> The enemy is the static card. It always has the same front, formatting, and font. After enough reps I would latch on to little cues that are irrelevant to the meaning of the card, meaning I would skip the very important step of thinking deeply about the content. A fairly common occurrence was that a word in the sentence would remind me about the meaning of the sentence, giving away the answer to the target word, which is quite different from piecing together the meaning of the target word in a brand new sentence.
Interestingly, that's the "trick" behind a lot of the seemingly magic skill of geo guessers. The best players have played so much, that they now "see" things that a regular person wouldn't even consider to look for, like the camera quality, what year the car was from, and so they narrow down the possible countries by those aspects, before even looking at the "picture".
> Interestingly, that's the "trick" behind a lot of the seemingly magic skill of geo guessers. The best players have played so much, that they now "see" things that a regular person wouldn't even consider to look for, like the camera quality, what year the car was from, and so they narrow down the possible countries by those aspects, before even looking at the "picture".
Slightly OT, but this happens constantly with ML classifiers on any highly multi-dimensional problem. At first it seems like magic, and then someone digs into the principal components of the prediction, and finds a mixture of a few highly specific factors that -- in the worst case -- is an artifact of the dataset itself (image blur or color bias, for example).
Also common is that the predictive factors aren't pathological -- they're just "boring" -- and therefore the performance of the model is dismissed by the practitioner ("oh, I'd have thought of that, since it's only using a few common traits that are well-understood.")
The one time I tried Anki u realised I started recalling the answers based on the shape of the words lay out on the card without necessarily reading them.
Interestingly, that's the "trick" behind a lot of the seemingly magic skill of geo guessers. The best players have played so much, that they now "see" things that a regular person wouldn't even consider to look for, like the camera quality, what year the car was from, and so they narrow down the possible countries by those aspects, before even looking at the "picture".