Matt Barnes - Quantum Country interview - 2019-06-19

“One-Night stand” user

Synthesis + highlights

Matt already has an Anki practice. He transcribed our cards and has been studying them diligently… so he appeared to not be using our system at all. He’s a believer, but our separate review system is just a tax for him to use. But:

“The one thing that’s very nice about this medium is that I don’t have to come up with the questions.”
Without the essay, though, he says the questions wouldn’t have worked.

He doesn’t really care about a sense of progress with his Anki practice. It’s now just something he does regularly, for a fixed time cost, for which he feels a strong benefit.

Raw notes

  • How’d you find it?
    • Subscribed to MN’s blog
    • Hadn’t studied QM before
  • Why read it?
    • Uses Anki, “a big fan of that”
    • “I study a lot of machine learning,” interested in intersections with QC, has colleagues who are into that, wants to discuss
  • First impression
    • Wanted the 101; had tried to find a tutorial before, but it was too dense. Really likes the writing style. Had a level of trust.
    • How’d this text compare to the tutorial / prior book?
    • “More engaging. More fun to read.”
  • On Anki usage:
    • Got started via MN’s post
    • Uses it for reading technical papers. “I read a paper a day”
    • Will write cards about, say, a trick a paper uses, or for simple definitions and notations
    • Has been using for 6 months, has 650 cards
    • Reviews every other day, stays manageable
    • About 5 minutes
    • “I’m making progress.” What do you mean?
    • Just building up more of a deck…
    • “It has this weird feeling that the knowledge you’re gaining is more tangible”
    • Starting to get better at writing cards, he feels
    • Do you pay attention to the review intervals on the buttons?
    • Young cards feel easy, familiar
    • Old cards are in a few buckets: either the knowledge is now easy, or the question now feels irrelevant, or the knowledge has slipped
    • When answering old cards correctly, “the question has become easy”
    • How’d you start the habit?
    • Do it at the same time every day
    • Is always adding material: that’s a trigger to review
    • “It’s a very satisfying feeling because you have all this knowledge you’re retaining. … When you’re building up this card deck, you really feel like you’re remembering this content.”
  • First encounter with review area
    • “It’s very similar to Anki.”
    • “The one thing that’s very nice about this medium is that I don’t have to come up with the questions.”
    • “Coming up with good questions is a little bit of extra effort”
    • Likes that it’s spaced out
    • “It makes the reading feel a little more valuable because you know that you’re going to remember them.”
  • On the levels on the cards:
    • Saw them, but didn’t think too much about them
    • “It was something about the spacing…”
  • Ignored the notifications because added to his Anki deck (!!!)
    • Manually transcribed the cards
    • Did you skip any cards?
    • Nope, did ‘em all.
    • Wouldn’t have understood the cards without the essay
    • Trusts that the author will write cards very carefully, so prefers them to ones he would write
  • Have you been able to achieve your goal?
    • Hasn’t seen that colleague in a while
    • How was your search experience changed by the first one?
    • Time in between was too long without Anki

Prep notes

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Last updated 2023-07-13.