Thread by @andy_matuschak

One way to look at memory systems' efficiency is marginal cost: I can choose to "pay" 5m over my lifetime to memorize the answer to a question.

I find it generative to flip that around. Say I saturated 10 minutes of review daily—what would that casual practice unlock? (thread)

This framing maps better onto my lived experience. I review during interstitial dead time I'd probably misuse. It doesn't "cost" 10 minutes: it's free, so long as it stays in that timebox.

Empirically, I find my reviews stay <10 minutes so long as I cap new questions to 40/day.

If I could add 40 questions a day, that would mean I could add 14,600 questions a year, at the cost of 10 minutes a day!

The first chapter of Quantum Country is 112 questions, so that amount to something like memorizing the material from 130 textbook chapters!

But I don't add 40 questions a day! Question-writing, not reviewing, is the real bottleneck for my practice.

It's awfully difficult to write good questions, and taxing even if you're skilled at it. I find it also requires a significant context switch.

Of course, lots of people solve this by downloading others' questions, but this seems to rarely work outside basic language learning. Instead, it usually leads to people dropping the practice. More on why: notes.andymatuschak.org/z1YhDPWyvzzkC7…

Enter: the mnemonic medium. By interleaving expert-authored prompts with prose narrative, authors embed those prompts in structure with meaning. notes.andymatuschak.org/z5YjgWTaYfhWLr…

Authors supply the prompts, lightening readers' burden. notes.andymatuschak.org/z4j3bcyJfBzGdp…

There's some tension here. If I made my own 112 prompts for the first chapter of QC, I'd likely get a much deeper understanding of the material. But—also—I probably wouldn't do it! I want to spend that effort on material core to my creative work, less on more peripheral material.

The first chapter of QC takes most readers 4 hours to read (and has 112 questions). I spend 1-2 hours a day reading. So if the mnemonic medium were ubiquitous, I'd end up adding 40 questions a day, no sweat. That seems awfully enticing!

The mnemonic medium is a long way from ubiquity, to put it mildly. In the meantime, I've significantly increased my rate of new SRS prompts with another approach: turning my daily writing practice into a kind of *personal* mnemonic medium.

I write for a few hours each day, accumulating notes like the ones you see in this thread. They really help me think. notes.andymatuschak.org/zVFGpprS64TzmK…

But as I write prose about those topics, I also write SRS questions inline, much like the mnemonic medium. notes.andymatuschak.org/z5ARNXtS5Vxtes…

Those embedded questions end up in my daily review practice. I find that it's easier to write a lot of them this way, in the context of writing prose. Particularly cloze deletions.

The practice feels quite strange! It certainly distorts the prose… but not always harmfully?

One thing I like about this approach is: I don't want to just remember things I read—I want SRS to help me develop new ideas! I want to regularly review all the fragmentary inklings I sketch on the way to new insights. Embedded prompts are a convenient way to make that happen.

I feel I don't yet understand the personal mnemonic medium at all: I've only been writing this style of note for about a month. It's different from the mnemonic medium, and it's different from my old note medium, which is itself idiosyncratically different from normal notes.

I do notice that my 40 question/day quota is more consistently saturated with this practice, and that may be the high-order bit!

And of course, if review sessions are sufficiently valuable, that cap will grow: people will happily spend more than 10 minutes per day.