Very good. Additional factor in this that I’m somewhat concerned about is “cluttering your head” for a lack of a better term, though this might be a non-issue if you know how memory actually works (I don’t). Would be interesting to see it as a part of you write-up.
I don’t really know of anything like that (aside from fictional evidence like ‘Funes the Memorious’); there is research on weakening memories, but that focuses on stuff like rape and post-traumatic stress disorder.
If you were wrong that knowing something would save you 5 minutes, you can always just delete those cards. (The brain keeps plasticity even into old age, so whatever limit there is seems to not be reached in a normal life.)
If I remember correctly the supermemo website gives advice about this, somewhere. Its recommended not to be too selective about what to enter into the SRS system. If you find yourself spending a lot of time with an item that’s not very useful, simply delete it later on.
One thing I am not quite sure of is when to rely on simple lookup (I keep a lot of information in an text file) vs. when to commit to memory with SRS.
When?
http://www.gwern.net/Mnemosyne#what-to-add
This article is now at http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#what-to-add
Very good. Additional factor in this that I’m somewhat concerned about is “cluttering your head” for a lack of a better term, though this might be a non-issue if you know how memory actually works (I don’t). Would be interesting to see it as a part of you write-up.
I don’t really know of anything like that (aside from fictional evidence like ‘Funes the Memorious’); there is research on weakening memories, but that focuses on stuff like rape and post-traumatic stress disorder.
If you were wrong that knowing something would save you 5 minutes, you can always just delete those cards. (The brain keeps plasticity even into old age, so whatever limit there is seems to not be reached in a normal life.)
If I remember correctly the supermemo website gives advice about this, somewhere. Its recommended not to be too selective about what to enter into the SRS system. If you find yourself spending a lot of time with an item that’s not very useful, simply delete it later on.