so I’ve been using spaced repetition for ~1.5 y. now in my CS degree and life in general. it’s a great solution for lots of problems: no relearning what I understood in class two weeks ago; a cheap way to incrementally refine my understanding over time on topics I haven’t worked on directly recently (which is most of them); the rate of forgetting is slowed down, etc. but to use spaced repetition this way requires learning how to do so, it’s not like with language where you can download Anki and a premade deck and you’re good to go. there are also practical problems:
why are there no great scientists who are inhumanly good at remembering the corpus of their field through incremental reading?
my current prompt writing style is kind of similar to incremental reading, in the sense that I prioritize close cards written quickly over well-written Q/A cards. but even writing in this way is costly. for a 3h lecture I will write ~50-200 cards. even when writing as quickly as possible, almost automatically turning notes into cards, it takes ~30m. then tomorrow morning it takes ~30m to revise them + ~15m to revise the due cards. and that’s just one lecture. then there is the spread out cost of actually integrating that knowledge with other things I know, updating other understandings, etc. I don’t have any estimate for the time that takes up, but it’s definitely not free. so I doubt that it’s possible to actually remember the entirety of a field. there’s just too much information, and you need to chew it out to be able to make use of it.
why are there no insanely good engineers who know every detail of their entire stack through spaced repetition?
similar story to the one above. plus I find that little idiosyncratic details which don’t fit neatly into a wider picture are the most difficult to remember, thereby being the most time-consuming.
all that is to say that spaced repetition makes learning more efficient by solving some memory-related problems, but not so much more efficient that you can just download an entire field into your brain in a manner of months.
a really nice thing with spaced repetition is that you haven’t replaced how your memory functions, just augmented it a bit. but it’s still fundamentally your same brain, one with the ability to ask questions like “am I zooming too much/not considering all options?” or “is what’s salient to me actually what’s happening?” doing spaced repetition doesn’t have any bearing here unless it gives you a false sense of confidence in what you know or doing it crowds out developing other skills.
I’d expect H3 to be true, ceteris paribus, but would also expect that having the ability to ask questions like the one above and just think better to be of greater importance, i.e. someone whose thinking habits are more developed and doesn’t use Anki would be a better researcher/doctor than an Anki savant whose thinking habits are underdeveloped.