How long does an Anki flashcard take to review over 20 years??
4-7 minutes.
How much more efficient are Anki flashcards in comparison to conventional flashcards??
~20x
What is a good rule for adding flashcards to Anki??
The fact should seem worth 10 minutes of time in the future.
When should a fact be added to Anki despite the time cost??
If the fact seems striking enough.
Research paper in unfamiliar field
- Uses example of reading AlphaGo paper
- Skimmed the paper:
- Important ideas and concepts, key techniques. “What were the names of the two main types of neural network AlphaGo used?”
- Looking for basic facts that were easily understood. “What’s the size of a Go board?”
- Several rapid passes over thep aper.
- After 5 or 6 passes, a 1-2 thorough reads:
- Understand in detail
- Knows the background context already
- Could have used convential notes, but Anki gave confidence of retaining understanding in the long term.
- Entire process took a couple days of time, spread over a few weeks:
- A lot of work
- Payoff meant he had a basic grounding in modern deep reinforcement learning
- “I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project”:
- Not stuff like geography of Africa, learning about WWII
- Intellectually appealing but no emotional investments
- Cold and lifeless Anki questions, hard to connect to in a later review.
- When in conncection with a personal creative project, it’s easier to connect to the questions and answers emotionally.
- It’s tempting to use Anki cards to study in preparation for some hypothetical use, but it’s better to use it as part of some creative project.
Should you skim read or deeply read a paper first??
Skim read.
How many skim reads should you do of a paper before moving on to a thorough read??
5-6.
What two types of information are you looking for in a skim read??
- Important ideas and concepts
- Basic facts that are easily understood
Why should you skim read a paper before doing a thorough read??
Because you will know some of the background context already.
Why should Anki primarily be used in service to a personal creative project??
It’s easier to connect to the questions emotionally.
Why shouldn’t you use Anki to “stockpile knowledge”??
It’s intellectually appealing but you have no emotional investments.
What’s some side effects of not having an emotional connection to Anki cards??
- Questions feel cold and lifeless
- Harder to remember, feel like a burden
What’s an example of using Anki to “stockpile knowledge”??
- Ultimate Geography
- Learning about WWII
- Anything that is pointless.
Shallow reads of papers
- 10-60 minutes on papers
- Asses articles before you read them:
- Does the article contain substantial insight or provocation relevant to the project?
- New questions, new ideas, new methods, new results?
- Anki flashcards about core claims, core questions and core ideas of the paper.
- Helpful to extract from:
- abstract, introduction, conclusion, figures and figure captions.
- Will typically extract 5 to 20 Anki questions
- Bad idea to extract less than 5 because it becomes an “isolated orphan in my memory”.
- Don’t ankify misleading work
-
If you feel you could easily find something more rewarding to read, switch over. It’s worth deliberately practicing such switches, to avoid building a counter-productive habit of completionism in your reading. It’s nearly always possible to read deeper into a paper, but that doesn’t mean you can’t easily be getting more value elsewhere. It’s a failure mode to spend too long reading unimportant papers.
Synoptic reading using Anki
- Shallow reads and deep reads of papers are possible, you can also “read” the entire research literature of some field or subfield.
- Instead of shallow-reading a large number of papers, engage deeply with key papers (liek the AlphaGo paper)
- 1 truly important paper, then 5-10 key papers in the field, shallower reads of a much larger number of less important papers.
- Key papers:
- Build up an overall picture of where the field is at
- What progress looks like for the field
- “synpotic reading”
- From “How To Read A Book”: Mortimer J Adler and Charles Van Doren
- What’s been done
- What’s yet to be done
- Identify open problems
- Questions that I’d like answered
- Tricks and observations
- Anki is most useful in exploring new areas, not the areas you’re most comfortable with
- Without a lot of drive, it’s difficult to make materials stick
- Anki helps create that drive:
- Confident you will retain information
- Make sense of what you will read
- Reading like this makes it more pleasurable
General patterns of Anki use
- Make most Anki questions and answers as atomic as possible:
- Breaking down one complex question into more atomic pieces makes a routinely wrong question into multiple routinely right questions.
- Atomic questions can still involve complex, high-level concepts
- Anki is best thought of as a virtuso skill, to be developed:
- Anki itself is a very simple program
- It requires skill and practice to use well
- Anki isn’t a tool for memorizing simple facts, it’s a tool for understanding almost everything:
-
“It’s a common misconception that Anki is just for memorizing simple raw facts, things like vocabulary items and basic definitions.”
- Developing virtuoso skill means cultivating the ability to use it for types of understanding beyond basic facts
- Break things into atomic facts
- Build rich hierarchies of interconnections and integrative questions
- Don’t put in orpghan questions
-
“It’s too strong to say that to be a virtusos Anki user is to be a virtuoso in understanding. But there’s some truth to it”.
-
- Use one big deck
- Avoid orphan questions:
- Grooming habits of the Albanian giant mongoose, interested in currently
- Soon ankified 5-10 questions
- However, in a few months the cards will be stale and you’ll get them wrong.
- The questions are disconnected from other interests
- Lost the context that makes you interested.
- Orphan questions are questions not closely related to anything else in memory
- It’s not bad to have a few – hard to know what will grow into a substantial interest.
- Never add a single question. Rather, try at least two questions, preferable three or more.
- Don’t share decks and create your own:
- Useful to put personal information into Anki
- Constructing your own decks is part of the process, the more elaborately ou encode a memory, the stronger the memory will be.
- Form rich associations yourself.
- Cultivate strategies for elaboriative encoding and forming rich associations:
- A strategy for forming strategies
- Multiple variants of the same question
- What about memory palaces and loci?
- Useful for trivia
- Less developed for more abstract concepts
- “there is great value in learning to think in more memorable ways”
- 95% of Anki’s value comes from 5% of the features:
- Don’t bother with most additional features like tags, auto-generating cards, plugins
- Clozes are good for things like quotes.
- Challenges of using Anki to store facts about friends and family:
- “Is [my friend] vegan?” is fine.
- “What is the name of [my friend’s] eldest child” is a bit strange.
- It’s a social norm to remember things like that, it’s like you’re faking interest.
- Leaves you feeling uncomfortale.
- Procedular versus declarative memory:
- Difference between remembering a fact and mastering a process
- Might remember a fact but not recognise situations to apply it
-
“Put another way: to really internalize a process, it’s not enough just to review Anki cards. You need to carry out the process, in context. And you need to solve real problems with it. "
- Difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something:
- Useful in both ways
- Author argues names do matter, it’s an early step along the way to understanding
- Particularly useful for non-verbal things like “what’s the name of this painting?”
- Challenges with getting behind:
- Anki becomes challenging when you get behind with cards
- Two days of not using, the cards begin to back up
- It’s intimidating to see 500 cards to be reviewed.
- Increase quotas (100, 150, 200, 250 then 300) cards per day until you catch up
- Other uses of Anki:
- Learning an API
- Seminars, set quota of at least three high-quality questions to ankify. Setting quotas help you pay attention.
- Videos, events, places. 3-5 questions about the experience but it doesn’t matter too much.
- Ankify in real time as I read papers and books. This is because in seminars and conversations you want to be immersed in the experience, but with papers and books you hav plenty of time.
- Reading a book can become bogged down with Ankifying. Set a quota, don’t ankify everything in sight.
- Ankify things that serve your long-term goals.
- Anki can be used in conjunction with notes.
- Avoid yes/no questions:
- elaborate the ideas in the question
- On external memory aids:
- Google, Wikipedia and notebooks ought to be enough
- A complement to Anki
- Something special about creative work and problem-solving, having an internalised understanding.
- Speed of associative thought
- Ability to rapidly try out many combinations of ideas
- Fluency matters in thinking.
- The thought experiment of a flute in which there is a one second delay between blowing the note and hearing it is absurd.
- Certain types of thoughts are much easier to have when all the relevant kinds of understanding are held in the mind. Anki is invaluable.
- Why isn’t Anki used so much?
- People underestimate the gains that come from distributing their study in a manner similar to Anki, preffering last-minute cramming even though studies show it produces worse results.
- “principle of desireable difficulty” the idea that memories are maximally strengthened if tested when we’re on the verge of forgetting them
- Systems like Anki are challenging to use well and easy to use poorly.
How can making flashcards atomic help prevent card failures??
It can make one large, routinely wrong question into multiple routinely correct questions.
What is an “orphan question”??
A question which is unrelated and unlinked to prior knowledge.
Why are “orphan questions” a bad thing??
Because they feel disconnected from what you actually care about and feel like a burden.
Why is using shared Anki decks a bad idea??
Encoding the memory yourself is part of the process.
In what way is reviewing Anki cards not enough??
To really internalize knowledge, you need to apply and solve real problems with it.
How can setting a “flashcard quota” be a useful tool??
It ensures you pick the most useful pieces of information rather than ankifying everything.
How can you prevent becoming bogged down with ankifying (e.g. reading a book)??
Set a “flashcard quota”.
“Fluency matters…”??
“in thinking”.
What is the fluency in thinking thought experiment involving a flute??
A flute where there is a one second delay between blowing the note and hearing it is “absurd”.
In what way is a delayed flute analogous with fluency in thinking??
A delayed flute is like having to stop to remember something when thinking.
How does the speed of associative thought matter??
It allows you to rapidly try out many combinations of ideas.
Part 2, Personal Memory Systems More Broadly
How important is long term memory?
How did chess experts see the board differently to beginners??
They saw it as a collection of chunks or units rather than a series of individual pieces.
The chunk theory in chess was written about in which book??
Thought and Choice in Chess
Who wrote Thought and Choice in Chess??
Adriaan D. de Groot
“It’s like they’re trying to compose”…??
…a beautiful sonnet in French, but they only know 200 words of French.
How does ‘Augmenting Long Term Memory’ argue that chunk-theory apply to mathematics??
The essay argues that top mathematicians have internalized many more complex chunks.
Why do top mathematicians see a complex problem as simpler than ordinary people??
Because they have internalized more complex mathematical concepts, they can abstract over a lot of the complexity.
What is the capacity of working memory in chunks??
7, plus or minus 2.
Who first described the concept of a capacity in working memory??
George Miller
What was the name of the paper by George Miller about the capacity of working memory??
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.
What is the correlation between working memory and IQ??
The better your working memory, the higher your IQ.
What is the definition of a “chunk”??
The basic unit of working memory.
What is the name of the curve that measures how likely you are to remember something over time??
Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
A steeper Ebbinghaus forgetting curve corresponds with??
A faster rate of memory decy.
What is the x-axis for an Ebbinghaus forgetting curve??
Time.
What is the y-axis for an Ebbinghaus forgetting curve??
Probability of recall.
The relationship between time and the probability of recall is??
Exponential decay.
What is the testing effect??
Where long term memory is increased by practice retrieving the information that needs to be remembered.
What is the spacing effect??
Where long term memory is increased when learning events are spaced apart in time.
What are the two effects that increase the efficacy of Anki??
- The testing effect
- The spacing effect
What effect does testing memory have on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve??
It flattens the curve.
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date: 2020-09-06 13:32
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title: Article - Augmenting Long-term Memory