poetical.science

I used to think.

I used to walk around and ride the bus and ride the subway and ride my bike and I would think.

Sometimes I would listen to music on my iPod, and that would interrupt the thinking process a little bit, but not too much.

Sometimes I would play videogames and I wouldn't think, but mostly I didn't play games on the go.

I often didn't have a portable console on me, I often wasn't working through a game, etc...

Then, in college, I got a smartphone and everything changed.

I always have it on me, I always keep it charged, and it contains infinite entertainment.

I feel like I haven't thought nearly as much ever since.

I could keep the phone in my pocket. I try and sometimes I succeed. But often I fail. The phone is habit forming.

Anki is a way to make thinking - at least, a certain kind of thinking - competitive with other things on my phone.

Anki is fun and satisfying and habit forming.

I wish I could, monk-like, resist the temptations of the world.

I try and honestly I think I do a decent job, but not as good as I would like - so I need Anki.

Anki is a tool that structures contemplation.

It resurfaces fleeting thoughts, and encourages novel connections.

It is programmable attention.

Anki is a flashcard application, designed to build long-term memory.

Writing good flashcards is a skill, and a difficult skill (see How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding). But so is any writing. Learning to write good flash cards teaches you how to make things memorable. How to distill knowledge into digestible chunks that can build on top of one another. Isn’t good (non-fiction at least) writing like that too? I suspect that developing the skill of writing good flash cards hones good general writing as well.

Reviewing is thinking and when thinking I often want to write or edit cards.

I review on my phone but don’t have emacs there.

If I edit in Anki my cards are then out of sync.

That’s too annoying.

Therefore anki-editor is a non-starter for me.

It's got to all be in Anki.

And not just understand, but understand durably. As opposed to reading for completion’s sake.

Retrieval practice produces much stronger memory than reminders.

This means that notes in Anki make the user more fluent with the material, in addition to getting all of the normal note taking benefits.

Maybe. Just a thought.

See https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

I have a lot of anxiety about how fast I can pick things up.

Anki helps with that because, even if I'm learning slowly I can be confident that I won't forget. So much of what we learn normally gets forgotten, so the cumulative advantage of durable learning more than makes up for minor speed deficiencies.

Anki is, as Michael Nielsen says, an emotional prosthetic in this way.

There are a few mechanisms that encourage deep reading, when Ankifying what you read:

• Reading to write good cards
• Repeating prompts deepening understanding
• Can only handle so much information at a time when that information repeats on you

To expand on the last point, when articles recurr on you, it’s too much to read tons of articles each day. This encourages me to identify good articles and read them deeply, instead of seeking ever more articles of questionable quality to read shallowly.