Augmenting Long-term Memory

1. Augmenting Long-term Memory

1. Augmenting Long-term Memory

The essay is a distillation of informal, ad hoc observations and rules of thumb.

1.1. Part I: How to remember almost anything: the Anki system

Two rules of thumb about determining what to remember:

It seems valued to take 10 minutes to remember in the future.
If it seems striking.

If it routinely rises to much more than 20 minutes it means I'm adding cards too rapidly, and need to slow down.

Through the material quickly more than 3 times to find terminologies I don't understand.

I count myself as successful if my mental image is roughly along the lines.

The world isn't divided up into neatly separated components.

Atomic questions.

If a substantial minority of your questions are orphans, that's a sign you should concentrate more on questions related to your main creative projects. It's particularly worth avoiding lonely orphans: single questions that are largely disconnected from everything else. I make it a rule to never put in one question. Rather, I try to put at least two questions in, preferably three or more.

Principle of desirable difficulty, the idea that memories are maximally strengthened if tested when we're on the verge of forgetting them.

1.1.1. Using Anki to thoroughly read a research paper in an unfamiliar field

1.1.2. Using Anki to do shallow reads of papers

1.1.3. Syntopic reading using Anki

What you get from deep engagement with important papers is more significant than any single fact or technique. It helps you imbibe the healthiest norms and standards of the field. It helps you internalize how to ask good questions in the field, and how to put techniques together.

1.1.4. More patterns of Anki use

1.1.4.1. Make most Anki questions and answers as atomic as possible

How to create a soft link from linkname to filename?

ln -s filename linkname

Break upon into two pieces:

What's the basic command and option to create a Unix soft link?

ln -s ...

When creating a Unix soft link, in what order do linkname and filename go?

filename linkname

1.1.4.2. Anki use is best thought of as a virtuoso skill, to be developed

1.1.4.3. Anki isn't just a tool for memorizing simple facts. It's a tool for understanding almost anything

Break things up into atomic facts. Build rich hierarchies of interconnections and integrative questions. Don't put in orphan questions.

1.1.4.4. Use one big deck

1.1.4.5. Avoid orphan quesitons

1.1.4.6. Construct your own decks

Making Anki cards is an act of understanding in itself.

1.1.4.7. Cultivate strategies for elaborative encoding / forming rich associations

Use multiple variants of the "same" question.

1.1.4.8. Procedural versus declarative memory

There's a big difference between remembering a fact and mastering a process.

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.

1.1.4.9. Getting pass "names don't matter"

Knowing the names of things are the foundation that allows you to build up a network of knowledge.

1.1.4.10. What do you do when you get behind?

Increase quotas (100, 150, 200…) of cards per day.

1.1.4.11. Using Anki for APIs, books, videos, seminars, conversations, the web, events, and places

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. – Kurt Vonnegut

Fluid access to memory is at the foundation of so much creative thought.

1.1.4.12. Avoid the yes/no pattern

1.2. Part II: Personal Memory Systems More Broadly

The probability of correctly recalling an item declined (roughly) exponentially with time.

Finding the right relationship between imaginative design and cognitive science is a core problem for work on augmentation.

1.3. Appendix 1: Analysis of Anki study time

How to discover my own intervals?

1.4. Appendix 2: Using Anki to learn APIs

Once I'm making real progress on my project, and confident I've made a good choice of API, then it makes sense to work through a tutorial. I usually dip quickly into several such tutorials, and identify the one I believe I can learn most quickly from. And then I work through it. I do Ankify at this stage, but keep it relatively light. It's tempting to Ankify everything, but I end up memorizing lots of useless information, at great time cost. It's much better to only Ankify material I know I'll need repeatedly. Usually that means I can already see I need it right now, at the current stage of my project. On the first pass, I'm conservative, Ankifying less material. Then, once I've gone through a tutorial once, I go back over it, this time Ankifying everything I'm likely to need later. This second pass is usually quite rapid – often faster than the first pass – but on the second pass I have more context, and my judgment about what to Ankify is better.

It's a form of a problem I described in the main body of the essay: the temptation to stockpile knowledge against some day when you'll use it. You will learn far more quickly if you're simultaneously using the API seriously in a project. Using the API to create something new helps you identify what is important to remember from the API. And it also – this is speculation – sends a signal to your brain saying “this really matters”, and that helps your memory quite a bit. So if you're tempted to do speculative Ankification, please don't. And if you find yourself starting, stop.

When to create a new note?

When search it after second/third time.

How to organize them?

Adding Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box: Make relationships with other notes once a new note created.