Thoughts on Anki and spaced repetition

Time and time again I’ve been frustrated by having to relearn a particular fact or concept. Usually the frustration is mostly work focused or work adjacent as that’s when my learning has an urgency or performance requirement.

What are the flag on the ss command for tcp listening ports?
How does gradient descent work again?

Or when reasoning through a topic and trying to draw on relevant information -

What year did Thatcher first become prime minister?
What were the three components of the economic trap that drove the Irish famine to it’s worst outcomes?
What is the money quantity identity again? And what does velocity actually mean?

All these things are questions within topics I’ve spent at least some time thinking about, and yet at any given point I am not confident I can recall them.

The solution to this is spaced repetition, or for me at least, the software Anki which implements it. In every case above I have learnt the above knowledge and then ‘committed it to memory’. The problem is memory has no alerting built in, when a fact begins to drift out of reach we are entirely unconscious of it, only being confronted with our forgetfulness when retrieval fails. Or in the best case temporarily eludes before thankfully appearing out of nowhere in the mind.

Put bluntly, you are constantly forgetting things. All the time, every day. Many of those things are not relevant, what you had for breakfast last Monday for instance - but some are! Retaining that information requires combatting the forgetfulness curve. To do this you must use spaced repetition.

Further Reading