Failing to see the big picture

From: mh
Country: {{{Country}}}
Sent: Nov 27, 2016
Subject: repetitions

Question:

Making regular repetitions is a sort of activity that helps me re-focus/re-align myself. The problem is, after some time, I start to not see the wood for the trees. What I mean is the atomic nature of SuperMemo items helps start small. In the past, my biggest problem was to get overwhelmed with the big picture (of a project) before I actually started it. However, the frequent reason for interruptions in repetitions is a failure to translate them into a bigger picture. I start to perceive them as a waste of time while I should be focusing on what's truly important (e.g. programming instead of reviewing my English which is basically pretty good). In the course of my daily repetitions, I hit items I consider a waste of time. Not all pieces of knowledge seem worth their while.

Answer:

Answer 1

Fortunately, your problems are easy to solve with a couple of inbuilt features:

• Incremental reading: This is the ultimate solution for the "forest vs trees" issue. Topics (articles and extracts) keep the 'forest' in mind while (Q/A) items focus on the trees. Over time, you make so many personally-relevant extracts and cloze-deletions that you really build your own forest of Q/A items which is enough to maintain a big picture. Also, writing your own material leads to much more meaningful knowledge.
• Priority queue: This is the solution for ensuring that you stop wasting your time. First, you will need to use incremental reading to add new and interesting content into the same collection. Then you can use Alt+P to set the priority of individual articles as high (close to 1%), and then everything developed from that article will also be high priority. You can also set entire branches (e.g. Advanced English) as low priority. However, priorities are relative, so first add a mix of things to your collection (e.g. English, programming, etc.) and then prioritise.

Since you are already comfortable with the most boring part of SuperMemo (repetitions of old items), you will see a strong improvement in meaningfulness by using these tools. Good luck!

Answer 2

My solution to the problem is to adhere meticulously to prioritizing my material to perfection. I always start the day with a question "What item will SuperMemo show me first?". Will the question be disappointing or will it really touch upon something I really need to know badly. With my focus on priorities, I am never disappointed. This always gives me a great start to the day. If they are items I have doubts about or I just do not like (for hard to explain reasons), I give them low priorities. I never manage to complete my outstanding queue because I have many items other than for learning English. This way those "less pleasant" items just hide in the process. I review them less often. If this makes me forget, at least I know I forget things that I care less about.

As I get deeper and deeper into the priority queue during the day, my focus drops, I get tired, and I care less. It all becomes automatic. A good start makes it easy, the rest is less important.

Answer 3

For programming notes, consider the approach detailed in Janki method. It is based on Anki but applies to SRS in general.

Big-picture capture is a significant issue. Be sure to make elements that capture the intuition and insight you want to retain. This is especially helpful in math and programming. Consider focusing on _why_ questions for these. Also look to capture analogies and metaphors. For example, for math you can ask for a rigorous definition of the derivative as the limit of the difference quotient of a function, but also have an element that asks for a general conceptual summary of what the derivative is. And don't forget that SuperMemo can execute animated gifs, so placing an animated image like this one in an image component tagged as part of the answer can be much more effective than only capturing the specific definition. It is also important to consider capturing both high- and low-level information from multiple "angles" to ensure a concept is properly ingrained. Also remember to refine elements as you go, if an element is poorly worded clean it up or if it needs to be split apart or combined with others do so, and delete useless elements during review.

Another example of the usefulness of animations is taking these animations and asking questions like "What sort is used in this image" etc. https://www.toptal.com/developers/sorting-algorithms

I also find that even though I primarily use Q/A elements (as opposed to incremental reading) that over time I am building up a different way of thinking that incorporates many of the concepts I have in the system. Experience is showing that items should be encoded with a view towards future integration mentally with other concepts. In software engineering and math this is called *orthogonality* -- basically it means you can take two independent things and combine them in useful and meaningful ways. By repetitive quizzing on material, even though they are "trees" you start to make connections between concepts you wouldn't normally make. It is not necessarily SuperMemo directly forcing these connections but rather the fact that you are facing a daily "pop quiz" that ensures information remains fresh in your mind. As you go through the day you may encounter situations or ideas that suddenly seem related to the information you recently quizzed in SuperMemo. So in this way you build up the forest from the trees upward, whereas you (hopefully) get the forest first when you read a book / watch a video and begin extracting the "trees" of Q/A elements. What this means is that while you see each topic as its own "forest" initially (e.g. an English forest, a Math forest, etc) as you quiz on the "trees" daily you start to build up an "integrated forest" that contains interlinked elements from all of these formerly separate groups.

In my experience this interlinked forest is far more useful because it is *your* understanding that you have built up over time.

Answer 4

If you use the question-answer approach, as in classical SuperMemo, you will notice that it always give you a false feedback: you feel you make less progress than you actually do. This is because you keep being bombarded with leeches and hard items. You do not experience any novelty (as in incremental reading). All the main mass of your long-interval items is hidden in the process. You do not see it much. If you make an "evening summary" of what you learned, you will often come very scant. Not only you have little novelty and lots of old leech material, you are also employing weak passive memory. You do not learn "what questions I had today". You learn "answers to questions (you had today)". You may have learned 30 answers, but you will recall just 2 questions in your "evening summary". This is why you should rely on SuperMemo statistics to judge your progress, not your subjective feeling based on that false feedback.

Instead of measuring feelings, you need to measure actual progress.

Advanced English 2014 could also be intermingled with your general knowledge collection (if you have one). Doing just English at some point is bound to feel like a low productivity effort.

Most of all, the best approach is to try incremental reading. With a regular inflow of new material and lots of extra reading, your subjective feelings about progress will be much more positive.

Follow-up Question

What does this statement mean?

Classical SuperMemo is notorious for giving you false feedback.

Is this referring to use of older versions, or to use of SuperMemo in standard Q/A form? If the latter, what false feedback? Personally I find the Q/A form *far* more useful than incremental reading for studies and am very interested in so-called "false feedback" effects.

Answers

Classical SuperMemo

In most contexts when we speak of "classical SuperMemo", we mean the use of type-in questions and answers, like in SuperMemo 1.0. SuperMemo 17 can also be used with questions & answers only. This approach is ineffective for most users. As discussed often in other places, it is the user psychology that makes "classical SuperMemo" hard. If you feel good with your approach, it almost certainly is ok.

False feedback

In classical SuperMemo you always "feel" much worse about your progress than your statistics actually show. It is the opposite to book reading. With a good book, you usually feel like you learned a lot. Naturally, a year later, you will remember little of the book. By that time, you will be enjoying another book. In other words, the brain is great at detecting novelty and finding joy in learning. It is much worse in estimating the durability of knowledge. In SuperMemo, we learn things we are likely to forget due to insufficiently frequent use. This goes against the conditions the brain would meet in African savannah. Today we want to do complex science and engineering, and we need a bit of support from technology.