I have used Anki to remember names and faces on multiple occasions. It works well, usually I’ve only used it at the beginning of being in the environment. For the names of famous people I don’t think it passes the cost-benefits test. Gwern recommends only adding a card if it will save you 5 minutes over a lifetime, and so memorizing large corpuses where you may only need a handful of them ever is likely to be a bad tradeoff. The difference between these scenarios is that remembering faces and names is something you need to have instant access to, but misremembering famous people is either acceptable in the case of conversations, or can be referenced when it comes up in my writing or thinking.
Thanks.
I only partially agree with what you quote.
In a part of hacker community, being able to remember who is Raymond or Graham may be the difference between being considered as a member of the ingroup or not. Of course, that’s never such a binary choice, but it clearly may help to indicates that we have the same reading in commons, Hacker and Painter, The bazar and the Cathedraal.
I can’t state whether it’ll save 5 minutes or less, because the question is not how much time it takes to remember the information, but the message sent.
Furthermore, it sometimes occurred that I met famous searcher in academic conference. Turing price or Fields Medal. I won’t work with them quite probably, but I suspect that having known who they are, what they are known for, may potentially have been a lead to interesting discussion, and help me know where to lead the discussion.
I have used Anki to remember names and faces on multiple occasions. It works well, usually I’ve only used it at the beginning of being in the environment. For the names of famous people I don’t think it passes the cost-benefits test. Gwern recommends only adding a card if it will save you 5 minutes over a lifetime, and so memorizing large corpuses where you may only need a handful of them ever is likely to be a bad tradeoff. The difference between these scenarios is that remembering faces and names is something you need to have instant access to, but misremembering famous people is either acceptable in the case of conversations, or can be referenced when it comes up in my writing or thinking.
Thanks. I only partially agree with what you quote.
In a part of hacker community, being able to remember who is Raymond or Graham may be the difference between being considered as a member of the ingroup or not. Of course, that’s never such a binary choice, but it clearly may help to indicates that we have the same reading in commons, Hacker and Painter, The bazar and the Cathedraal. I can’t state whether it’ll save 5 minutes or less, because the question is not how much time it takes to remember the information, but the message sent.
Furthermore, it sometimes occurred that I met famous searcher in academic conference. Turing price or Fields Medal. I won’t work with them quite probably, but I suspect that having known who they are, what they are known for, may potentially have been a lead to interesting discussion, and help me know where to lead the discussion.