Issa at 02:44, 23 July 2021

2021-07-23T02:44:29Z

Issa: Created page with "I had an awful card about Wang coding from studying computability theory a few years ago (I was just learning how to use Anki for math back then). No surprise then that I kept..."

2021-07-23T01:47:38Z

Created page with "I had an awful card about Wang coding from studying computability theory a few years ago (I was just learning how to use Anki for math back then). No surprise then that I kept..."

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I had an awful card about Wang coding from studying computability theory a few years ago (I was just learning how to use Anki for math back then). No surprise then that I kept burying the card because I was like "ugh, I don't like this card, and I want to catch up on my reviews anyway". Well today I sat down and finally reviewed the card. As I was trying to answer it, I got confused again whether the left or right numeral had to be reversed. This got me thinking again about ''why'' we should bother reversing one of the numerals. And lo, I figured out a really good reason that was ''not'' even given in the textbook. It looks to me now like the explanation in the textbook is some kind of made-up post-hoc explanation... written by someone who did not spend the time to actually invent the encoding!

Reflecting on why I was able to discover this, it seems like it's because I had this bad big card that worked for a few years but finally "broke" due to poor memory encoding. And that gave me a chance to think about it longer. What if I had just made a bunch of small cards from the beginning? Would I have discovered this same fact? Or would I have just kept answering the same easy questions, without questioning the reason why the encoding was set up this way? It seems like the "ugh" feeling is really important here -- it finally drove me to ''do the thing''.

==See also==

* [[Spaced proof review as a way to invent novel proofs]]

==What links here==

{{Special:WhatLinksHere/{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}

[[Category:Spaced repetition]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 02:44, 23 July 2021
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	Reflecting on why I was able to discover this, it seems like it's because I had this bad big card that worked for a few years but finally "broke" due to poor memory encoding. And that gave me a chance to think about it longer. What if I had just made a bunch of small cards from the beginning? Would I have discovered this same fact? Or would I have just kept answering the same easy questions, without questioning the reason why the encoding was set up this way? It seems like the "ugh" feeling is really important here -- it finally drove me to ''do the thing''.		Reflecting on why I was able to discover this, it seems like it's because I had this bad big card that worked for a few years but finally "broke" due to poor memory encoding. And that gave me a chance to think about it longer. What if I had just made a bunch of small cards from the beginning? Would I have discovered this same fact? Or would I have just kept answering the same easy questions, without questioning the reason why the encoding was set up this way? It seems like the "ugh" feeling is really important here -- it finally drove me to ''do the thing''.
		+
		+	Perhaps another instance of [[creative forgetting]].

	==See also==		==See also==

Big cards can be good for mathematical discovery - Revision history

Issa at 02:44, 23 July 2021

Issa: Created page with "I had an awful card about Wang coding from studying computability theory a few years ago (I was just learning how to use Anki for math back then). No surprise then that I kept..."