But the arbitrary-factual isn't they way people recommend using Anki. I really struggle to understand exactly what people are actually using it to learn. There are a lot of medical students and that makes sense, but that is... arbitrary-factual.
I've tried many times with other material, but I always get far more out of creating condensed notes and reviewing actual notes than quizzing random factioids in Anki.
I get that probably the idea is that creating prompts could guide me about which notes to review, but it seems easier to just review the notes. I think the people doing Anki are just putting the effort into making cards rather than into making notes. It would probably be nice if it were easy to convert notes into Anki but everything I've tried sucks and it just make taking each hour of taking notes into two hours of making notes and cards. I could have just reviewed notes for that hour. Closures are sort of okay but converting notes into closures is a bigger pain in the ass than it should be.
Maybe someone can make a LLM that takes some corpus of text and generates Anki cards of key points for review. Then I could just feed my notes in. But otherwise it really seems like a huge waste of time.
Quoting myself from four years ago: Dr Ali Abdaal runs a YouTube channel (about studying medicine at Cambridge University) and one of his videos is on "Evidence-based revision tips", with citations for the studies he's working from - here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE it's about 20 minutes.
He says that spaced repetition is effective, but basic repetition of re-reading, re-watching, re-listening is not effective.
Spaced repetition with "active recall" comes out significantly more effective - instead of exposing yourself to the same material over and over, challenge yourself to recall the material at the time when you're on the edge of forgetting it; the active mental effort of doing that appears to fix information in memory much more effectively than reading or hearing it again.
A consequence of that is his suggestion that notes and review material should not be facts you want to remember, but questions that will prompt you to think and recall what you want to remember. "Writing questions for yourself makes you engage in cognitive effort, and the more brainpower it takes to recall a fact, the better strengthened that connection seems to get, according to the evidence at least".
The thing I would counter is that "people studying medicine in medical school" is a bit of a bubble. This is particularly because the step of creating notes isn't necessary. There are many, many pre-built notes and study guides to select among. It's more about finding one that works for you and adapting it to the specific coursework.
The point being that if you are studying medicine the notes for review already exist and you just touch them up. You spend very little (if any) time actually creating them. I would certainly agree it's a waste of time to create your own notes in medicine.
I don't see how making and reviewing notes is that different from making and reviewing cards. The more important aspect of using a system like Anki is leveraging the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Maybe if you already have the habit of making, organizing and reviewing notes you don't need a system on top of it like Anki?
I've tried many times with other material, but I always get far more out of creating condensed notes and reviewing actual notes than quizzing random factioids in Anki.
I get that probably the idea is that creating prompts could guide me about which notes to review, but it seems easier to just review the notes. I think the people doing Anki are just putting the effort into making cards rather than into making notes. It would probably be nice if it were easy to convert notes into Anki but everything I've tried sucks and it just make taking each hour of taking notes into two hours of making notes and cards. I could have just reviewed notes for that hour. Closures are sort of okay but converting notes into closures is a bigger pain in the ass than it should be.
Maybe someone can make a LLM that takes some corpus of text and generates Anki cards of key points for review. Then I could just feed my notes in. But otherwise it really seems like a huge waste of time.