Stylistic Analysis of my Anki Cards

Published on • 4 min read

Brief Introduction

I’ve been using Anki for 2.5 years as of writing this. Here’s some stylistic analysis of some random cards. Maybe my analysis will communicate some carding tacit knowledge.

For more context, here is my essay about my reasons for using Anki.

I started Anki in Jan 23'

History cards on Principia Mathematica

I have a complicated relationship with this card. I struggle with history cards in general. I’ve done a few things to try to better network it within my cards. I’ve added a screenshot of its place in the context of my Ultimate History deck. I’ve only required that I remember the first three sig figs (up to 168X). I’ve added Cloze deletion cards to better remember the date (inspired by Gwern).

I still very much struggle with it. History cards are hard. Dates are hard. I think I’m lacking a story to tie the card to. The thing is, creating story cards also takes effort. There is a trade-off between breadth versus depth in Anki card creation. For every card I write about the story of Newton’s Principa Mathematica, I could be creating cards for WWII. There’s something like a minimum viable amount of networking of a card to make it stick, though. The more are card the more I am annoyed by context-less cards, and the more I’m willing to put in the time required to network cards, I think.

CS theory card

This one kind of bores me, but I feel like it’s important. I feel too proud right now, but I’ll probably end up suspending it in a few reviews.

This touches on a key tension I have with Anki. The tension between intrinsic curiosity and instrumental learning. By intrinsic curiosity, I mean the pleasure, excitement, interest, or pride that one sees immediately on looking at a card. By instrumental learning, I mean the high-level goals that one might have about learning a subject.

Aspirationally, I’d like to remember all of theoretical computer science. I spent 5–10h/week for a semester of school learning it

Failures vs. successes

A close friend made me this one! I don’t like cloze deletions much, partially because the majority of my cards are LLM-generated and partially because I think Q/A cards are recalled better.

I’m not sure how useful pithy abstract life advice is in Anki, but I have a bunch of cards like it and enjoy them.

Jurisdiction

I binged The Consciousness of the Litigator one night and generated a glossary of flashcards around law that I have yet to review the vast majority of. On one hand, I’m interested in how the U.S. legal system works. On the other hand, I’m interested in everything, and I only have so much time. This is like 1/40ish flashcards that I made, and the one that I have gotten to review.

I don’t feel like Anki has any satisfactory solutions to card prioritization. You can create or not create cards, but you can’t determine the priority of a given card. Maybe this is just a story that I’m telling myself, but I feel like I’d like such a feature, especially given the advent of LLM card creation. I’d like to be able to make 40 flashcards on law and have a few of them reviewed at some point.

Maybe I’m misdiagnosing the problem. However, there is a vague sense in my mind that the user experience of creating and reviewing Anki cards could be much better. 

How many electrician businesses?

I’ve been learning about different industries to start a SaaS. I realized I didn’t have any sense or grounding for “how many businesses were in a given industry”. So I made some cards for that! Specifically in the service sector and the trades. I hope that they will give me landmark numbers of sorts! I added the [X sig fig] to mean, in the case of this card, I only need to produce the answer “200,000” to mark it correct.

Thanks for reading about my Anki cards! This blog post was quite easy to write, so I may do more like this in the future. If you’d be curious to see those, please let me know! Also, if there are any other angles that you would like me to write about my Anki cards from, I’d be curious to hear that as well.

Comments? Ideas? Want to discuss further?

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