[Draft] Are memorisation techniques still useful in this age where you can offload your memory to digital storage?
I am thinking about using anki for spaced repetition, and the memory palace thing also seem (from the surface level) interesting, but I am not sure whether the investments will be worth it. (2023/02/21: Trying out Anki)
I am increasingly finding it more useful to remember your previous work so that you don’t need to repeat the effort. Remembering workflow is important. (This means remembering things somewhere is very important, but im still not sure if that somewhere being your brain is as important)
example 1: I download music from youtube and I have been using online downloader for years until one day I learned about yt-dlp, and I spend half an hour reading the document to type the correct command for my use and I didn’t save it down somewhere else, so the next time that I want to download music again I had to spend another half an hour reading the doc. Now I have a txt file storing the command.
examples to be written: lyrics (css shit), writing down ideas immediately on the nearest place.
Some certainly are. For many facts, memorized data is orders of magnitude faster than digitally-stored knowledge. This is enough of a difference to be qualitative—it’s not worth looking up, but if you know it, you’ll make use of it.
There’s the additional level of internalizing some knowledge or techniques, where you don’t even need to consciously expend effort to make use of it. For some things, that’s worth a whole lot.
If you’re a computer nerd, think of it as tiered storage. On-core registers are way faster than L1 cache, which is faster than L2/3 cache, which is again faster than RAM, which is faster than local SSD storage which is faster than remote network storage. It’s not a perfect analogy, because the limits of each tier aren’t as clearly defined, and it’s highly variable how easy it is to move/copy knowledge across tiers.
Indexing and familiarity matters a lot too. Searching for something where you think it’s partway through some video you saw 2 years ago is NOT the same as looking up a reminder in your personal notes a week ago.
[Draft] Are memorisation techniques still useful in this age where you can offload your memory to digital storage?
I am thinking about using anki for spaced repetition, and the memory palace thing also seem (from the surface level) interesting, but I am not sure whether the investments will be worth it. (2023/02/21: Trying out Anki)
I am increasingly finding it more useful to remember your previous work so that you don’t need to repeat the effort. Remembering workflow is important. (This means remembering things somewhere is very important, but im still not sure if that somewhere being your brain is as important)
example 1: I download music from youtube and I have been using online downloader for years until one day I learned about yt-dlp, and I spend half an hour reading the document to type the correct command for my use and I didn’t save it down somewhere else, so the next time that I want to download music again I had to spend another half an hour reading the doc. Now I have a txt file storing the command.
examples to be written: lyrics (css shit), writing down ideas immediately on the nearest place.
Agree with Dagon that indexing is very important.
trial of using github to host version history
Some certainly are. For many facts, memorized data is orders of magnitude faster than digitally-stored knowledge. This is enough of a difference to be qualitative—it’s not worth looking up, but if you know it, you’ll make use of it.
There’s the additional level of internalizing some knowledge or techniques, where you don’t even need to consciously expend effort to make use of it. For some things, that’s worth a whole lot.
If you’re a computer nerd, think of it as tiered storage. On-core registers are way faster than L1 cache, which is faster than L2/3 cache, which is again faster than RAM, which is faster than local SSD storage which is faster than remote network storage. It’s not a perfect analogy, because the limits of each tier aren’t as clearly defined, and it’s highly variable how easy it is to move/copy knowledge across tiers.
Indexing and familiarity matters a lot too. Searching for something where you think it’s partway through some video you saw 2 years ago is NOT the same as looking up a reminder in your personal notes a week ago.