p-christ

Do you agree with the assumptions of the Anki scheduler? That each time you review a card you'll remember it for incrementally longer and longer?

If so then a fixed amount of review time per day will let you remember things for longer & longer.

thanks a lot, your comments make a lot of sense and are really helpful!

Do you agree with just this part?

> Effectiveness of spaced repetition scales exponentially

If you've forgotten something then you don't have that knowledge anymore. So remembering things for longer means you are effectively gaining knowledge.

It's like someone giving you $10 and then trying to argue that they haven't actually given you $10 because just a few minutes ago you had a $10 bill in your pocket but you spent it on something else.

> I don’t need to remember the exact way something was written by the author.

I agree. Who ever said you should try to remember that? Remember the high-level important and transferable information, don't waste time trying to remember information that won't help you elsewhere.

The simplifying assumption around units of information and the graphs are just to visualise the main point.

Effectiveness of spaced repetition scales really fast / exponentially whereas other learning methods don't scale like that - do you agree?

If so then over the long-run spaced repetition is always going to be extremely efficient relative to other learning methods.

The article links to a paper which estimates how much more effective you get at reading the more knowledge you have. It shows that for most ages you don't improve in this way, but for older ages you do.

Then it says for the "best case" that "adults" takes years to get twice as effective at reading.

If you don't believe this then it means you think it takes adults less than a year to get twice as effective? If effectiveness doubles each year then that would mean by the time a 25 year old becomes 65 that they're 1 million times as effective at reading than when they were 25. Does that sound reasonable to you?

You misunderstand how important memory is for learning. Ofsted, the UK school inspection board, actually defines learning itself as a "change in long-term memory". You can't learn anything without a change to your memory, they aren't separate things.

So, sure, you should try to apply your knowledge and layer concepts on top of each other. But if you do that AND also remember a lot more of such experiences you'll learn a lot faster.

Thanks for the feedback, we are going to add an export feature sometime soon

Think about it in terms of how many days of knowledge each rep gets you.

The first rep gets you 1 extra day of knowledge. The next rep gets you 2 extra days. The next one gets you 5 extra days.

So each rep is getting you more and more knowledge even though the time required to execute the rep remains the same. This is exponential growth.

If you only have 1 card then for most days you won't have any reviews to do so it doesn't work. But if you add cards regularly then over the long-run every day you'll be getting more and more "extra days of knowledge" by doing the same amount of reviews each day.