As a long-time Anki user (12.000+ cards in review), I've been deeply fascinated with deliberately memorising. It has been a huge boon to my work as a doctor; but how far does it extend? And if it's so advantageous to remember things, why do we forget?
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The mnemonic medium is, at least in part, about combatting forgetting. But when is forgetting beneficial? Would love your thoughts on this.
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I’ve pondered this question on and off for the past few years but don’t have much coherent to say. The highest-order bit for me is: when the cost of maintaining the knowledge is greater than its benefit—which depends both on the maintenance scheme and the knowledge in question.
In the limit we could ask: what if maintenance was 100% free? Stories from savants suggest you’d still want some forgetting. Maybe it’d be sufficient if you could voluntarily forget, like a muscle?
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Exploring limits is a great frame. I'd wager that would cause some problems with 1) Look-up speed, 2) Over-fitting, 3) Not safeguarding against "old" knowledge.
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