Rereading/No Recall

Anki Learning Effectively
1

Imagine I want to remember this idea:

Find more accurate reference points by diversifying the type of social media accounts you follow.

What are your thoughts on just putting the front side with no back side for the process of remembering? How would one exactly test/grade these cards? Do you think it’s a good idea? And if not what would be a better idea? My goal is to internalize and remember this idea so that I can keep it implemented in my every day life.

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Passive recall is better than nothing at all, but you should always try to convert it to active recall.

“What can you implement to increase the accuracy of your reference points?”
“Diversify the type of social media accounts you follow.”

Language is very flexible.

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I hear that, but the problem with these cards is that there are multiple answers for the prompts like these. Most of the flashcards I have have a singular answer that is obvious from the context. But these types of flashcards tend to have more than one answer. Like for example I can also watch youtube videos of people in different geographical/socioeconomic regions as another way to increase the accuracy of my reference points. If I end up specifying the answer the answer feels kind of obvious. You know? I was wondering if there was a known way to deal with these types of cards so that it’s not obvious enough to just forget in real life implementation but also not vague enough to be frustrated with.

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For something like this, I think you shouldn’t use active recall. Without knowing exactly what you are talking about “Find more accurate reference points by diversifying the type of social media accounts you follow” seems kind of obvious so active recall wouldn’t help with this. You want the idea to be internalized as a part of you. To do this, I think you need to see the idea and really reflect on it: imagine concrete scenarios where you could use this idea, imagine physically doing the idea and why you are doing it, imagine what would happen if you didn’t do the idea, etc. You want to really think about it and reflect on it.

Take for example the idea “I am going to die one day”. You obviously understand what that means but do you really think about it constantly? Do you live everyday as if it’s your last? Maybe you do or maybe you don’t. Creating an Anki active recall card to ask you “Will you die?” doesn’t really do anything. You would need to see this idea on a recurring basis that you choose (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).

Here are some ideas of how to implement this:

  1. Create a special deck for these types of reminders and set the learning steps to something like "10m 1d 1d 1d 2d 2d 3d 3d 4d 4d 5d 6d 8d 12d 33d" and the relearning steps to something like "1d 2d 2d 3d 3d 4d 7d 10d 33d". The point of this is to get you to think about the idea on a consistent basis and then let it graduate. If you see the graduated idea and it has an interval higher than 33 days but you realize you haven’t really implemented this idea in your life you can click “again” and set it back to the relearning queue.

  2. Create a special deck that has a max interval of your choosing so that you would see this card consistently (e.g. daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, yearly, etc.)

  3. Don’t create an Anki card, and write this in your notes somewhere and come back to it whenever you feel like it.

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Suggest you read Andy Matuschak.

I’ll briefly note down my ideas:

  1. Questions do not need to be similar in kind to what you were or are doing in school.
  2. Questions are facilitators of answers and you never really know something without the context of questions.
  3. You shouldn’t say, “How to frame the question so that I know X”. You say, “I want to learn X in the context of what?”

Now, I think a good way of creating a card for this is clozing the end of the sentence so that you link the “finding reference point” with the required task for that.

Well, you can create reading cards with no back but it’s not that great I think unless you want to vaguely remember the idea for some unspecified reason (which is fine and I do it at times).

That’s another idea for prompt writing. Imagine a scenario where you want to know this and write it down. Now the question should be, “In X scenario, what should I be thinking?”. That’s something Andy does and I believe some others do too.

You can also simply ask a question and note down all the possible responses. Then use cloze for all the points. Now, when answering you have the context of the other responses to know they are not the answers to this question.

I think this is a good prompt because it emulates what often actually happens, is that you try come up with ideas but run out of them. So that’s a realistic context to my mind. You want to be able to come up with the response given you’re provided all the other possible answers.

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