Is what I am doing logical (FSRS Weights)?

Anki FSRS
1

I have a huge backlog. I spend around 2 hours every day reviewing my backlog, letting FSRS queue all my cards based on their retrievability. However I have to keep moving forward with learning new stuff.

The problem with learning freshly new stuff is that it almost always requires next-day review. My standard FSRS weights don’t allow for that. The weights still cannot be optimized though in the early phase, since I have not accrued a large enough amount of reviews yet.

This leaves me with a delay of up to 2-3 days on average until I get to review those newly learned cards, making me be stuck in a cycle of forgetting and then relearning in the early phase (at least until I optimize the paramters)

What I usually do is that I give each deck its own preset, cloned from the standard preset. Now I copy the presets from one of my harder decks and pasted it into my standard presets. Now all the presets that I clone from the standard presets have these new, harder weights.

Would this adversely affect the scheduling in the long run?

Here are my old standard presets

1.5003, 2.9792, 8.3370, 13.5937, 5.1019, 1.1997, 1.0332, 0.0212, 1.7375, 0.0445, 1.1132, 2.1295, 0.1031, 0.3431, 1.5569, 0.2190, 2.8237

My current standard presets

0.5045, 0.9154, 2.2372, 4.0593, 5.0598, 1.1894, 0.8779, 0.0045, 1.7465, 0.0320, 1.1340, 2.0933, 0.1000, 0.2950, 1.4286, 0.2190, 2.8237

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2

Why not just change desired retention?

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I was told that was an extremely bad idea in my case since I have it already set at 95% :skull:

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4

I usually copy the parameters from an old deck when start learning a new deck, as long as two decks are not drastically different.

If you want to make sure new cards are reviewed on time (you use the word “delay” so I assume the problem is that, e.g. anki scheduled 500 reviews every day for you, but you only have the time to do 300 reviews, so the remaining 200 become “overdue”), consider change the “review sort order” to e.g. ascending intervals in deck options. In this way, cards with the smallest interval would appear first.

btw if you are feeling that anki has scheduled too many reviews that you cannot complete, consider decreasing desired retention to like 0.9 or 0.85 (don’t decrease too much though).

The largest difference is in first 4 parameters, which determine the initial interval of new cards (higher = larger interval). So they should not affect much on scheduling in the long run.

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consider change the “review sort order” to e.g. ascending intervals in deck options. In this way, cards with the smallest interval would appear first.

Oh : p

Never thought about that :sweat_smile:

I usually copy the parameters from an old deck when start learning a new deck, as long as two decks are not drastically different.

What is the difficulty of that old deck. Is it a difficult one

btw if you are feeling that anki has scheduled too many reviews that you cannot complete, consider decreasing desired retention to like 0.9 or 0.85 (don’t decrease too much though).

You know I wanted to ask this: How damaging is it for long term learning to have cards remain overdue for a long period of time due to piling up backlog.

I mean the queuing of FSRS tries to scramble and shuffle the cards every day according to their changing retrievabilites. But that is just damage control or rather plasted paper on a wall crack. So I really wonder about the extent of the damage or that whether I should dedicate entire days for reviews to get my backlog down to size or that I should seriously consider lowering down my retention.

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If you always end up with a backlog and can’t consistently study all of your due cards, then you definitely need to lower desired retention or change your learning habits.
Btw, I recommend setting “Review sort order” to “Relative overdueness”, that way it will show cards with the lowest probability of recall first when FSRS is enabled.

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7

Btw, the minimum number of reviews necessary will be decreased from 1000 to 400 in the next release. Me and LMSherlock are considering lowering it further to 100 reviews.

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8

95% is the cause of your troubles. Try to set it to 85%.

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9

That would be nice!

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It’s exactly as damaging as you think. I think every piece of advice you’ve gotten in the past 3+ months has included a suggestion that you should take care of your backlog (and lots of techniques for how to do it). Folks recommend that because having a backlog is damaging to long-term and short-term learning.

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Thanks for this! I can’t believe ‘protips’ still work for me even though I have been using Anki for years now lol. This should have been included in the help section, no?

btw, how far relative overdueness’s order can be to ordering by due date? Can I expect huge change as much as that stuff in due for shorter time period somehow have lower retrievability?

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I don’t about this but someone also said parameters can be improved with just 16 reviews. We gotta wait and see what happens.

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why is backlog in spotlight for the last 3 months? I can’t imagine fsrs because people have been using it since the start of last year.

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I don’t think that backlogs are any more frequently discussed now than they have been before. People have always had and will always have backlogs. The only uptick in talk due to FSRS would be discussing whether or not to reschedule cards to the new algorithm, or let them arrive at it naturally. That’s the only “new” thing that can cause a backlog.

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I agree. Trust your memory (and FSRS).

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My memory is the reason why I have only one chance left at passing my Anatomy exams.

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Try other ways of learning maybe? I have personally heard and you probably know this already but visualization is the most important part of Anatomy. And a cool quote somewhere that goes “cadaver is the best teacher”. But I don’t know much about those.

About retention though, I’m thinking if you set up your retention lower let’s say, around 88 from your current 95, wouldn’t this free up some of your time spent Anki-ing. I haven’t tried this myself but what do you think about lower retention+extra study for harder cards+extra study for forgotten cards (maybe in custom session with “review forgotten cards”)? I know folks in language learning communities do that.
BTW, how much do you need to pass a test? iirc here you need only 50 per cent in written. I remember you saying that you can’t afford to forget many cards. Can you really not afford a lower rentention?

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