" Editing
The most efficient method to deal with leeches is to change how the information is presented. Maybe your cards have too much information, or you’re trying to memorize something without fully understanding it."
This is not true. Interference is the most common cause of forgetting. Before this was on the top of the list. It has now been moved to the bottom. Waiting is the best way.
That change was made 4 months ago, and the reasoning in the pull request makes sense to me.
That’s obviously not true for every user in every case. While it may be true for you, and “waiting” is one way to deal with interference – it’s certainly not the only way. “Editing” is another good way to deal with interference – and a host of other issues.
Editing is cheating in many cases.
You can’t edit the meanings of words without providing hints that you wouldn’t get in the real world.
異星人 alien (from another planet)
異星人 - Jisho.org
宇宙人
space alien, alien
alien - Jisho.org
Editing may work for you, and editing is one way to deal with interference - it’s certainly not the only way. “Waiting” is another great way to deal with interference, if not the best.
Leeches - SuperMemo Help
" * In heavily overloaded incremental reading, use Auto-sort and Auto-postpone to reduce the flow of leeches to a trickle"
Unfortunately, Anki can’t do this.
Editing is only cheating if you do it badly.
But regardless, I don’t personally find your argument (it’s the best way for me, so it should be at the top) more compelling than the explanation for the change (“to encourage users to make their cards more suitable for spaced repetition”). We’ll see what others think.
[I’m moving this to Anki > Suggestions *again* – please stop moving it back to the wrong category.]
Please do not ever reply to any topic I make again, and do not edit them either.
I don’t actually take orders from you. Posting in the wrong category guarantees that your issue won’t be seen and considered by any of the correct people. I should probably just let you make that dumb decision, but I’m not.
Please stop.
Leave me alone, stop editing my topics, and move on with your life.
But thank you for not italicizing every other word in your post.
Okay, if it’s important to you – you can leave your post in the wrong category. That way you can make sure that the people you’re trying to reach don’t see it – since it’s not actually about this Discourse forum. 
Please stop.
Leave me alone, stop editing my topics, and move on with your life.
But thank you for not italicizing every other word in your post.
I don’t agree completely. Here is what SuperMemo says: (emphasis mine)
Interference is probably the single greatest cause of forgetting in collections of an experienced user of SuperMemo.
So, yes, for an experienced user like you, interference is probably the most common cause. But, remember that the manual is primarily aimed at new/ inexperienced users.
Even if you assume that interference is the most common cause of forgetting, waiting is not always the best way to deal with it. Editing is useful in many cases.
Sorry, I couldn’t understand your “alien” example (i.e., I couldn’t understand what was the front of the card and what was the back and also how the cards were interfering).
But, if you want to remember the translations of the different meanings of the English word “alien”, you need to provide the hint on the front of the card. Otherwise, you can’t know which translation you are supposed to recall when you see the card.
Adding such hints is not “cheating” because you will know the context when you want to use the word in the real world.
If you consider the following quote from SuperMemo, the approach of waiting starts to feel much ineffective.
You can often remember an item for years with straight excellent grades until … you memorize another item that makes it nearly impossible to remember either! For example, if you learn geography and you memorize that the country located between Venezuela, Suriname and Brazil is Guyana, you are likely to easily recall this fact for years with just a couple of repetitions. However, once you add similar items asking about the location of all these countries, and French Guyana, and Colombia and more, you will suddenly notice strong memory interference and you may experience unexpected forgetting. In simple terms: you will get confused about what is what.
Wikipedia says something similar:
Retroactive interference is the interference of newer memories with the retrieval of older memories.[1] In other words, subsequently learned memories directly contributes to the forgetting of previously learned memories. The effect of retroactive interference takes place when any type of skill has not been rehearsed over long periods.[1] Of the two effects of interference theory, retroactive interference is considered the more common and more problematic type of interference compared to proactive interference.[1]
As compared to proactive interference, retroactive interference may have larger effects because there is not only competition involved but also unlearning.[20]
Another quote from SuperMemo, which suggests editing the cards to make them less prone to interference:
It is very hard to predict. Still you should do your best to prevent interference before it takes its toll. This will make your learning process less stressful and mentally bearable. Here are some tips:
- make items as unambiguous as possible
- stick to the minimum information principle (many of the remaining rules in this text are based on avoiding interference!)
- eliminate interference as soon as you spot it, i.e. before it becomes your obsession (e.g. as soon as you see the word inept you think “I know the meanings of inept and inapt but I will never know which is which!”)
- in SuperMemo use View : Other browsers : Leeches (Shift+F3) to regularly review and eliminate most difficult items
Another quote from SuperMemo:
- The most efficient method of dealing with leeches is to choose Edit; however, you will need lots of experience to figure out how to properly formulate the material, split it into smallest possible components and use mnemonic techniques (see: 20 rules of formulating knowledge)
for an experienced user like you, interference is probably the most common cause. But, remember that the manual is primarily aimed at new/ inexperienced users.
…
The most efficient method of dealing with leeches is to choose Edit ; however, you will need lots of experience to figure out how to properly formulate the material
There have been many papers written about interference as the source for forgetting but none on how not editing your Anki card keeps you from remembering.
I see many users beating themselves up over their cards, when in fact their cards are fine. People just have to come to terms that interference is a real thing and it is impossible to remember everything. 80% of 10,000 words is better than 100% of 1,000 words.
“Adding such hints is not “cheating” because you will know the context when you want to use the word in the real world.”
But, in the real world you won’t see or have the hint.
I probably fall under a different user case than you (I study medicine, so a lot of dry hard to memorize facts) and I suspected that a great reason why I forget a lot is interference, ESPECIALLY since I am studying in a foreign language to my mother tongue so no matter how fluent I get, I will never grasp the nuances of a topic in the same way as a native does.
I am using AI at the moment to reformulate the cards more easily but that cannot be applied for a lot of cases.
For example, memorizing tough names. I could maybe ask the AI to break it down into smaller pieces but I haven’t experimented that yet.
Well, it depends on the specific case.
If the hint tells you that you have to recall the translation of “extraterrestrial” sense of the word alien rather than the “foreign” sense, then it is not cheating. When you want to use the word in the real world, you will know what you actually mean by the word in that context.
However, I do realise that some hints may be considered as “cheating”.
For example, a user makes a card where they are supposed to recall 5 items on a single card. This card is very difficult to remember and can become a leech.
If the user splits the information into multiple cards (the minimum information principle), remembering the answer becomes easier.
I agree that not all cards have this problem. But, when this problem exists, the best solution is to edit the card.
I also wanted to put forward my view on the strategy of “waiting”. The manual says:
In such situations, it’s often helpful to concentrate on one idea at a time. Once that idea is firmly ingrained in your mind, you can then start learning the other idea. So, in these situations, you might want to leave one of the words suspended until you have learnt the other one well, and then unsuspend it.
So, in short, you want to learn one item first and then learn the next.
In that case, subsequently learned memories will directly contribute to the forgetting of previously learned memories (retroactive interference). So, you are not solving the problem of interference, you are just delaying it. According to Wikipedia, this is the more harmful form of interference:
As compared to proactive interference, retroactive interference may have larger effects because there is not only competition involved but also unlearning.[20]
Now, let’s have a look on the following text, which I have adapted from “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning” by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel.
Interleaved and varied practice has been shown to enhance the ability to discriminate. One study involved learning to attribute paintings to the artists who created them, and another focused on learning to identify and classify birds.
Researchers initially believed that massed practice (studying many examples of one artist’s works before moving on to another artist) would be more effective for learning the defining characteristics of each artist’s style. The idea was that interleaving would be too difficult and confusing; students would never be able to sort out the relevant dimensions.
However, the researchers were wrong. They found that interleaved exposure to the works of different artists was actually more beneficial. Interleaving enabled better discrimination and produced higher scores on a later test that required matching the works with their painters. The interleaving group was also better able to match painters’ names correctly to new examples of their work that the group had never viewed during the learning phase.
Despite these results, the students who participated in these experiments continued to prefer massed practice, convinced that it served them better. Even after they took the test and could have realized from their performance that interleaving was the better strategy for learning, they clung to their belief that the concentrated viewing of paintings by one artist was better. Breaking the myths of massed practice can be challenging, even when faced with contrary results.
From this, I deduce that trying to learn the interfering words together and trying to focus on the differences between them is better than learning them one-by-one.
How many people in this world mix up their left and right hands? People have to think for a moment before answering which is which. I had a coworker who even tattooed the words “left” and “right” on their wrists. This is because the two similar words and concepts are learned at the same time. Had a person been taught their right hand is called their right hand, and not mention anything about their left hand, then a year later be taught that their other hand actually has a name, their left hand, that would be remembered instantly and quickly and the two would never be mixed up.
From this, I deduce that trying to learn two similar words together will permanently connect the two in your brain forever.
I find it hilarious that you’re fighting over something like that. You really didn’t have to be rude to someone who was just trying to help. Anyways coming to the topic, why is the ordering so important? People are going to read it regardless of whether it’s in the bottom or top. If the argument is asking people to edit promotes bad habits, well then it does regardless of whether the suggestion was the first one or second one.
Interesting. In my country we always eat with our right hand so remembering that was easy for me. Left is for cleaning yourself after toilet. These associations helped. In fact even now sometimes I look at my hands and think “which one I eat with” to distinguish right and left lol.
I can tell that vaibhav is right. It happens with my jp learning all the time. I learn a Kanji and the card matures. I may find that card very easy eventually but encountering a different but similar looking Kanji then would create much more problems than it would have if I learned them together. Studying them together is much more beneficial as I get to study intently the components that sets them apart. Otherwise it means, say, I learn 祭 but then start confusing it with 発 after half an year. Then I would painstakingly try to learn 発 only to realise in the process I don’t know what 祭 actually looked like. I’ve gone through this so it’s personal experience.
I wouldn’t say that deduction from a thought experiment, based on a subjective worldview, is solid logic for making general objective statements.
In my mind, trying to teach only about “right” first would likely lead to the same confusion between “right” and “not right” at best, and at worst would not convey the essential meaning of the concept of “right” at all.