Except for languages and stuff like that, I don’t think the kind of learning you get from Anki and similar is that useful. I say I learn something when it becomes truly part of me—which Anki cannot do. Merely memorizing stuff which I could look up on Google in a few seconds if I needed to doesn’t sound like a terribly useful use of my time. (Einstein didn’t see the use of learning the speed of sound in air when he could look it up, and he didn’t have a cellphone with an Internet connection with him all the time.)
This has not been my experience with Anki, or at least not exclusively. The optimal way to use SRS is to build a complex, redundant network of associations. In other words, to do what you’d be doing anyway, but ideally in less time and with less effort. Each repetition of a fact is an opportunity to strengthen not only the connection represented therein, but the adjacent connections in your network.
You’re not just memorizing facts; you’re explicitly training your internal models.
Except for languages and stuff like that, I don’t think the kind of learning you get from Anki and similar is that useful. I say I learn something when it becomes truly part of me—which Anki cannot do. Merely memorizing stuff which I could look up on Google in a few seconds if I needed to doesn’t sound like a terribly useful use of my time. (Einstein didn’t see the use of learning the speed of sound in air when he could look it up, and he didn’t have a cellphone with an Internet connection with him all the time.)
This has not been my experience with Anki, or at least not exclusively. The optimal way to use SRS is to build a complex, redundant network of associations. In other words, to do what you’d be doing anyway, but ideally in less time and with less effort. Each repetition of a fact is an opportunity to strengthen not only the connection represented therein, but the adjacent connections in your network.
You’re not just memorizing facts; you’re explicitly training your internal models.
Do you have an example of where that’s worked out well for you?