(meta: this is a short, informal set of notes i sent to some folks privately, then realized some people on LW might be interested. it probably won't make sense to people who haven't seriously used Anki before.)
sept 28
have people experimented with using learning or relearning steps of 11m <= x <= 23h ?
just started trying out doing a 30m and 2h learning & relearning step, seems like it solves mitigates this problem that nate meyvis raised
oct 1
reporting back after a few days: making cards have learning steps for 11m <= x <= 23h makes it feel more like i’m scrolling twitter (~much longer loop, i can check it many times a day and see new content) vs a task (one concrete thing, need to do it every day). it then feels much more fun/less like a chore, which was a surprising output.
obv very tentative given short timescales. will send more updates as i go.
oct 9
reporting back after ~1.5 weeks: pretty much the same thing. i like it!
i think the biggest difference this has caused is that i feel much more incentivized to do my cards early in the day, because i know that i’ll get a bit more practice on those cards that i messed up later in the day — but only if i start them sufficiently early. the internal feeling is “ooh, i should do any amount of cards now rather than in a couple hours, so that i can do the next set of reviews later.”
empirically: i previously would sometimes make sure to finish my cards at the end of the day. for the last 1.5w or so, i have for many (~1/2) days cleared all of my cards by the early afternoon, then again by the early evening, then once more (if i had particularly difficult or a large number of new cards) by the time i go to sleep.
…which has consequently significantly increased my ability to actually clear the cards, which is now making me a bit more confident that i can add more total cards to my review queue.
if i’m still doing this in 6weeks or smth, i’ll plan to write out something slightly more detailed and well-written. if not, i’ll write out something of roughly this length and quality, and explain why i stopped doing it.
see you then!
[srs unconf at lighthaven this sunday 9/21]
Memoria is a one-day festival/unconference for spaced repetition, incremental reading, and memory systems. It’s hosted at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA, on September 21st, from 10am through the afternoon/evening.
Michael Nielsen, Andy Matuschak, Soren Bjornstad, Martin Schneider, and about 90–110 others will be there — if you use & tinker with memory systems like Anki, SuperMemo, Remnote, MathAcademy, etc, then maybe you should come!
Tickets are $80 and include lunch & dinner. More info at memoria.day.
Work developed through artistic value and/or subjectivity
thanks for clarifying! so, to be clear, is the claim you’re making that: work that has artistic or otherwise subjective aims/values can find a measurement of its value in the extent to which its “customers” (which might include e.g. “appreciators of its art” or “lovers of its beauty”) keep coming back.
does that sound like an accurate description of the view you’re endorsing, or am i getting something wrong in there?
1 and 3 are not the kind of work I had in mind when writing this take.
what kind of work did you have in mind when writing this take?
what got you from Level 1 to Level 2 won’t be the same thing as what gets you to Level 3
what do you mean by Levels 1, 2, or 3? i have no idea what this is in reference to.
i think this is a reasonable proxy for some stuff people generally care about, but definitely faulty as a north star.
some negative examples:
- gambling, alcohol, anything addictive
- local optima (e.g. your existing userbase would like your product less if you made X change, but you would reach way more people/reach a different set of people and help them more/etc if you made X change)
- some products don’t make sense to have repeat customers, e.g. life insurance policies
thanks for keeping this alive, parker!
1
1i liked this! thanks for writing. last line gave me chills!
yeah, the design is super duper dope. the red fading out the white is a nice touch.
some i've added since then:
(interlude — i want to point out that, with 4 total cards, i can now translate between fahrenheit and celsius for most of my use-cases. neat!)
i've also found it useful to be able to reason with greater fluency about the numbers involved and their implications without needing to e.g. try to add up zeros or figure out what various prefixes mean at the same time. so, i've also added: