Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen: How Can We Develop Transformative Tools for Thought? https://numinous.productions/ttft/: 'We’ll begin with three principles we used when writing the cards in Quantum Country. Note that these are just three of many more principles–a more detailed discussion of good principles of card construction may be found in Augmenting Long-term Memory...
...Most questions and answers should be atomic: Early in his own personal memory practice, one of us was learning the Unix command to create links in the filesystem. He entered the following question into his memory system: “How to create a soft link from linkname to filename”. Together with the corresponding answer “ln -s filename linkname”. This looks like a good question, but he routinely forgot the answer. To address this, he refactored the card into two more atomic cards. One card: “What’s the basic command and option to create a soft link?” (A: “ln -s”). Second card: “When creating a soft link, in what order do linkname and filename go?” (A: “filename linkname”). Breaking the card into more atomic pieces turned a question he routinely got wrong into two questions he routinely got right. It seemed that the more atomic questions brought more sharply into focus what he was forgetting, and so provided a better tool for improving memory. And what of the original card? Initially, he deleted it. But he eventually added the card back, with the same question and answer, since it served to integrate the understanding in the more atomic cards.
Make sure the early questions in a mnemonic essay are trivial: it helps many users realize they aren’t paying enough attention as they read: This was a discovery made when we released the first Quantum Country essay. Anticipating that users would be struggling with a new interface, we deliberately made the first few questions in the essay utterly trivial–sort of a quantum equivalent to “2+2 = ?”–so they could focus on the interface. To our surprise, users performed poorly on these questions, worse than they did on the (much harder) later questions. Our current hypothesis to explain this is that when users failed to answer the first few questions correctly it served as a wakeup call. The questions were so transparently simple that they realized they hadn’t really been paying attention as they read, and so were subsequently more careful.
Avoid orphan cards: These are cards which don’t connect closely to anything else. Suppose, for the sake of illustration, that you’re trying to learn about African geography, and have a question: “What’s the territory in Africa that Morocco disputes?” (A: “The Western Sahara”) If you don’t know anything about the Western Sahara or Morocco or why there’s a dispute, that question will be an orphan, disconnected from everything else. Ideally, you’ll have a densely interconnected web of questions and answers, everything interwoven in striking ways...
#noted #2019-12-17
