I think one crux between us is the degree to which “memory is the foundation of cognition”, as Michael Nielsen once put it. Coming from the perspective that this is true, it seems to me that a natural consequence of a person memorizing even a simple sentence, and maintaining that memory with SRS, is that the sentence needs to be compressed in the mind to ensure that it has high stability, and can be recalled even after having not been used for many months, or even years.
In order to achieve this compression, it is inevitable that the ideas represented by the sentence will become internalized and integrated deeply with other parts of the mind, which is exactly what is desired. This process is a fundamental part of how the human mind works, and applies even in the mind of a person with low “rationality”.
Recall that memories are pathway dependant i.e. you can remember an “idea” when given verbal cues but not visual ones. Or given cues in the form of “complete this sentence ” and “complete this totally different sentence expressing the same concept”. If you memorise a sentence and can recall it any relevant context, I’d say you’ve basically learnt it. But just putting it into SRS on its own won’t do that. Like, that’s why supermemo has such a long list of rules and heuristics on how to use SRS effectively.
Agree on this, memory coherence is pretty important. Cramming leads to results sort of like how you can’t combine the trig you learned in highschool with some physics knowledge: there aren’t good connections between the subjects, leaving them relatively siloed.
It requires both effort and actually wanting to learn a thing for the thing to integrate well. We tend to forget easily the things we don’t care about (see school knowledge).
I think one crux between us is the degree to which “memory is the foundation of cognition”, as Michael Nielsen once put it. Coming from the perspective that this is true, it seems to me that a natural consequence of a person memorizing even a simple sentence, and maintaining that memory with SRS, is that the sentence needs to be compressed in the mind to ensure that it has high stability, and can be recalled even after having not been used for many months, or even years.
In order to achieve this compression, it is inevitable that the ideas represented by the sentence will become internalized and integrated deeply with other parts of the mind, which is exactly what is desired. This process is a fundamental part of how the human mind works, and applies even in the mind of a person with low “rationality”.
Recall that memories are pathway dependant i.e. you can remember an “idea” when given verbal cues but not visual ones. Or given cues in the form of “complete this sentence ” and “complete this totally different sentence expressing the same concept”. If you memorise a sentence and can recall it any relevant context, I’d say you’ve basically learnt it. But just putting it into SRS on its own won’t do that. Like, that’s why supermemo has such a long list of rules and heuristics on how to use SRS effectively.
Agree on this, memory coherence is pretty important. Cramming leads to results sort of like how you can’t combine the trig you learned in highschool with some physics knowledge: there aren’t good connections between the subjects, leaving them relatively siloed.
It requires both effort and actually wanting to learn a thing for the thing to integrate well. We tend to forget easily the things we don’t care about (see school knowledge).