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Spaced repetition flashcard apps are the "Smoke on the Water" of developer side-projects. Here's my attempt: http://cardflashapp.com
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"And then what?" Nutritional deficiencies. Aging. Lack of sleep. A variety of diseases. Use of certain drugs (like marijuana). All of these have been documented to affect memory. Also, I think one's attitudes towards the past will affect one's memory of it. For example, I am very present- and future-oriented. I rarely dwell on the past or review my day (or my past life in general), I don't keep a journal. I also don'…
No, I meant more "why do you (parent poster) want to remember everything?". OK so hypothetical world where you remember everything ... then what? What's different, why do you want that? Humans don't have the brainpower to make use of memories of everything. 'Having loads of memories' is not exactly the same thing as 'learning more' or 'having clear focus on a goal', or 'intuition', or 'improved decision making', or '…
The answer is, you don't know, because you can't remember any of them.
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There are techniques with better payoff and retention. Check the memory systems advocated by David Roth or Harry Lorayne, or the locus method ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci )
How do you know they have better payoff and retention?
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Some people swear that the process of making the deck helps significantly with their ability to retain the material. Personally I find it a waste of time and all time spent editing cards is a waste to me. It doesn't help me. Learning traditionally (taking notes, answering practice questions, etc) from books and reviewing with Anki is the most effective for me.
Ymmv but when building a deck creating mnemonics for each item was really important for me. Made it a lot slower to enter data but much more fun and much more effective in later use.
I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not rec…
The interesting thing about the stream is that it is different each day. The stream I live near is a tidal stream, since I live by the ocean. Sometimes the tide is high when I go, so the water is brackish. At those times, I can see puffer fish and some kind of long narrow fish with large eyes and fins that look a bit like wings. When the tide is low, the carp swim from upstream along with the turtles. Blue herons stand in the shallower sections trying to catch the endless minnows that skip through the pebbles in the river bed.
I have often thought to record the stream by taking pictures, or video. But then, to what end? What time shall I go? And in what season? And, if I diligently point out the numerous animals that fill the stream, will I not deprive the viewer of the greatest pleasure -- that of discovering an amazing world where one would think that nothing existed?
I think your stream of consciousness is similar. The value is not in the individual thoughts and ideas, but in the experience of those ideas rushing from one place to another. While it is important to spend time to reflect on and view this wonder, it is not necessary to preserve a snapshot of it. Doing so will only distract you from what is happening now.
A person's life is too short to do all the things he or she imagines even in a single day. Do not waste your lifetime by chasing few ephemeral ideas.
I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not rec…
I based this off of a Coursera course - I made anki cards for all the new information and made sure to review all the new cards on the day I learned them. The review time rapidly turned into hundreds of cards per day and it just didn't scale.
For that one Coursera course, I ended up being stubborn and limiting my pace to what I could Anki. I ended up taking the Coursera course three times - I passed 100% the final time, but still hadn't finished putting the last two weeks of content into Anki.
I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not rec…
It's not. At least, not at the expense of other things. Memorization is but one piece.
The book "Make it Stick" goes into this and a lot of other techniques that blend together, but SRS is not the whole of it by a long ways.
I believe SRS is overused. The spacing effect is, of course, real and quite important. However, it lends itself to decontextualizing what you're learning. For example, foreign language vocabulary is best learned in context (ie., in sentences, within conversations). That's the only way to know how it's actually used. Otherwise, you're just learning a mapping between first and second languages. There are other benefits…
I believe SRS is overused. The spacing effect is, of course, real and quite important. However, it lends itself to decontextualizing what you're learning. For example, foreign language vocabulary is best learned in context (ie., in sentences, within conversations). That's the only way to know how it's actually used. Otherwise, you're just learning a mapping between first and second languages. There are other benefits…
Secondly, there are many many advantages to learning vocabulary out of context. I am very interested in foreign languages, and have self-studied to elementary proficiency in Italian, German, and Russian. Memrise is my go to app for picking up vocabulary out of context, because it is the fastest path to a bigger vocabulary. For a lot of vocabulary, at least for the languages I've come across so far, there is a direct one to one mapping for the essential things.. E.g. you can learn the word for "book", "fire", "box", "sky", etc. out of context. Certainly, learning in context has advantageous for improving grammar and in some situations verb usage - therefore a more balanced approach. An easy example of the advantage of in-context language learning is that in German and Italian, knowing somebody uses different verbs than knowing a thing. If you were to study a verb like "to know" in Memrise, you rely on the flashcard's definition to be thorough enough to clarify their usages.
[0]: "A Trainable Spaced Repetition Model for Language Learning", writes about how spaced repetition is used by Duolingo. https://s3.amazonaws.com/duolingo-papers/publications/settle...