Maybe someone should make ~1 Anki card each for lots of EA Wiki entries, then share that Anki deck on the Forum so others can use it?
Specifically, I suggest that someone:
Read/skim many/most/all of the EA Wiki entries in the “Cause Areas” and “Other Concepts” sections
Anki cards based on entries in the other sections (e.g., Organisations) would probably be less useful
Make 1 or more Anki card for many/most of those entries
In many cases, these cards might take forms like “The long reflection refers to… [answer]”
In many other cases, the cards could cover other insights, concepts, questions, etc. raised in the body of the entry
Making such cards seems less worthwhile for cases in which either:
the entry mainly exists as a tag (without itself having much content)
the entry is about a quite well-known thing and doesn’t really say much that’s not well-known in its body (e.g., the International relations tag)
Export the file for the resulting deck and share it on the Forum and maybe elsewhere
Other people can then either use the whole deck or pick and choose which parts of the deck to use (e.g., deleting cards when they come up, if the person feels those cards aren’t relevant to their interests and plans)
I think this could also be done gradually and/or by multiple people, rather than in one big batch by one person. It could also be done for the LessWrong Wiki.
If someone does make this deck, I would very likely use some/many of the cards myself and also promote the deck to a bunch of other people.
(I also currently feel that this would be a sufficiently useful action to have taken that I’d be inclined to reward the person with some token amount of my own money to signal my appreciation / to compensate them for their time / because me saying that now might incentivise them. I’d only do this if the cards the person makes actually seems good. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss that.)
Turning the EA Wiki into a (huge) Anki deck is on my list of “Someday/Maybe” tasks. I think it might be worth waiting a bit until the Wiki is in a more settled state, but otherwise I’m very much in favor of this idea.
There is an Anki deck for the old LW wiki. It’s poorly formatted and too coarse-grained (one note per article), and some of the content is outdated, but I still find it useful, which suggests to me that a better deck of the EA Wiki would provide considerable value.
The EA community has collected and developed a very large set of ideas that aren’t widely known outside of EA, such that “getting up to speed” can take a similar amount of effort to a decent fraction of a bachelor’s degree
But the community is relatively small and new (compared to e.g. most academic fields), so we have relatively little in the way of textbooks, courses, summaries, etc.
This means it can take a lot of effort and time to get up to speed, lots of EAs have substantial “gaps” in their “EA knowledge”, lots of concepts are misinterpreted or conflated or misapplied, etc.
The EA Wiki is a good step towards having good resources to help people get up to speed
A bunch of research indicates retrieval practice, especially when spaced and interleaved, can improve long-term retention and can also help with things like application of concepts (not just memory)
And Anki provides such spaced, interleaved retrieval practice
I’m being lazy in not explaining the jargon or citing my sources, but you can find some explanation and sources here: Augmenting Long-term Memory
If one person makes an Anki deck based on the EA Wiki entries, it can then be used and/or built on by other people, can be shared with participants in EA Fellowships, etc.
Possible reasons not to do this:
“There’s a lot of stuff it’d be useful for people to know that isn’t on EA Wiki entries. Why not make Anki cards on those things instead? Isn’t this a bit insular?”
I think we can and should do both, rather than one or the other
Same goes for having Anki cards based on EA sources vs Anki cards based on non-EA sources
Personally, I’d guess ~25% of my Anki cards are based on EA sources, ~70% are based on non-EA sources but are about topics I see as important for EA reasons, and 5% are random personal life stuff
I think there are a lot of people in the EA community for whom engaging with the EA Wiki entries to the extent required to make this deck would be worthwhile just for themselves
I also think there are even more people in the EA community for whom using all or a subset of these cards will be worthwhile
(Though there are also of course people for whom these things aren’t true)
“Many of the entries probably won’t actually be that well-suited to Anki cards, or aren’t on very important things”
Agreed
But many will be
The card-maker(s) can skip entries, and the card-users can delete some cards from their own copy of the deck
Maybe someone should make ~1 Anki card each for lots of EA Wiki entries, then share that Anki deck on the Forum so others can use it?
Specifically, I suggest that someone:
Read/skim many/most/all of the EA Wiki entries in the “Cause Areas” and “Other Concepts” sections
Anki cards based on entries in the other sections (e.g., Organisations) would probably be less useful
Make 1 or more Anki card for many/most of those entries
In many cases, these cards might take forms like “The long reflection refers to… [answer]”
In many other cases, the cards could cover other insights, concepts, questions, etc. raised in the body of the entry
Making such cards seems less worthwhile for cases in which either:
the entry mainly exists as a tag (without itself having much content)
the entry is about a quite well-known thing and doesn’t really say much that’s not well-known in its body (e.g., the International relations tag)
Export the file for the resulting deck and share it on the Forum and maybe elsewhere
Other people can then either use the whole deck or pick and choose which parts of the deck to use (e.g., deleting cards when they come up, if the person feels those cards aren’t relevant to their interests and plans)
I think this could also be done gradually and/or by multiple people, rather than in one big batch by one person. It could also be done for the LessWrong Wiki.
If someone does make this deck, I would very likely use some/many of the cards myself and also promote the deck to a bunch of other people.
(I also currently feel that this would be a sufficiently useful action to have taken that I’d be inclined to reward the person with some token amount of my own money to signal my appreciation / to compensate them for their time / because me saying that now might incentivise them. I’d only do this if the cards the person makes actually seems good. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss that.)
Turning the EA Wiki into a (huge) Anki deck is on my list of “Someday/Maybe” tasks. I think it might be worth waiting a bit until the Wiki is in a more settled state, but otherwise I’m very much in favor of this idea.
There is an Anki deck for the old LW wiki. It’s poorly formatted and too coarse-grained (one note per article), and some of the content is outdated, but I still find it useful, which suggests to me that a better deck of the EA Wiki would provide considerable value.
Why this might be worthwhile:
The EA community has collected and developed a very large set of ideas that aren’t widely known outside of EA, such that “getting up to speed” can take a similar amount of effort to a decent fraction of a bachelor’s degree
But the community is relatively small and new (compared to e.g. most academic fields), so we have relatively little in the way of textbooks, courses, summaries, etc.
This means it can take a lot of effort and time to get up to speed, lots of EAs have substantial “gaps” in their “EA knowledge”, lots of concepts are misinterpreted or conflated or misapplied, etc.
The EA Wiki is a good step towards having good resources to help people get up to speed
A bunch of research indicates retrieval practice, especially when spaced and interleaved, can improve long-term retention and can also help with things like application of concepts (not just memory)
And Anki provides such spaced, interleaved retrieval practice
I’m being lazy in not explaining the jargon or citing my sources, but you can find some explanation and sources here: Augmenting Long-term Memory
If one person makes an Anki deck based on the EA Wiki entries, it can then be used and/or built on by other people, can be shared with participants in EA Fellowships, etc.
Possible reasons not to do this:
“There’s a lot of stuff it’d be useful for people to know that isn’t on EA Wiki entries. Why not make Anki cards on those things instead? Isn’t this a bit insular?”
I think we can and should do both, rather than one or the other
Same goes for having Anki cards based on EA sources vs Anki cards based on non-EA sources
Personally, I’d guess ~25% of my Anki cards are based on EA sources, ~70% are based on non-EA sources but are about topics I see as important for EA reasons, and 5% are random personal life stuff
See also Suggestion: Make Anki cards, share them as posts, and share key updates
“This seems pretty time-consuming”
I think there are a lot of people in the EA community for whom engaging with the EA Wiki entries to the extent required to make this deck would be worthwhile just for themselves
I also think there are even more people in the EA community for whom using all or a subset of these cards will be worthwhile
(Though there are also of course people for whom these things aren’t true)
“Many of the entries probably won’t actually be that well-suited to Anki cards, or aren’t on very important things”
Agreed
But many will be
The card-maker(s) can skip entries, and the card-users can delete some cards from their own copy of the deck
“This seems like rote learning / indoctrination / stifling creativity / rah rah”
I quite strongly feel that these sorts of concerns about these like Anki cards are often misguided, including this case
I can expand on that if anyone actually does feel worried about this idea for this reason