Spaced Repetition Database for the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions Sequence

I'm happy to see something about Anki here, but how are Sequences supposed to be SRS-able in any way? "Learning" them involves understanding, not memorization of text / facts.

Or is that the joke ("mysterious answers") and I failed to see it?

Great post, thanks! In these primitive times without knowledge pills, discussion of methods to improve our learning are very welcome. Here are some I know;

• I found the SuperMemo discussed in this article pretty good for things like learning foreign words (I'm trying to pick up some Finnish vocabulary); I'm not sure how it would work for knowledge that cannot be so easily represented as A=B. I haven't fully explored the potential though.
• My personal favorite are audiobooks; it's a great way to pick up a lot of qualitative knowledge (say, history or psychology), or 'reading' a lot of 19th-century literature. Librivox and friends are excellent resources for that. The great thing about audio books is that I can do something useful with my idle time (shopping, running, commuting etc)
• For language learning, the Pimsleur is an interesting way; it's about repeating simple phrases again and again - completely ignoring writing or grammar, but still a relatively quick way to be able to converse with locals (worked for me with Greek at least to some extent)
• Memorization of random lists of things, like the ones mentioned in Mind Performance Hacks
• Remembering the things to do; GTD and OrgMode are my main tools here.

Still, there is a whole universe of knowledge that cannot be acquired using such tools -- procedural knowledge, deeply technical knowledge. I suppose there is no alternative to sitting down and excercise those gray cells; still, I'd be very interested if anyone has some new approaches there.

This is fantastic given that I am actually studying Japanese and it turns out Anki has very good support for this language. Thank you for posting this.

SRS software is very efficient, but still makes you think how terribly inefficient the brain is at remembering things. Wouldn't it be better to just read a word list once, decide "this is important" and just remember it, instead of spending half an hour every day to make the words stick?

This is great; would it be possible to link back to the sequence in question from the Flashcard itself?

Browsing the downloads section I found several pre prepared decks on pharmacology. This will come in handy, thanks!

I also note that they have a version for the iphone, which will be perfect for learning unobtrusively whenever I'm bored.

Does SuperMemo make any attempt to distinguish between learning "facts," "concepts," "relationships," and "skills?"

I would be pretty astonished if the same studying routine yielded optimal results for all four of those categories.

Are you still using SuperMemo?

I've been using Mnemosyne for about a week now. I don't have much interesting to remember at the moment, so I've been working on memorizing the Periodic Table (both numbers-symbols and order, so I can write out the whole thing to impress cute nerds). I feel compelled to post because I just had a really odd experience where something was in memory that I didn't expect to be there- I had already memorized the symbol-number pair (both ways) for H-Ar (1-18) and just added the relationships (H->? He. ->He? H). For a number of them, I blanked until I said "ok, Si is 14 and 15 is P, so Si->P." What was odd was that it worked- for some reason I was surprised that I was able to recall that 15 was P and that actually was right.

So- this works. Use it. You'll be surprised by what you can remember.

This is really useful; thanks! I've been using Anki for little over a year now, and I've found it very useful for classes and learning programming. I really like this application, and I'd love to see any more decks that you happen to make. I'll definitely start my own next time I go back and read through the archives.

I had read all the sequences before, but I have found that since I've started using the cards I've noticed the concepts coming up in my life more often

Maybe the cards could be made even more effective if they asked you to come up with an application on the spot?

I used Anki to study German and found it decently effective. It's also the only notecard software I've used that I found I could customize as much as I wanted (for instance, having three or four "sides" to a card).

I've thought about an alternative (or complimentary) answer for the question " Sequences + Spaced Repetition = ? ": Instead of this approach (which is basically distilling the posts into flashcards as per Incremental reading), how about a deck of cards with one linked post per card with further cards for particularly interesting/important points. When a card comes up for review, you read the linked post and send it to re-reading in the future. This can also be scaled to books, though that may be pushing it.

The Pro is that its easier to implement, while still being better than just one read-through of the sequences. One big con is that there's no active recall; no questions to answer, so it probably won't be as much a part of you.

The point about this being a complementary solution is that you can slowly convert links to posts into proper Q&A flashcards, which basically makes this an intermediate stage between "read once" and "make an anki deck for a whole sequence at once".

Now I didn't actually implement this yet (I only found out about spaced repetition a few weeks ago), and I'd like a second opinion from someone who's used SRS for a while on whether this idea will work or not.

As Paul Buchheit says, "'Good enough' is the enemy of 'At all'". If you download Anki, my favorite spaced repetition software (free and cross-platform) ...

This was golden! I had vaguely heard about the background theory behind this sort of memorization scheme before, but never had anyone point me to "the best easy thing" in this area. I love when people compress advice down to an actionable best-of-breed pointer :-)

I've downloaded Anki and played with it and it appears to be something that will make a substantial positive difference to my life. Thanks!

I hunted around and found flashcard sets for amino acids (none do exactly what I want and I may make my own "biohacker's amino acids" set) and spanish vocabulary, but I bet there there are all kinds of amazing card sets out there. Any tips on optimal usage or cool card sets would be appreciated :-)

IIRC, Anki is supposed to be able to export in Mnemosyne's .xml format. I'd like to take a look myself, and if it's a good set of cards, I could also upload it to the Mnemosyne card collection as well.

I just had a look at Anki and the first screenshot put me off:

The repetition mechanism looks suspiciously ad-hoc to me. 6.5 months, 1.5 years or 3.5 years, a bunch of round figures that I choose myself by looking at those very numbers? That isn't at all how I want my spaced repetition to behave. The supermemo software is rubbish but the algorithm it uses and makes public is quite good. Unless Anki has some similar algorithm that they use (and have done research on) I'll be rather reluctant to switch!