Spaced Repetition literature review prize: And the winner is...

With all that said, I do have some feedback for jsalvatier! (Please don't take this as defecting criticism; also, in the interests of honesty - I noticed all of #2 shortly after the contest began, and kept quiet out of plain self-interest, waiting until the judging happened).

1. First, it caused me a little stress that judging took so long. The deadline was 1 August, it didn't have to take 18 days to judge, even if events intervened (as they apparently did) to block the earlier gathering which would judge the contest - it could have been done online by so few judges. This is especially true for a contest with only two entries.

2. The contest was mishandled from the standpoint of publicity. I should not have been so confident I would win; there should have been more than 2 entries with $400 at stake for a task intrinsically worthwhile. There are a number of ways this could have been advertised better:

   1. This could have been announced on the Mnemosyne and Anki mailing lists and forums. It is quite relevant to their interests and they are the obvious places to announce such a contest, even if they would not link it on their front pages.
   2. It could have been advertised better on LW. This was really generous and interesting and potentially a key community tool! (lukeprog won't be this active forever.) Why wasn't the contest an article on the Front Page? (AFAIK, it never appeared there.)
   3. Piotr Wozniak, the expert of experts on spaced repetition in practice, could have been contacted to participate or possibly advertise it on Supermemo.com; he may sound intimidating from the Wired article, but my email correspondence with him was perfectly normal and fluid, with the ordinary delays.
   4. The contest, per #2, could have been submitted to Reddit (the psychology subreddit being only the most obvious of multiple potential targets) or Hacker News; both communities are interested in spaced repetition. This is also true of Imminst.
   5. Google AdWords could have helped; $10 buys a lot of clicks when it comes to spaced-repetition ads, and could well be worth it. ($350 is about as impressive as $360 as seed for a prize.)
   6. Interested LessWrongers could have been personally contacted. Anyone who has created a deck of flashcards is obvious; and why not contact lukeprog? Reading and summarizing papers and reviews is practically his specialty. He is busy, of course, but it's not like spaced repetition is that worthless compared to his current topics, and the prize may make up for lost time.

I'd like to thank John for putting up the prize money and just starting the prize - such things can be thankless, and as public goods one might expect them to be under-supplied. I would have worked in some of that research, but not this soon nor in as much depth.

I also appreciate the feedback he and the judges left on the SR page. Feedback is a pretty rare thing for things I write.

I'm afraid I don't have grandiose plans for the money - $272 is earmarked for repairs to my car (in part thanks to my sister), and I already spent $70 on fish oil and vitamin D. The $40 left may enable me to finally experiment with nicotine, which ought to be interesting.

EDIT: I ordered the nicotine-water last night. Preliminary plans: using the habit-formation for exercise, spaced repetition, and n-backing.

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I had a six month long "4-6 days a week" Anki habit under development before I started my most recent gig. The new work routines disrupted my Anki habit and several days ago, actually using some of the content, I realized I'd forgotten how to fingerspell a certain letter that was in one of my decks. Reading these essays reminded me of all the good reasons I had for doing Anki and I started working through my backlog of cards.

I just wanted to say thanks for the contest and the essays and everything. It is more likely than not that I'll reform my habit in my new environment. You caused the splash and I benefited from the positive ripples. Thank you to everyone involved :-)

Ok. I had earlier promised to donate $20 to the charity of the winner's choice. So, Gwern please choose.

My biggest takeaway from the research is that it's worth thinking briefly about every new Anki card whether I can make it an effective short-answer question rather than a cloze-deletion.

Er... that's my biggest action item. My biggest takeaway is that research definitely supports spaced repetition + testing far over studying.