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Comment by cptcobalt | Hacker News Reader

I see this argument as semi-fallacious, since it's really asking "can you recall infinite things on an infinite timescale using this method"? Sure, the math might add up, but humans are reliably fallible. I do agree, from practice, that practicing spaced repetition can increase the breadth of knowledge beyond that of "casual learning", but I've seen my brain fail on aged entries too.

Nicky Case's intro to spaced repetition is pretty stellar, both as a crash course and the reasoning behind it: https://ncase.me/remember/

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The argument is wholely fallacious and the author knows it and is just being silly. The entire argument is based on assumptions that only hold for smallish numbers of items. It we get to larger finite numbers, such as the number of possible states of a human brain, those assumptions are clearly false.

More than semi-fallacious - the math doesn't add up, because you run into the Bekenstein bound, which limits how much information you can pack into a volume.

This is why I don't use spaced repetition. The danger of becoming a black hole is just too high. Forgetting things is well known to be highly evolutionary advantageous, because all the critters that remember everything and turned into black holes stopped reproducing. Very dangerous stuff to play with.

Ha! Certainly none of us will get anywhere close to this bound, no matter how much time we log in Anki. But the OP asked "Would an infinitely-long-lived, but forgetful person be able to recall an infinite number of facts using this method?", and the answer is a surprising "no, you turn into a black hole".

Sometimes even just one piece of knowledge can turn you into a black hole. It’s why nobody remembers every digit of Graham’s (phone) number.

;)

his phone number is highly compressible though, it’s the decompression/serialization step that turns you into a black hole

I know we're all playing around here, but surely the answer must be that there's a limit rooted in the specific biological/chemical implementation of memory in the brain that our hypothetical "infinitely-long-lived, but forgetful person" would hit before the Bekenstein bound (probably long before) and therefore it's impossible to turn a brain into a black hole via that mechanism.

The more you learn the more you gain the ability to encode new facts with fewer "bits." Thanks to associative memory. Adults have an advantage in learning in this regard.

Tragic really how smart people know perfectly well that you shouldn’t exercise if you don’t want to accidentally turn into a grotesque muscle freak, but rarely use the same caution in brain exercise.

I guess I’m the extreme case then; I’ve been using SuperMemo for 16 years, every single day; originally it was to memorize foreign language vocabulary words, but has since expanded to everything I want to know. Left unchecked you’re right, you can easily become obsessed with memorizing junk knowledge and becoming like the comic book guy from the Simpson’s. But over time it has helped me learn how to “compact” complicated ideas into simple statements and more easily internalize new ideas. Since I’ve been using SuperMemo to remember concepts, metaphors and illustrations kind of just “appear” in my brain. I don’t fully understand why, I think it’s like lightning striking a place with lots of metal; you can’t force it to happen, but you can make the conditions conducive to “lightning strikes” of inspiration.

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