Prompt makeover logs

These are great insights, Matt! "Writing good prompts" involves developing better theories of what it is to understand things—what's important to know vs. what's not; what's meaningful; etc. Sounds like you've made progress there!

Andy Matuschak

Andy, I'm really enjoying reading the guide to writing prompts. It's a real pleasure, so thank you. I actually just finished a major overhaul of my notes. I don't have a nice log like the above, but I thought I would share a bit about my experience in case it's useful. I've read Nielsen, done the Quantum Country, and so I think the actual way I write prompts is mostly ok, though I continue to discover more concise ways to write. But for a variety of reasons, I had fallen way behind on review and was in a position where I needed to review a couple hundred cards over a few days that I hadn't seen for months. On 2/3 of the cards, my reaction was "I don't remember, but also I don't care." My big issue was that I had misjudged the level of detail I would care about in the future. After thinking about it, I realized one of my goals with SRS is to internalize a large academic literature that is siloed over multiple domains, so that I can synthesize and draw connections between disparate works. After being away from the cards for a few months, I found I really cared about knowing different explanations, so I kept cards about those. For example, I have a set of cards about the ways evolution can cross fitness valleys, and I kept them all. But since explanations typically involve at least a bit of elaboration, I've found the average length of my cards has increased. On other cards, there was more detail than I cared about. For example, I had a card that said: Children whose parents have patents obtain patents themselves at a rate of {{c1:18}} per thousand, while children whose parents do not have patents obtain them at a rate of {{c2:2}} per thousand. I changed this to: Children whose parents have patents obtain patents themselves at a rate of {{c1: ~10x} the rate of children who do not. But many other cards I simply deleted. Instead, I just assume I can return to my notes if I ever have to write on these topics with any detail.

Ah, great! Yes, I've found that word useful. Non-technical non-fiction is full of heuristics and mental models, which usually need subjunctives to be formulated reasonably. I do notice that "might" prompts tend to have more ambiguity issues, since it often suggests multiple candidates.

Andy Matuschak

This is great—thank you for sharing!

Andy Matuschak

Same feeling for me. This is only mildly relevant, but I've noticed that the word "might" seems to open the door to significantly better prompts. Less than 1% of my prompts include it (according to a quick search), and most of those were created after discovering your notes with the prompts in them. The guide has really increased my usage of it, despite no explicit recommendation. Not sure if this is useful to you, but I thought it was interesting.

I personally call this "Flashcard Refactoring", and I actually have a series of articles on my blog / newsletter where I go in depth on particular cards in my deck and how to improve them! http://www.marknagelberg.com/flashcard-refactoring/ http://www.marknagelberg.com/tips-from-anki-flashcard-refactoring-add-enough-knowledge-to-your-deck-and-review-your-sources/ http://www.marknagelberg.com/tips-from-flashcard-refactoring/ http://www.marknagelberg.com/combating-knowledge-interference-flashcard-refactoring/

Thanks for sharing. Yes, I definitely have that problem! It's an unfortunate pressure: usually the most easily "translatable" things are trivial things, rather than deep insights or my own ideas.

Andy Matuschak

This is excellent! Unfortunately, I only have one such example: https://again.blog/formulation-fun-1/ On a somewhat related note, have you bumped up against a subtle psychological push to write things that are easily "translatable"? The closest analogy I can think of is the idea that TDD pushes you to write code that's easily testable but not necessarily optimal.