[lanstin]

Hmmmm. Maths is one area where I have felt you hurt yourself by remembering things (except maybe definitions but then usually people state the current in scope definition in the preface or something). You can derive most things about as fast and more usefully than you can remember it. Except maybe a couple identities per area. But these will tend to be beautiful enough you will run over the derivation just for pleasure from time to time.

With enacs I find if it is not in my muscle memory it doesn’t matter if I consciously know about a feature. I can think “there must be some way of doing this” and then googling it and finding it as fast as I can stop my work and recall that in 2005 I used to have some good method of dooming this obscure use case of editing/process management.

Especially now with everything changing so quickly I find paying attention to the deep constraints and reserving the possible solutions from those conditions is more effective than trying to memorize a bunch of library or platform specific capabilities.

[BeetleB]

> You can derive most things about as fast and more usefully than you can remember it. Except maybe a couple identities per area. But these will tend to be beautiful enough you will run over the derivation just for pleasure from time to time.

To derive things, you need to have memorized a basic set of theorems. As you go deeper and deeper, the "stack" gets bigger. If you only memorize the very basics, there's a good chance you will not be able to derive the deeper stuff whenever you need it.

If you are in second semester measure theory and you haven't ingrained a lot of the first semester of real analysis in your head, you likely will do poorly. Quick: When is a closed set not compact? If you do analysis a lot, you can easily answer this question. However, if you do it only occasionally, not knowing this will limit you (or even worse, and common, believing that all closed sets are compact).

I used to be in the camp of "Memorization sucks - just solve enough problems and it will stick". Its only recently that I'm realizing I was wrong. Everyone will have things stick if they do enough problems, but also everyone will have a different capacity for how much sticks. You'll hit your peak eventually by just solving problems, and a better memory will take you further beyond that small peak. Once you realize how effective SRS can be, you don't want to be limited by a poor memory.

> With enacs I find if it is not in my muscle memory it doesn’t matter if I consciously know about a feature. I can think “there must be some way of doing this” and then googling it and finding it as fast as I can stop my work

Often when reading the org mode manual I'll come across something that makes me say "Oh wow, I wish I knew this keybinding" and then would promise to remember it or look it up when needed. It's depressing how often I've said that about the same keybinding. Now that I use SRS, this phenomenon still occurs, but at less than half the frequency it used to.

Although to be frank, I now use hydra on Emacs often, so it's not as common for me to memorize keybindings.

> Especially now with everything changing so quickly I find paying attention to the deep constraints and reserving the possible solutions from those conditions is more effective than trying to memorize a bunch of library or platform specific capabilities.

Emacs is timeless :-) I will be using it for probably as long as I can use a computer.

But yes, I would be selective on what to put in SRS. Reviewing takes very little time, but creating new entries is time consuming. It needs to be worth it in the long run.