One of the biggest advantages of Anki I’ve found is remembering my rabbit holes. You’ve probably had the experience where you go down deep into some rabbit hole, learn a lot, forget it all, then come back years later. You remember the raw extent of it all, but forget much of what you actually knew. I find this really sad, for a couple reasons.

First, it strongly disincentivizes rabbit holing. Yes, there are some nice things to say about ephemerality and all that, but I get this gnawing feeling sometimes while I’m going down a rabbit hole that nothing is being built; I’m just wasting my time. Ankifying the knowledge I learn reduces that feeling, which gives me the psychological permission necessary to continue rabbit holing.

But possibly even more importantly, my rabbit holes aren’t totally random. They often intersect in interesting ways, and I learn a lot from those intersections. You know that feeling you have right when you’re at the top of your game of some rabbit hole? You have all of this information at your fingertips, so much felt mastery? Now that I Anki, whenever I dive into something new, I am always feeling that way over all of the rabbit holes that I’ve ever Ankified. And more importantly, when I come back months or years later to something I haven’t touched since, it’s still fresh. As fresh as the day that I left it. I can sink right back in without wasting any time.

That’s more obviously important for things that you find easier to learn in spurts of energy than with consistency (perhaps because consistently working on it is practically difficult or intellectually tiresome). This varies a lot from person to person, so I won’t give a straightforward example here, but try to think of something in your life where you’ve gotten into it three or four times, each for a few days to a few weeks. And you learned a lot each time! But it was also kind of annoying to have to regain all of the context that you lost between your engagements with the material. Imagine, instead, that at the beginning of these spurts you had as much at your fingertips as you did at the end of your previous spurt. That’s what it feels like to rabbit hole with Anki.

But also, I think the property of continuing background context is particularly important in a harder to notice way for the sorts of rabbit holes that have complicated, interleaved skill trees. Maybe a good example here is market behavior — maybe you get really interested in how markets work at some point, but you still feel like there’s a lot of missing. You put the textbook you were reading down, and at some later point in your life you get really interested in prediction markets. Maybe you get briefly addicted to Manifold or something. At this point, you’ve gained a familiarity and intuitions with market behavior that you couldn’t get from a textbook. if you picked up the textbook again, things would start to make sense in a way that they might not have before. Being able to go back to previous rabbit holes while retaining the insights of interim rabbit holes is huge. And, being able to go into new rabbit holes having perfect command of the insights from your previous ones let your knowledge compound in a way that makes traditional rabbit holing seem utterly useless.

When I use Anki, and when I add cards to Anki, I have the sensation that I’m building and honoring an institution. of course, it’s the same knowledge, but I grow to have a much greater respect for it. It feels much more solid, much more real.

relevant thread: https://x.com/saulmunn/status/1867008554873553117