Traffic signs

musical notation

geography

history

chemistry

metallurgy

physics

healthcare

...

This is one of those 'what have the Romans done for us' comments. Intelligence + facts = smarts. Facts are to thinking like fuel is to an engine, without facts your thinking will be either useless or wrong. So regardless of how smart you are some degree of access to facts is a requirement and if you can do this without having to look things up all the time it will go faster and with access to more facts the quality of your output will go up.

I get what you are saying. If I were studying this would be great. But it's been a long time since I have done any formal study. Most of what I learn now days is by doing. I might read a book on a topic but never have an assignment or a test to follow up. I'm attempting to find out if others in my shoes have found a use for memorization like this. If so it might be something worth me trying.

Do you ever find yourself going back to something you used to know well, only to find that you're now a bit rusty? In theory, spaced repetition would allow you to keep that knowledge from getting stale.

I think you'll find you learn new things quicker with judicious use of spaced repetition. As a bonus, you'll never forget those things as long as you maintain the habit. And we're all always learning, so that shouldn't be hard.

I do think the hardest part of spaced repetition use outside of the classroom is choosing what to memorize. In school, those decisions are made for you. I find it easy to bite off too much and start memorizing minutiae of a technology instead of the essential items. But I think it's just another skill to master.

Actually in history less so. Unless you are learning for some kind of odd test where they will demand ton of exact dates, you are better off learning how events related to each other and how they followed.

Hardest parts of physics and chemistry in understanding. Again, you can use flash card memorization here and there, but the first of it is different.

I have no formal training in history, but Anki has got me much more interested in it. Before Anki, I tended to collapse centuries of history into ‘the distant past,’ which made it hard to appreciate how events related to each other, or distinguish between events separated by years and events separated by decades or centuries. I discovered, by using Anki for an exam, that it’s relatively easy for me to remember 4-digit numbers, and relatively difficult for me to remember sequences of events. So, memorising the years of events has been a great way for me to learn more history. Arbitrary dates with no understanding of the context are harder to remember, so the cards that come up the most are the topics to read more about (or delete, if they really are useless factoids). It’s a bit like using the number line as a memory palace.

I dont have formal training either. But I found that they collapse into blob when you don't understand them. Because then you are memorizing names of events without knowing what they actually were in any detail.

Once you listen to more detailed lecture or read more detailed book, they become clearly distinct due to many small differences and stories. So misplaced event suddenly "dont makes sense", because you can explain why it could not happen then.

Did you use it for any of these and what was your experience?

I used it to study for an ICC exam. I passed the test so it worked really well i'd say.

ICC?

Not to nit-pick, but physics? What would you use flash-cards for in physics? Memorizing equations? Why would you ever do that?

I’ve used flashcards quite extensively during my studies (electrical engineering and telecom engineering) and I continue to use it for technical subjects; albeit with reduced intensity.

Spaced repetition systems are not just about “rote” memorization. When used right it is a very personalized practice tool that can help with quite high-level ideas.

I wouldn’t fx. make flashcards for an entire API — instead I would focus on the concepts and features that are important for what I am doing. You can make it about “exactly” what you want to practice and remember.

Think of it more as a collection of personal notes with build in recall practice, rather than remembering scores of “random” facts.

one (small) group that has taken to spaced repetition study techniques quite enthusiastically is the tournament scrabble community. the thing about scrabble is that you don't need to know what the words mean, you just need to memorise "acceptable sequences of letters", and also while there are ~275000 valid words in the official dictionary, people have already done the work to sort them into usefulness order. so if you want to play top-level tournament scrabble it is really helpful to simply memorise, say, the 5000-10000 (depending on your dedication) most useful words, keyed by "alphagram" (the alphabetically sorted set of letters in the word). e.g. ADEINRT -> [ANTIRED,DETRAIN,TRAINED]. again, you don't need to know or care what those words mean, just to know the they are the only three words made from that set of letters (as an aside the most useful words to memorise tend to be predominantly 2, 3, 7 and 8 letters long, most tournament players master the 2s as soon as possible, take a while with the 3s and start "cardboxing", scrabble jargon for using a flashcard app with spaced repetition, to learn the top few thousand 7s and 8s)

anki itself is not super popular since there are apps like zyzzyva that are specialised for scrabble word study, but the technique is.

I think we've all found ourselves looking up a command line option for that one bash utility for the upteenth time. Throw it in a flash card and never look it up again. The same with text editor shortcuts, API's, etc.

My shop teacher would tell us to write down when we needed to borrow a tool. If we had to borrow a tool twice, it was time to go and buy it. I think the same rule is useful for spaced repetition. Even if you'd learn it eventually by regular use, once you have it in Anki you'll never forget it, even if you spend a couple years away from that particular technology. When you come back, you'll still have those configuration flags at the tip of your fingers.

And you have used hours of training on a thing used once every blue moon.

Congratulations, I guess?

Generally something is worth optimizing it this much when you're going to use it more than 10 times. Insert obligatory xkcd chart here: https://xkcd.com/1205/

There are things that are this useful, but they're generally in category of mathematics, potentially physics, chemistry or linguistics.

Learning parameters of a shell command, especially all of them, is a waste. Learn useful things first.

This is the main problem SuperMemo and Anki sets face, the ordering is by difficulty only and not by product of difficulty times usefulness.

Someone calculated they expect to spend a total of around 5 minutes over their entire life studying each new Anki card. That's not such a high bar for inclusion. Spaced repetition is very efficient. Of course, it's still not reasonable to memorize entire man pages.

That's a good point. I'll try it out for that. See if I can't finally get tar down.

https://xkcd.com/1168/

I collect interesting facts and tidbits I find in books, podcasts, and YouTube, and turn them into flashcards. It helps me remember various insights that I would otherwise forget. For example, I made cards for different Russell conjugates[0], definitions of certain words (eg culture, knowledge, optics, reify, ancillary, falsifiable), and quotes from books.

You can program yourself with flashcards[1]. EG I have a card that says "What should you do when someone is explaining something and you don't understand?" (Ask questions until you understand). When my colleague is explaining something and I just don't get it, this flashcard triggers me to ask questions, instead of pretending to understand.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iocMeRcSKf3gAxsTh/self-progr...

I put all kinds of things in my Anki deck, mostly unrelated to software development, but I have created cards for things like the definitions of CRDT, ACID and monad, what link-local IPv6 addresses look like, and some useful flags in grep and parallel. Ever get annoyed by the realisation that you learned something a few months ago, but have forgotten it by the time you need it? Anki can fix this.

There was a post not too long ago (I can't remember it unfortunately) where someone argued that memorization (they used software development specifically as the example) could help in connecting concepts. You can be a developer who knows what to google. Or you could be one who knows lots by heart and connects everything they know. I'm a bit sceptical myself, since rote memorization seems like something that is easily forgotten after a few months..

The point of Anki is that you will never forget an ever growing library of information if you maintain the habit.

I feel like understanding rather than pure knowledge is what allows you to connect concepts.

Yes, but some knowledge is a requirement to really understand something. Trivial example: can you really understand addition of numbers if you can't remember how to do it?

Pure memorization of facts is also really helpful to creating new understanding: Have you ever read a textbook that stacked definition upon definition and at some point you can't really keep up anymore because you're going back to the previous paragraphs all the time? At that point, pure memorization of definitions (even without understanding them really) already helps massively to reduce cognitive overload and makes forming new understanding form the rest of the text even possible.

I basically settled on an Anki-like system for cramming for tests in college. But this was a situation where I largely didn't attend class, but knew what formulas I'd need to know to pass each exam. Like clockwork, about 48 hours before an exam I'd lock myself away and make a bunch of flashcards, then spend hours rote memorizing them. It worked, and it got me through the tests, but I'd didn't really learn much.

This is NOT what Anki is for. It's called space repetition for a reason. The whole raison d'etre of spaced repetition is that you can memorize information in a fraction of the time by reviewing the information at progressively increasing intervals. If you had practiced spaced repetition, by the end of the term you would have spent a fraction of the time studying and would retain the vast majority of the information for months. If you spent a few minutes per week reviewing, you would still remember those facts today.

Besides learning vocabulary, the one place I'm really getting great results with Anki is exam preparation.

Exams are often in a very well-defined scope where you can rote learn most of the definitions, and the few exercise variants that appear in preparation also can appear on the exam.

I don't think that this is the best way to learn many things, but exams are partially tangential to true learning and it works well enough in my experience.