- Tags:: 🗞️Articles, Spaced repetition
- Author:: Andy Matuschak
- Link:: How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding (andymatuschak.org)
- Source date:: 2020-12-01
- Finished date:: 2022-01-08
Making questions about something is iterative:
You’ll jump around, focusing only on the parts which seem most valuable. You may return to a resource on a few occasions, writing more prompts as you understand what’s most relevant. That’s good! Exhaustiveness may seem righteous in a shallow sense, but an obsession with completionism will drain your gumption and waste attention which could be better spent elsewhere
Good prompts for lists:
But unless you’re an experienced cook, you’ll probably find this prompt intractable, or you may remember ingredients inconsistently. Unordered lists like this can be challenging to translate into good prompts. One good strategy is to create a set of questions which require you to fill in a missing element of the list:
First I write prompts focused on each of the tagged items, linking from the instance to the tag. Then I might separately write prompts about the tag itself, perhaps inspired by patterns I notice in its instances. Finally, I often write a prompt which fuzzily links from the tag to its instances by asking for examples.
The novelty admonition is an interesting trick: “give an answer you haven’t given before.
Spaced repetition to keep ideas salient, like your list of favorite problems:
one valuable use for spaced repetition prompts is to keep ideas salient, top of mind, over longer periods of time. Gwern Branwen has pointed out** In private communication. that such prompts are effectively trying to extend the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and control it for a purpose (…) Viewed in this way, the point of repeating these prompts over time is to keep the relevant ideas salient until they have a chance to connect to something meaningful in your life.
Note: the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is the frequency illusion congnitive bias.