Some of these observations aren't particularly surprising, but this line really took me out of it:
> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.
The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.
Using the scheduler estimates from the FSRS simulator [1], for desired retention held equal at 85%, I received approximately 20-30% improvements in workload upon switching to FSRS from SM-2. Even disregarding the "internal" improvements, the ability to reduce the number of parameters that require modification/present risk to performant scheduling is heavily reduced to only setting desired retention explicitly (a benefit in and of itself) as well as minor decisions (e.g. inclusion of suspended cards). Interpretability really is far less of an issue than efficiency, and frankly the achievements of the team behind FSRS (including their decision to make it publicly available) should be lauded.
It definitely is! It's unfortunate that what seems to have developed to be the consensus view on SRS within most language learning/high-load traditional academic circles (>90% of the userbase, I'd imagine) that it is, at best, a very useful but unfortunate inevitability, or at worse a torturous and exhausting experience. That obviously doesn't apply to everyone; factors like card design, course content/interest (the passion element which Nielsen rightly identifies as integral) and good old mindset and habituation all vary within those communities and beyond; but I think it is fair to say it's the majority opinion, particularly for those just starting to use the software. Some of that difficulty can be overcome by being patient with the obtuseness I think, but at the end of the day it helps to at least somewhat enjoy what you're studying! Anki can help you love a subject you like, but it usually can't help you like one you hate.
Pleased to see this posted here again. Nielsen's writing on Anki and memory systems more broadly has been nothing short of incisive, inspiring and paradigm-shifting in contributing to the ongoing "hermeneutic turn" within the community. Whilst this is not as evident as with his later essays, ATLM lays the foundations for some of the most important points for beginners of using the tool: a focus on coherence, disambiguation, and crystallisation as virtues of an Ankification practice; and above all shifting the conversation from it as a miserable prosthetic to memorise arbitrary associations to a genuinely beautiful tool that you can use to shape and change what you know, are and do.
The former interpretation's popularisation does unfortunately seem to be the outcome of it being embedded within the epistemic ecologies of language learning and medical school, two situations where Anki is almost inevitable if one is to succeed, but also where its unique power of meaning making is most neglected. As he writes in "Building a better memory system" [1], targeting the audience of the creative expert seems to be where the most tractability in expanding and improving a mnemonic practice lies. I hope such progress continues in the vein of current open-source and community-oriented advancements such as FSRS - the best feature of which is making switching from SuperMemo all the more obvious ;)
Anecdotes don't make data. I'm keen to see any significant study that demonstrates the existence of so-called cancel culture, but for now it seems to be making a big fuss over a few overzealous institutions and some well-meaning but decidedly myopic liberals.
I'd argue that the trend can come from two places, the less rational type you mentioned which appears to occur to enhance compatibility with an in-group, and the type which is based on having a set of base moral values which then affects our political beliefs. The latter of these can be seen as creating one layer of abstraction above the values, perhaps aiding in expressing those views, as well as enabling discussion with those who arrived on their views without consultation with their morals (due to copying others views, going with current trends in ideology, etc.).
Whilst this may be too critical, I find that if you wish to use Anki for proper "learning" rather than simple memorisation, cloze deletions are the wrong way to go about it.
They suffer from being too easy to get wrong and too hard to get right, as well as your brain often just recognising the pattern of the words in the text rather than the information itself.
If you want to make good cards in general, you need to think more in terms of building up a detailed corpus. Interlink cards, establish key concepts in a field, focus on relations between atomic units rather than individual atomic or non-atomic units. In addition, include images to serve as useful stimulation for the visual cortex. The only real advantage I can see to clozes is a marginal speed increase.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, it seems that the author falls victim to the same fallacies he mentioned in his post. By assuming that all discussion of politics inherently devolves into tribalism, he invokes the all-or-nothing attitude which, as he mentioned, is often present among politically "engaged" people with minimal experience with views outside their sphere of opinions.
It's also worth noting that I notice some people will often conflate, usually accidentally, holding strong opinions (politically or otherwise) with not being exposed to a wide enough range of opinions/not being educated enough.
In addition to this, people will often hold a series of political views out of ideological consistency, rather than tribalism, a factor which strangely is minimised in the discourse surrounding it.
I find that, as long as you're with reasonably politically aware adults, you can have positive conversations as long as you are both aware of your moral bases and discuss in good faith.
Fairly simple, use my brain as well as the methods listed in https://nabeelqu.co/understanding to understand the material, then use Anki for any details that are useful to remember. There are lots of techniques out there on how to "superlearn" or similar, but really most of the time they have very marginal benefit, and you just need to get on with it.
To anyone's who's used LibreOffice recently - is it still as buggy and terribly performing as a few years ago? I remember trying to open a 10 page document with a few images and it took in excess of two minutes to open it. At that point I just decided to use LaTeX.
As usual with anything that isn't open source, I have significant doubts about the longevity of this. Making a few questions on each article and putting them in Anki is probably more effective and also pretty much certain to still work in a few years time, for free.
> This is a misdirection. Yes there are a very small minority of people who do call for this but it is what I'm talk about is simple opposition to others political beliefs. If I say that there are only two sexes and you cannot change your sex, I would be banned from many of the most popular subreddits. This is not advocating for the genocide of trans people. It's a scientific and political position.
A comparison can be made to other positions which may be a tad extreme here, but I think it's arguably appropriate. If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room. However, even if attempts are made to persuade said people with logical arguments, often they will continue to hold such beliefs to the same strength or even stronger than before.
Is it appropriate to silence people for holding specific views? No. But ultimately some compromise has to be made. A decent solution may be the use of a debate section, but I'm sure better ones exist.
> Maybe I'm naive, but it seems pretty obvious that it's because technology is mostly full of leftists, so they tolerate their own extremists and ban their opponents. Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.
I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.
I'd assume another reason is that given that a small number of far-right threads/communities exist, you're going to have people leaving simply because people who are against, or at least frustrated with, your existence isn't a great place to be around.
I'm curious, can you point me towards some examples of the data you suggest? I personally haven't seen anything of the kind, although perhaps newer data may suggest slightly lower rates of overall satisfaction given that increasing awareness of something to an otherwise unaware population is always going to increase false negatives. Still, the figures I see are always approximately in the 95%+ positive range.
I think the core of a lot of these issues is the distinction between universal findings which almost always are in favour of "progressive" worldviews and anecdotes which aren't necessarily. The example of trans people detransitioning is a good one here - the general truth that transgender people are very happy with their decision to do so (regardless of what that may mean for them) conflicts with individuals and their anecdotes regarding their (or people they know's) transition.
Whilst there isn't inherently incorrect or morally wrong about detransitioning in itself, often when brought up it can lead a person to an idea which is incorrect - essentially applying the anecdotal evidence of a Reddit thread to all situations.
Thus, moderators of subreddits (and administrators, although I think that whilst it is bad when they do so, it isn't as common as many would believe) feel conflicted on the matter. Should they allow the discussion to continue, almost guaranteeing that somebody is going to form misconceptions from the thread? Or should they shut it down, stifling free speech but at the same time reducing the level of overall animosity towards minorities in the community, and preventing people from forming misconceptions?
Ultimately, I think that it should always really come down on the side of free speech, as long as they aren't being blatantly hostile. However, in my opinion, if we really want to have a positive "marketplace of ideas", as some describe it, we really need to educate people from a young age on logical reasoning, cognitive biases and argumentative fallacies the same way we would teach history, geography or the arts. Whilst I think that's unlikely to happen in our current political climate, given that keeping people uneducated is a very effective way to make them vote for those who make the most compelling surface-level arguments, it seems to be the only good solution for the conflict laid out above.
> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.
The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.