Comment by bryanph_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanph_ | Hacker News Reader

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I think in most of the mentioned note taking methods (zettelkasten, digital gardening) spaced repetition is kind of frowned upon in a way. It is seen as a necessity because of the way the educational system requires you to conjure up a certain set of knowledge at a particular time (a test). With zettelkasten and digital gardening (or any other method with similar goals) the process and habits that you acquire over time become more important. The goal is not to optimize for the (short-term) memorization of some knowledge only to shove it aside and move on to the next set of knowledge to memorize for the next test. Rather these methods are trying to design a process by which you can build on ideas iteratively. In order to really embrace these methods we'll have to see changes in the educational system as well or we'll end up with methodologies optimized for the educational system that is currently in place (which is what spaced repetition is in my view).

If you have poor recall, how do you know what you need to look up? How do you know what entry points you have in your 'zettelkasten'? If you have no intention to recall information, why even bother taking notes? Instead of searching your notes, or following a zettelkasten ID trail, search the internet. We want to be able to _use_ information.

I'm all for the zettelkasten method, for good notetaking habits...however there's also a tendency of many notetakers, or productivity porn on notetaking, to waste so much time 'notetaking' and 'organising' that they never _act_. (I've been very guilty of this in the past).

Recall isn't bad. It's essential. It is, however, not the _only_ thing to use. You want to use spaced repetition for the most important, most used information. Stuff that's a bit more niche, rarely used, yeah just search that.

There's a word for this in German: Bulimielernen (bulimia learning). I.e. learning a large number of facts in a manner that you can barf them up exactly once (in the exam) and forget them immediately after.

Naturally, this only works on knowledge-base exams, not skill-based exams (e.g. math). This also shows up in the results: math exams generally seem to have worse grades than other exams, and math exams seem to have lower thresholds to pass (e.g. 25 % vs. 60 %).

Spaced repetition is not the same as cramming, and spaced repetition (if applied correctly) leads to long-term memory formation.

It's not perfect for every type of information, and there are some aspects of memory (most notably contextual memory) which can make it less effective than one might like. But it definitely is more useful than just for exam cramming...

I'm curious why you think maths is exempt from being 'gamed' per se, by this technique.

I'm also not sure where you're getting "math exams generally seem to have worse grades than other exams" and "lower thresholds to pass" from.

At university I specifically remember some of my friends not understanding the calculus they were doing _at all_, yet they could still answer questions because they rote learned the technique.

Spaced repetition is not the same as short-term memorisation. In fact I'd argue that you haven't fully memorised something with an SRS until the interval between reviews is at least a month or two -- which isn't really "short term" especially when you consider that school terms are also on the order of a few months.

I consider Spaced Repetition a mental model of how we learn and retain knowledge. I think your objection is with flash card systems and I don’t disagree with your assessment.

I think of Spaced Repetition more generally. A paper based Zettelkasten system can be enhanced with a paper based review scheduling system; say 43 folders as described by David Allen in Getting Things Done with a simple SuperMemo algorithm for interval spacing.

When we gain good recall of Zettelkasten structure/content I suspect that we inadvertently mimic Spaced Repetition. I can be convinced otherwise.

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