Arthur Milchior's personal blog

How I know that anki really works

I'm really bad at remembering faces and names^[1]. With anki, it did change a lot. I started a new job in september. In august, I went on the website of the laboratory I was joining, and I red the list of my future colleagues. I then created a card with their picture, first-name, last name. If the picture were not on their professionnal webpage, I did try to find them on the web and in social media. In september, when I started my job, I already knew their name^[2].

I was able to easily see the effect of anki, because I realized that, while I knew the name of the colleague who have an anki card, I still had trouble recalling the name of the few colleague who had no anki cards. I.e. if a problem had no picture of themselves on the web, I wasn't able to recall their name. In particular, it was hard for me to learn the name of the administrative staff, because their name and pictures do not appear on our website. .

Using anki to learn name has a strange side-effect. When I see the face of a colleague, I need to recall to which picture of anki he looks like, and then I can recall his^[3] name. So, it's still a costly process in my head, since using anki created an unusual indirection.

Of course, I could ask anyone without picture on the web whether I could take a picture to add in my database. Bit I believe it would have sound strange.

Problem remaining

One problem with the anki method is that it only works when I made cards. However, most of the time, I don't think about taking time to make the cards. I should certainly remember the name of people I meet in conferences, they could be future colleagues, they could lead to job opportunities or to scientific collaborations. Recalling their name and where we meet is thus important. But I don't necessarily think about doing it while in the conference. And once I leave the conference, I never do the card.

Similarly, I've got a life outside of my work. For example, when I meet friend of friend, I may want to recall them. But I can't necessarily ask to take a picture of them. And if I met them at a queer event, a polyamory event, or a bdsm event, I think adding this information in a database would be a bad idea, even if its only a private database.

Famous people

Another thing which confused me a lot is the name of famous people. Usually, I can tell more or less why they are famous. For example, I do know Didier Leribon and Didier Lestrade wrote about homosexuality. I do know that Eric S Raymond and Paul Graham wrote texts which are considered to be important in hacker's culture, and the name of their texts use two words (Hacker and Painter, Bazar and Cathedral), while I never remembered which one is which one. So I currently try to use anki to learn the name, figure and achievement of a few great name of computer science. I may write a day about the result of this experience. Right now, my biggest problem is that I do not know who I must add.

Wikipedia has list of important people in computer science. However, this list contains Euclide, Turing, Torvalds, Knuth, Jobs... I tried to add them in chronological order. The first cards were easy, I already knew about Euclide, Al-Khwarizmi, etc... they are famous. But now I do realize that even if Frances E. Allen is a pionner in CS, the note I have about her does not really help me in any way. Ok, nowaday, if I meet her, I may recall her name. But I would not really know why she is famous. Well, I'd know she is famous for being the first woman to have a Turing prize, but it would not tell me what she did to deserve it. Or more exactly, I may know she worked on compiler, but I don't know what she did about them. Worse, I believe that the early work is CS is now so basic that it would not be clear to me that it was an important work in her time.

Note that I don't only consider real people. I'm currently also using anki to learn the name and principal description of characters of long books. I usually get lost in Disc-world, for example. I now have a disc-world deck with the name of the most important characters, and a short description of things which happened to them. I also thought about doing the same thing with Tolkien's mythology, I then realized it would probably be far too much work. Especially since I don't yet know how successful this kind of deck will be.

Forgetting

I have a trouble with faces and names I do not usually have with anki. I forgot quicker than usual. Anki waits more and more before two successive occurrence of the same question. The main idea of anki is that, if you did remember successfully after 4 days, 16 days, 2 months, then you can wait 8 months before the next time anki ask you to recall this information. This is certainly true when knowledge are interrelated. For example, imagine I have just seen a mathematical concept. Imagine that anki tells me that I won't see it again for a full year. It's not really a problem, because I'll still use my knowledge to learn and work with more complicated concepts.

However, if I did not see the face of a colleague of my old laboratory during 6 months, I may totally have forgotten the name of this colleague. I never had any occasion to remember his name. It follows that I often fail the cards asking me the name of people I do not see anymore.

Sharing deck

I sometime tries to share deck when I post about anki. You'll easily understand that, in this example, I can't really share my deck, since the content has no interest for anyone except me.