SuperMemo Video
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2021
5:08 · 35K views · Feb 17, 2018
A five-minute SuperMemo demo of incremental reading: importing a Wikipedia article on nutrition, extracting passages, making cloze deletions and finishing the item. It lists the keyboard shortcuts used.
Pointed to as a short demonstration of what incremental reading looks like in practice, though one commenter was not convinced by it.
3 comments from Hacker News
I have the perfect tool for you if you're willing to suffer through getting used to it: SuperMemo [1]. The basic feature it starts with is spaced repetition [2]. Spaced repetition is good. But terribly boring if you're making cards by hand. Because of that, SuperMemo has a feature that imo is just as important as SRS but much less known: incremental reading [3]. tl;dr of incremental reading: process hundreds of articles in a time efficient manner and enjoyably convert them to active recall items. For a video on it in action check this [4] More detail: incremental reading has a lot of parts but probably the most important is the priority queue and the concept of incrementally. Priority Queue: imagine you had 100 articles to go through. How would you process them efficiently? What if you have 10,000? You can't go through that reasonably. SuperMemo helps you manage that with a priority system which lets you choose what's actually important and what you'll end up seeing more and less often. I can't express just how much this helps. This means I can import as much shiny stuff as I want and be confident I'm not gonna lose out on stuff I actually care about. If you just used priority queue and manually made cards while going through things SM would be a big improvement over standard SRS. But it has another cool concept: incrementalism. With SuperMemo you don't read through an entire piece of content at once. You read it over time, and make extracts that you break down till you have
You can import entire articles into Supermemo and break them down into flashcards without leaving the program. Anki just gives you flashcards. There's an incremental reading plugin for Anki, but it doesn't work very well. Incremental reading works by breaking down an article into flashcards. Basically, you go: article -> paragraph -> sentences -> flashcards (usually with cloze deletions). But, because the algo manages when you see everything, I don't have to worry about doing all of that in one step. Polar Bookshelf (getpolarized.io) is more of an open source solution for archiving documents at the moment. You can export annotations/extracts from Polar into Anki, but you don't get the spaced repetition with the actual reading of articles like you do with Supermemo. I read a bit of the article, decide if making an extract of that portion is worth it, and then click next repetition when I'm done/bored reading it. I'll then get another article/flashcard/extract (of another article). You also have tools for marking up articles and saving your place. Every day I review around 30-50 flashcards, and 30-50 articles/extracts of articles. With Supermemo, I don't have to decide (or rather, I give up the ability to decide) what I'm going to read next; in favor of having everything scheduled by the algo. I go through about 800-1000 items in my RSS feeds once a day, save them into read it later/polar/bookmarks, and once a week, I throw the ones that still seem interesting into Supermemo. I
I'm interested in incremental-reading, but the video he has really doesn't sell it for me [1] It seems like you skim through an article, extract a few facts, and add them to your memorization schedule. Would it really help you summarize the article, or help you synthesize the arguments and follow the logic leading to a conclusion? 1. this video