What's next?

Hello, kind supporters! Andy here. Now that the final chapter of Quantum Country’s published, we wanted to share what we’re up to next.

First off: an important update to the Patreon. After years of scrappy independent projects, Michael’s decided it’s (perhaps past) time to pursue stable employment. We’ll still be talking about these projects all the time, but they’ll be a side-project for him, rather than a full-time gig. So starting next month, this becomes a solo Patreon. I’ll still be pursuing the same ideas—just with updated tactics, sans Michael (more on that below). Please feel zero guilt in modifying or canceling your support accordingly!

Now then: what’s next?

First off, Quantum Country’s still a laboratory. We’ve been running a long-term randomized controlled efficacy trial, and that data will be ready for analysis in the coming weeks. I’m also understanding the impact of application prompts, both through data analysis and through feedback from readers.

But stepping back, now that Quantum Country’s finished, it’s time to push on the limits of the mnemonic medium. A few of my top questions:

• Varying subject matter: How does the medium’s performance (real and perceived) vary when applied to technical primers like Quantum Country, but on other topics?
• Varying genres: How might the medium’s mechanisms be adapted to other genres (e.g. persuasive writing, informal discussion, reference material, academic papers)? How might it accommodate the wider range of reader motivations in those contexts?
• So what?: What is the big-picture impact of remembering what one reads, relative to what’s important in readers’ lives?
• Towards virtuosic use: What are the most important attributes of good questions? What would virtuoso or even canonical uses of the mnemonic medium look like? How might we effectively coach authors?

We can explore some of those questions in the context of Quantum Country, but it’s clear that we’ll soon need more mnemonic texts to better understand the medium. So I’m rebuilding the mnemonic medium as a platform that can be embedded into any web page. 

Now, there’s an important path dependence in creating new mnemonic texts: the medium requires readers to adopt a new habit. Readers are (somewhat) willing to complete practice sessions for Quantum Country, since it’s a substantial text. But it wouldn’t make sense to onboard by regularly reviewing ten questions from a short essay—at least not until you’re regularly encountering lots of short material you might want to study. For now, readers’ first exposure to the medium must be a substantial text.

So in the next six months, I’ll be pursuing two parallel streams for creating new material in the mnemonic medium:

1. More mnemonic books. The goal of this path is to produce more texts like Quantum Country, substantial and meaningful enough to onboard a reader on their own. I’m reaching out to the creators of some of the best existing web books to see if they’d like to integrate the mnemonic medium into their existing texts. Some of these books are licensed under Creative Commons, so I may adapt one or more myself, either as a demonstration or for wide use. I’m also talking with some favorite authors about writing new work or adapting existing work for the mnemonic medium. (Know someone who I should talk to? Please holler!)
2. Free-ranging experiments via Anki (and QC) users. Books are heavy. They take time to write, and they’re hard to change. I’d like to be able to iterate on more nascent ideas in smaller contexts—like a Twitter thread! The trouble is that those contexts are too small to onboard users; they’re only usable by people with a pre-existing memory practice. So I’ll steal them from Anki. Lots of existing Anki users find the app repellant and don’t care about all the knobs and levers. They’d be eager to switch to a better-designed platform, particularly if it’s easy to import their libraries. This pool of early adopters (along with Quantum Country’s readers) can then enjoy smaller-scale experiments with the new platform—and perhaps create some of their own.

I’ll also be exploring more fundamental changes to the medium:

• Different types of understanding: Continuing with the application prompts introduced in Quantum mechanics distilled, how might we help readers build the practical ability to apply what they’ve read? How might we support readers in synthesizing conceptual understanding?
• Connecting to meaning: The review activities are abstract, isolated from a context in which that knowledge actually matters. How might we situate practice within reviewers’ sources of meaning, whether social, professional, or creative? Can we ditch “practice” altogether by constructing meaningful contexts which would naturally amount to review?
• Taking emotion seriously: The mnemonic medium is in many ways aseptic, overly cognitive. What mediums might we invent if we began with authored experiences focused on deep emotional connection (like the best movies and video games), and blended them with methods for building deeper understanding? Mnemonic video is one early idea.
• Timeful reading: The review sessions don’t just help you remember material. They also extend your relationship with the material beyond the moment of reading, across weeks and months. How might we take advantage of this property, e.g. to author texts which unfold over time, or prompts which build on others you’ve already mastered?
• Programmable attention: One of the most powerful elements of the review sessions is that it orchestrates your repeated attention over time across hundreds of tiny tasks, too many to manage by hand. How else might that superpower support creative work—reading, thinking, expressing, problem-solving?

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve perhaps seen that I’m also experimenting with an unusual note-taking system. That’s something of a side project right now, but it keeps knocking on the door of the primary project I’ve been describing. At some point I may let it in.

I’ve decided to continue bootstrapping all this for now, thanks in part to your kind support. Perhaps I’ll eventually apply for grants. Perhaps some parts of this work will become commercial (in which case, of course, you will all be given free passes). Figuring that out is not a high priority right now.

Your comments and questions to all this are very welcome! We’re both deeply grateful for your kind support over the last year.

—Andy (for Andy and Michael)