anki is all you need

(inspired by a conversation i had on a drive home with ishan)

i am probably 20 years late to the anki/FSRS glaze, but today i realized that everything standing between me and all the goals i want to acheive are the anki decks that i've been neglecting.

if i buy what fancy cognitive scienentists have been saying, then we assume that working memory can typically only hold 5-9 pieces of information at any given time (what exactly a "piece" of information is seems fuzzy, i'm not even quite sure what the unit of measurement here is either). long-term memory, however, is effectively unlimited.

this matters because domain specific knowledge is very important when learning something new. for instance, a student who understands football fundamentals, what it means to blitz, run a pick play, or audiblize at the line, will be able to comprehend a article about football game strategy far better than someone with excellent "reading comprehension skills" but little football knowledge.

and so the more domain knowledge you can cache in your LTM, the easier it should be to learn new topics, as you decrease the likelihood of running into a concept that is new (cache misses are expensive). and anki/spaced repetition systems seem to be the most promising way to move information into LTM.