A simple substitute strategy for using spaced repetition: Say fact usefulness has a power law distribution: some facts you are going to look up 10s or 100s of times, others not that frequently. Say it’s hard to predict which facts are going to be the ones you look up 100s of times. If that’s true then by using SR you’re going to create a lot of wasted cards for facts that you thought you’d look up 10s or 100s of times but in fact are pretty useless. Instead what you could do is every time you want to look up a fact, before looking it up, try to recall it from memory. Research shows that trying to recall facts solidifies their memories much better than looking them up, so over time you will come to have all of the facts you most frequently need at your mental fingertips using this strategy (a bit like microprocessor cache management).
A simple substitute strategy for using spaced repetition: Say fact usefulness has a power law distribution: some facts you are going to look up 10s or 100s of times, others not that frequently. Say it’s hard to predict which facts are going to be the ones you look up 100s of times. If that’s true then by using SR you’re going to create a lot of wasted cards for facts that you thought you’d look up 10s or 100s of times but in fact are pretty useless. Instead what you could do is every time you want to look up a fact, before looking it up, try to recall it from memory. Research shows that trying to recall facts solidifies their memories much better than looking them up, so over time you will come to have all of the facts you most frequently need at your mental fingertips using this strategy (a bit like microprocessor cache management).