📣 Announcing an experimental new tool for thought 🚨
and I have been wondering: what happens if we take powerful ideas from cognitive science and deeply integrate them into explanations? Our first experiment in a new "mnemonic" medium:
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Does this feel familiar?
1. You read a book and feel you understood it.
2. Next week, you try to answer a question about it.
3. Surprise: you don't remember the details at all!
It's not just embarrassing at a cocktail party: it's a real barrier to learning complex new topics.
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I wonder--do "brain hacks" like this circumvent natural memory optimization? Forgetting the content of an article whose concepts you don't use on a regular basis may be a good thing. As learning hacks improve it may become wise to reserve them for the most important content?
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I worried about this when I started using spaced repetition. At least for me, after many thousands of cards, I appear to be nowhere near an upper bound. I add more cards; they get memorized; the curve doesn't change. I suspect we underrate our memory capacity.