3 ms·

I would describe myself exactly the same way as you, and I've always been that way (noticed it at first in school where I would take forever to hand in the memo

by kqr 2y ago

I would describe myself exactly the same way as you, and I've always been that way (noticed it at first in school where I would take forever to hand in the memorisation half of an exam but finish the analytical half in record time.) I recommend giving spaced repetition a serious go. It doesn't cost much and you might be surprised how far it takes even someone like you. It completely changed how I view the role of memorisation in analytical work. Strictly speaking, someone like you does not need to memorise things because you can always derive them from more fundamental principles. But being able to do that, while a blessing, is also a crutch. Reasoning from first principles every time is slow compared to pulling out the right relationship for the problem at hand right away.

llamaimperative 2y ago
I'm this same way -- very strong semantic memory, astoundingly bad episodic memory. I've been getting into spaced repetition and I was curious if you have ideas on what to memorize via SRS? I don't really have things in my job or intellectual pursuits that clearly lend themselves to flashcard style memorization, so I've been doing SRS on sort of quasi-useless things to help 1) get in the habit of SRS and 2) build more "scaffolding" in my memory so when I want to SRS useful things it'll be easier. (By (2) I mean I'm memorizing some historical dates/facts because I found early in using SRS that I'd traverse known facts like a graph, so simply having more known facts would make it easier to add and remember new ones -- most things I'll learn will have a date affiliated with them, so figure anchoring a bunch of dates in my memory won't be totally useless)
- kqr 2y ago
  I forgot to reply to this and don't want to write a long answer now in case you won't see it. If you're still interested, shoot an email to hn@xkqr.org and I'll give more details. Sorry for taking so long!

by kqr 2y ago

llamaimperative 2y ago

I'm this same way -- very strong semantic memory, astoundingly bad episodic memory. I've been getting into spaced repetition and I was curious if you have ideas on what to memorize via SRS? I don't really have things in my job or intellectual pursuits that clearly lend themselves to flashcard style memorization, so I've been doing SRS on sort of quasi-useless things to help 1) get in the habit of SRS and 2) build more "scaffolding" in my memory so when I want to SRS useful things it'll be easier. (By (2) I mean I'm memorizing some historical dates/facts because I found early in using SRS that I'd traverse known facts like a graph, so simply having more known facts would make it easier to add and remember new ones -- most things I'll learn will have a date affiliated with them, so figure anchoring a bunch of dates in my memory won't be totally useless)

kqr 2y ago
I forgot to reply to this and don't want to write a long answer now in case you won't see it. If you're still interested, shoot an email to hn@xkqr.org and I'll give more details. Sorry for taking so long!