Often, people focus on memorizing information on timescales of hours, days, or months. I think this is hard, and not necessarily useful—it smacks of premature optimization. The feedback loops are long, and the decision to force yourself through a process of memorizing THIS set of facts instead of THAT set of facts is always one you may wish to revise later. At the very least, you’d want to frequently prune your Anki cards to eliminate facts that no longer seem as pressing.
By contrast, I think it’s very useful and quite tractable to practice memorizing information on the scale of seconds and minutes. You get immediate feedback. And the ability to memorize a set of related information right away, then forget it when you no longer need it, is a little like the mental equivalent of learning how to pick up and set down a load. That’s something we need for all kinds of tasks. The ability to carry around a load for long periods of time isn’t as useful.
Memorization timescales and feedback loops
Often, people focus on memorizing information on timescales of hours, days, or months. I think this is hard, and not necessarily useful—it smacks of premature optimization. The feedback loops are long, and the decision to force yourself through a process of memorizing THIS set of facts instead of THAT set of facts is always one you may wish to revise later. At the very least, you’d want to frequently prune your Anki cards to eliminate facts that no longer seem as pressing.
By contrast, I think it’s very useful and quite tractable to practice memorizing information on the scale of seconds and minutes. You get immediate feedback. And the ability to memorize a set of related information right away, then forget it when you no longer need it, is a little like the mental equivalent of learning how to pick up and set down a load. That’s something we need for all kinds of tasks. The ability to carry around a load for long periods of time isn’t as useful.