Knowledge ready for Ankification

Jokes. Common sense (and evolutionary psychology) show that people like funny people.

How many people are always trying to remember a joke they heard? This seems like an easy solution.

Terrible idea that I can't help sharing:

1. Construct a really useful, really large Anki deck for some topic.
2. Slip in a few cards of pure Lovecraftian horror/insanity.
3. Share the deck.

The one sentence summaries (encoded as the "question", with the distribution name as the "answer") of various probability distributions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_probability_distributions . When possible, I'd like to see a chart of the pdf for various common parameter distributions and guess what the distribution is. Reversing this, I'd like to be told what the distribution is, and be told a few (i.e., three) (sets of) parameters, and visualize what the pdf/cdf would look like. This would be especially useful if all of these charts were in the same format.

Biases from Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases. Cue: example of the bias; Response: name of the bias, pattern of reasoning of the bias, normative model violated by the bias.

I think "scaffolding" for other knowledge and short complete lists would be great:
Anatomical terms of location
Metric Unit Prefixes
Greek Alphabet
Human Glands
Vitamins
Amino Acids
Match Moons to Planets

If someone can find a good way to organize complexity classes, cell anatomy, or time periods I'd love you for that too.

http://www.mediafire.com/?1h4288axmg1zvpn,fry554cgj5w85r6

There's the cognitive neuroscience and lesswrong wiki cards. There's probably some sloppiness because they were generated by a script.

I'd like to see an anki deck that trains for a sort of conversational recital of interesting results in science. Often you might have a general, vague idea of the result for a piece of research, but you don't know the details that lend you gravitas in reciting them. For example, if you know the main author, the university, the decade, and so on, you come off as very knowledgeable. Whereas, if you just start off saying something like "Y'know, scientists found that bees dance to communicate," you can immediately see in their body language that they're thinking, "uh huh uh... what the fuck is this crackpot, idiot talking about?"

You're infinitely more credible if you say something like, "So, this Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate, Karl von Frisch, observed in the late 60s that bees dance to communicate..."

I'd like to see the Anki manual itself turned into an Anki deck. No one has yet done this. I've not yet completed my incremental reading of that document, and I therefore lack a deck worth sharing.

One gets better results from learning before memorizing, and creating one's own deck makes a good way to understand a complex subject. That said, having an Anki deck for the Anki manual itself would make a fine set of training wheels for the bicycle, so to speak.

Mathematical theorems, axioms and definitions are encodable as flash cards.

There are some LW-relevant Anki decks here. But I wish there were more.

For a list of all Anki decks by LW users I could find, see here.

As I write in this comment detailing my strategy for using Anki to learn material from textbooks, Peter Gray's Psychology is particularly suited for ankification. Each page from that textbook comes with 1-3 marginal "focus questions" intended to guide the student in the process of learning the material. One can simply write these questions on the front side of the card, and on the back side write a brief summary of the paragraph(s) to which the questions refer. For an example of how a card written in this way would look like, follow the link above.

I've just started to use anki (so I've been thinking about this topic a lot).

What I plan to do is put my favorite motivational quotations on there. You could just use quotations in general as they are already short and they lend themselves easily to cloze deletions.

I've also got a book of proverbs. I've been going through it and using anki for the ones I like. Proverbs are also good because there has been a lot of research on embodied cognition recently and how visual images are much easier to remember. If you can get good at looking at concepts and then thinking of images/proverbs that illustrate the concept well, you will be well on your way to becoming a great writer. Even better, you'll become a great thinker because clear writing is clear thinking.

This one may violate the do not try to use SRS unless you understand it principle. But for those who understand mathematics, this book consists mostly of definitions, which are compact enough to use an anki deck for.

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Web-Linked-Dictionary-Collins/dp/0060851791

Shit Rationalists say is a study guide for newbies that can be easily imported into an anki deck because it's short (as the great 20 rules for formatting knowledge mandate).

Just to be clear, what exactly do you mean by encoding this info in Anki decks?

To take an example from the cog neuro textbook, would the following work for inductive reasoning?

q: What do you call deriving an inference about a larger category by considering examples from within that category?

a: inductive reasoning

What about the reverse?

q: What is inductive reasoning?

a: deriving an inference about a larger category by considering examples from within that category

Would this be considered too long? Is this true of all of the terms on there?

2 is good, AIMA is good too, but probably not for everyone here. Others coming to mind

• common thinking fallacies

• math