Anki on Android in 60 seconds

Yup!

I tried fiddling with the latex plugin on my computer, but still can't get the latex to show up on my phone - I see either boxes or boxes with question marks in. Any idea how to fix this?

Does anyone have a list of decks of interest to Less Wrongers?

Having just worked through one statistics course with Anki, and having worked through parts of one machine learning and one algorithms course, I disagree. Anki is great for learning conceptually complicated material, because such material tends to be composed of a large number of elements that build on each other. For the more complicated parts to make sense, you need to remember and comprehend all of the less complicated parts that it builds on. Spaced repetition helps ensure you really do remember all of them.

I also find that memorizing various formulas is actually very useful for one's comprehension. In order to remember a large number of them, you have to think about their contents: "I think the formula went... no, wait, that doesn't make sense, so what would?" In effect, you learn to quickly rederive the formulas each time you're prompted about them, until finally you know them so well that you don't need to think about them.

Doing it this way, you also start to notice when you don't really understand how a formula works. The formula looks like this, but why? You start to think about it on and off over a span of several days, or you might go looking for the answer. Some of the formulas used in the statistics course I did involved using concepts which were never really explained within the course itself, which started bothering me. So I looked them up on Wikipedia, and after having looked up those concepts, made new cards about them. This gave me a broader understanding about the topic than I'd have gotten from the course itself.

(Some of those new cards I made involved getting to the old to-be-memorized formula from the new knowledge I'd picked up. For instance, I edited a "the formula for judging a hypothesis about the variance of a normally distributed variable" card to a "from the knowledge that the chi squared distribution is a distribution of the sum of squares of n normally distributed variables, derive the formula for judging a hypothesis about the variance of a normally distributed variable" card.)

I also find this to be more enjoyable than the traditional process. Previously, if I was reading some conceptually advanced text, I had to spend a lot of effort into both understanding it and remembering it. Now it's enough that I understand it well enough to make Anki cards out of it. On this "knowledge extraction pass", I don't need to worry too much about whether or not I understand some particular formula or algorithm. That will come later. I just enter it into a card, though frequently I do need to think about it somewhat in order to make sure that the answers and questions I'm typing make sense. Then when I'm actually memorizing the cards, it doesn't feel like it took a lot effor either, because the knowledge comes in small-sized chunks (even if they actually do connect to a lot of other information). Somehow this tricks my brain into learning vast amounts of information without it ever seeming like work.

Also, learning more and more cards triggers in me the same kinds of reward mechanisms that are activated by gathering experience and leveling up in video games, which helps make it feel more enjoyable. On some occasions, I've been known to go through a day's cards, be disappointed that I ran out of them, and then work ahead in a book just so I could make myself new ones to memorize. Partially because of this, I've picked up a habit of entering the content of any non-fiction book I read into Anki cards.

Changed.

One basic problem I've noticed when trying to do new, hard things is that I have great trouble gathering the unfamiliar concepts needed to work with the thing to my mind. There's a novice level where a thing is hard, and I can't work on the thing without having a bunch of reference material at hand, since I can't recall a suitable number of prerequisite elements from memory. This was most of my experience with nontrivial university studies. Then there's the level where you do have the basic stuff pretty much loaded to your head, but the thing is still hard because it just plain requires insight and cleverness.

SRS is supposed to help with the first level of problem. I've got no idea what second quantization involves, but I'd assume being able to perfectly recall from memory the formulas on the wiki page would be some help with it. Programming does tend to involve clever things, but you could cram language syntax, standard library APIs, design patterns and other code idioms with SRS, and would probably have a lot easier time with the hard stuff.

Writing novels probably has the largest ratio of needing to be clever to leveraging fixed crunchy bits. You could drill in some Strunk & White equivalent to help with language, but that would probably be a pretty marginal help. Suppose you're doing some sort of background research for a historical novel or something though, SRS could help you get that stuff committed to memory. Also just having a lot of stuff recallable and combinable at will would probably help in coming up with plots.