Learn Exponentially
Your long-term ability is determined by how fast you learn. Learn slow and you won’t reach your potential. Learn fast and you might. Learn exponentially and you’ll achieve more than anyone thought you could.
This is a blog post about spaced repetition and using it to "learn exponentially" - the primary argument being that spaced repetition is far more effective at learning facts and can unlock "exponential learning".
My thoughts: spaced repetition is great for memorizing facts but I don't believe it is a sustainable way of "learning exponentially".
- Learning is more than just memorization. It is understanding the relationships between concepts in a given domain and being able to apply that understanding to novel situations. Spaced repetition is mostly about memorization. This is great for college exams but unless you make meaningful associations with the underlying information, it does not promote "learning".
- "Your Mind is for having ideas, not holding them" - quote by David Allen, creator of GTD. Or put another way - your brain is volatile meat with lossy storage. When you rely on it to hold facts, it incurs a great amount of overhead. You can use techniques like spaced repetition to store information more durably but these only get you so far. You run into limits - either the hours in the day that you can spend on spaced repetition or your brain's limit of storing facts.
Instead of memorizing facts, it's more important to have a mental model for how things within a domain are related to each other. This provides a framework to not just understand facts but also a foundation to derive new facts and understand new domains.
If you're already spending the effort indexing knowledge using spaced repetition, why not go all the way and index that knowledge externally in a knowledge base? This gives you infinite memory and the ability to associate ideas in any way whatsoever.
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