In this post, I will muse about strategies for learning and maintaining knowledge. The hope is to find an optimal strategy, or at least an approximation. I would assume that standard methods of learning are inefficient. One thing I have found is that without reviewing material, I forget it quite quickly. I feel like I have the memory of a goldfish! However, if I choose to review everything I read at a fixed interval, the amount I have to review grows linearly in time and eventually becomes unmanageable.

Fortunately, there is a science to this, which is called spaced repetition. The idea is that you should review material at a series of times which decreases in frequency. The original research on this was done in the late 19th century by Hermann Ebbinghaus, who forced himself to memorize random things, tracked when he did review, and found a strategy which appeared to be optimal.

Our general hope is to find strategies for review which maximize learning quality and time retention, while minimizing effort (i.e. time spent, but you might be able to reason that there are other metrics here as well).

There are popular programs which can help you program reviews (Anki is quite popular, especially among medical students, who have to memorize a great volume of information). However, are these the best you can do? And further, just downloading Anki does not mean that you know how to make cards which work for you. It’s very easy to create a lot of cards, and then stop reviewing because there is too much to do. It is also easy to put in a lot of cards containing information you don’t really know, which results in you reviewing material you only know shallowly. This is memorization, not learning! If one’s goal is to learn material deeply and retain that knowledge over a lifetime, how can you use software (like Anki) to support you, rather than leading you astray?

Further, one should be careful to define what things they really wish to know, and at what level. Maybe this quest of trying to remember everything is dumb, because actually you only really need to know things right now! However, I can’t think of any disadvantages to remembering more.