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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

I find it peculiar that you can confidently dismiss something as pseudoscientific hogwash while simultaneously admitting that you don’t know what it is.

This might help:

https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition#

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Because one can recognize the signs of pseudoscience even without knowing anything about the subject matter. E.g.:

- obscuring language

- missing references and/or imprecise citations

BTW your link does not explain what a prompt is.

It doesn't explain what "spaced repetition", "memory", "understanding", or "experiments" are either. It is written for people who already use spaced repetition, and aims to help them improve one aspect: writing prompts. It is not intended as an elementary introduction to spaced repetition, and so it doesn't bother to explain basic concepts.

Your objection is a little like complaining that a computer science textbook aimed at post-grads doesn't bother to explain what a variable is. Some background knowledge is assumed.

A prompt in this context is just the side of the flashcard that prompts you to remember the "other side"/answer. They can be questions, sentences with words missing, or many other things. E.g. for learning a language a prompt could be the English word, prompting you to remember the translation. Gwern calls them "questions" in his article, but "prompt" is more general, given that they're often not phrased as questions.

There are many examples of prompts and answers in the main article, with blue backgrounds, and prompts about the article's content with red backgrounds.

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