Whenever I hear about a new memory tool, I struggle to figure out what I would do with it. I try to keep knowledge “on paper” as much as possible, rather than relying on memory. The skills I need for my work are ones I use almost every day already, so I feel like I’m not forgetting anything essential.
What have you personally found useful to practice remembering using SuperMemo?
I think looking for things that you want to memorize is the wrong approach: I think it’s better for things you want to learn and be able to use long-term.
The SRS part probably gives you the impression that most of your time is meant to be for memorizing things but the incremental reading component massively shifts most of the use of SuperMemo to being learning and then memorization/maintenance of knowledge when it’s in a suitably refined form.
For me personally, there have been lots of things that I’ve found useful to learn though it’s hard to point at them too specifically since it’s not easy to tell what I only remember because of SuperMemo. Likely some of the things that made the biggest difference for me were:
-learning about REBT (mainly the idea of musts. I’m sure other therapies would have been useful this is just one that I happened upon)
-supermemo.guru from creator of SM. There are lots of useful writings from here making it hard to point to specific one of most utility but probably my favorite is his one on the Pleasure of Learning
-discovery of Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem from entirely random article I likely otherwise would have not ended up getting around to without SM
There are lots of other things I have in SM that I think aren’t directly applicable now but are likely to server as the foundation for bigger ideas (the more things you have in your head the more connections you can make thus increasing creativity). I don’t think it’s a good idea to assume that more knowledge is an implicit good (since actual effort needs to be made for things to be applicable in real life with formuationl) but I do think long-term knowledge can have a multiplicative effect and it only takes one good idea sparked by two things in memory to be worth the rest of the time you spend on the system,
Beyond that, I think it’s just insanely valuable having a system where I can chuck in whatever I find interesting and then not have to spend brainpower thinking about how to manage having 100 tabs. It completely fixes that.
(I am writing this at midnight so sorry if it is not entirely coherent)
Hi Aaron, great question. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: For people who are still in university, in study-intensive subjects, it’s a great advantage to use a Spaced Repetition System like SuperMemo. To me it feels empowering not to have to worry about forgetting. It’s a common experience to feel very frustrated to study so much for an exam, only to forget most of it afterwards. This doesn’t happen to me anymore, because I just know the algorithm will take care and as long as I do my daily repitions, my knowledge will get transfered into long-term memory.
Another obvious use case is learning languages. An SRS can greatly help you to learn a language much faster and this seems to be the most common usage.
One not so obvious advantage is about creativity/innovation. In my understanding, creativity has a lot to do with connecting ideas from different fields, ones you wouldn’t initially notice as being related to each other. Imagine you study two different domains, e.g. Biology and Economics. Actively remembering important information from both of those might result in two at first glance disparate ideas appearing in your mind in close succession. This is what leads to creativity, you making the connection between those. This is less likely to happen if you store your information mostly externally, e.g. in Evernote.
To answer your question more straightforward: So far, I have found it most useful for studying medicine in University and learning French/Spanish.
Whenever I hear about a new memory tool, I struggle to figure out what I would do with it. I try to keep knowledge “on paper” as much as possible, rather than relying on memory. The skills I need for my work are ones I use almost every day already, so I feel like I’m not forgetting anything essential.
What have you personally found useful to practice remembering using SuperMemo?
I think looking for things that you want to memorize is the wrong approach: I think it’s better for things you want to learn and be able to use long-term.
The SRS part probably gives you the impression that most of your time is meant to be for memorizing things but the incremental reading component massively shifts most of the use of SuperMemo to being learning and then memorization/maintenance of knowledge when it’s in a suitably refined form.
For me personally, there have been lots of things that I’ve found useful to learn though it’s hard to point at them too specifically since it’s not easy to tell what I only remember because of SuperMemo. Likely some of the things that made the biggest difference for me were:
-learning about REBT (mainly the idea of musts. I’m sure other therapies would have been useful this is just one that I happened upon)
-Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares
-supermemo.guru from creator of SM. There are lots of useful writings from here making it hard to point to specific one of most utility but probably my favorite is his one on the Pleasure of Learning
-discovery of Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem from entirely random article I likely otherwise would have not ended up getting around to without SM
There are lots of other things I have in SM that I think aren’t directly applicable now but are likely to server as the foundation for bigger ideas (the more things you have in your head the more connections you can make thus increasing creativity). I don’t think it’s a good idea to assume that more knowledge is an implicit good (since actual effort needs to be made for things to be applicable in real life with formuationl) but I do think long-term knowledge can have a multiplicative effect and it only takes one good idea sparked by two things in memory to be worth the rest of the time you spend on the system,
Beyond that, I think it’s just insanely valuable having a system where I can chuck in whatever I find interesting and then not have to spend brainpower thinking about how to manage having 100 tabs. It completely fixes that.
(I am writing this at midnight so sorry if it is not entirely coherent)
Hi Aaron, great question.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: For people who are still in university, in study-intensive subjects, it’s a great advantage to use a Spaced Repetition System like SuperMemo. To me it feels empowering not to have to worry about forgetting. It’s a common experience to feel very frustrated to study so much for an exam, only to forget most of it afterwards. This doesn’t happen to me anymore, because I just know the algorithm will take care and as long as I do my daily repitions, my knowledge will get transfered into long-term memory.
Another obvious use case is learning languages. An SRS can greatly help you to learn a language much faster and this seems to be the most common usage.
One not so obvious advantage is about creativity/innovation. In my understanding, creativity has a lot to do with connecting ideas from different fields, ones you wouldn’t initially notice as being related to each other. Imagine you study two different domains, e.g. Biology and Economics. Actively remembering important information from both of those might result in two at first glance disparate ideas appearing in your mind in close succession. This is what leads to creativity, you making the connection between those. This is less likely to happen if you store your information mostly externally, e.g. in Evernote.
To answer your question more straightforward: So far, I have found it most useful for studying medicine in University and learning French/Spanish.