I feel like I must be attacking a straw man here, as you’re not the only individual I’ve met who found spaced repetition revelatory, but I’m still not sure what I’m missing.
There is often a misconception that subjects like physics are solely about understanding and reasoning, but at the school level, it is necessary to have a solid grasp of the laws and formulas. Without this foundation, it is like attempting to write a program in a programming language without knowing the syntax. You have to stop and look up the syntax for each line of code, slowing down the entire process. Some things simply need to be memorized to achieve a certain level of proficiency.
The more cards I created/added made it worse.
I would recommend not giving up but instead altering your approach. I tried spaced repetition multiple times in grad school and completely failed at it. I then tried again over 10 years later (and much older!) and it was really like attaining a super power. The success is even more remarkable because compared to my university days, I am much less actively using the material in the cards.
In my case, the difference between the two attempts was sticking to the daily schedule[1] and getting better at creating relevant cards.
And keep in mind: SR aids in recall, not in understanding. There have been times where I look at the cards on a certain topic and do very poorly (consistently). I then realize it's partly because some key understanding has been lost. I then need to do a proper study session (get the book out, read for understanding, perhaps do some problems). After that study session, I get good on the cards and stay good for a long time. In the last 4 years, I've needed to do this perhaps twice.
[1] Yes, I do stop from time to time, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.
Once I realized that understand is different from recall, it made a world of difference.
I certainly wanted it to work, when I first learned about it I thought it was the answer. But I seemed to get worse and more stressed out because I wasn't learning anything.
I'm not too fussed about it not working for me. I don't think there is a one size style of learning.
Not sure if I'm just an outlier, but I think you're right that many learning heuristics aren't one-size-fits-all. Hope you can find something that's effective (and enjoyable) for you. :)
When I can edit code via vim keybindings quickly, I can move things, sketch ideas, swap entire blocks, and so on, easily. That lets me check and look at things, and allow my whole brain to be spent on higher level things like looking at the control flow, applying aesthetic considerations to simplify, or whatever.
I failed Calc 3 as a college freshman because I had taken high school calc as a junior, leaving a full year between. I understood the ideas of calc 3, but couldn't remember the basic stuff like integrating tan() or whatever. (and I also didn't have any study discipline at the time to actually solve for my situation). So I couldn't answer the questions on a test even though I knew the steps I would need to take past a roadblock. Solvable with study, which would have been effective in the form of spaced repetition flash cards.
When people complain about the difficulty of their college math courses or the math problems they solve at work, I can assure that it's not because they had a hard time remembering the answer to a multiplication. In a lot of cases, the equations they are trying to solve don't even have numbers in them. And when there are numbers, you won't be able to calculate them mentally because they won't simplify like they do in a no-calculator math exam.
You might not have realized, but a lot of the work when designing a no-calculator exam is to make sure people can compute the numbers mentally. When you step out in the real world, 32x9 becomes into 32.091x9.1^1.1. It turns ugly real fast when you have to deal with real numbers instead of a carefully crafted exam question.
This is pretty much the opposite of my experience. I have learned many programming languages and never found it useful to memorize any syntax. I read the book/docs/tutorial once, and then reference it (or code I previously wrote) just-in-time whenever I need a reminder, and find that whatever I use repeatedly is quickly committed to memory. I don't see how memorization could make this faster.
In a sense, the nature of a specialized career forces you to engage in spaced repetition of the things you need to know, and allows you to safely ignore the stuff you never need to touch again. If we encouraged spaced repetition on each and everything, I would be wasting a ton of time on subjects that ultimately aren't relevant, at the expense of free time and maximizing time spent on the relevant bits.
> As you specialize, you frequently have major classes where its "first week or two we dig into what you already should know, then we really dive into the deeper stuff."
Yes, they do this. But I've often seen (especially at the undergrad level) instructors avoiding topics or challenging problems because it required material beyond just the basic math/calculus (e.g. some trig identities, differential equations, etc). So in practice, this is not happening.
> Or you take up a job, and maybe you have to refer to that one topic from class years ago twice a year, that's spaced repetition.
It's even worse at work, where you don't have a teacher to enforce things. Suggestions get shot down all the time because coworkers have forgotten some (even trivial) things they learned at university, and they do not want to review it. I've seen this happens where they avoid basic Calc I stuff, where they avoid stuff in data structures (e.g. union find). They'll implement a poor solution, and convince management it can't be done better. Or that it can but it's a long term risk because if that one person who knows "union find" leaves, we won't be able to hire someone to maintain it, etc.
> If we encouraged spaced repetition on each and everything, I would be wasting a ton of time on subjects that ultimately aren't relevant, at the expense of free time and maximizing time spent on the relevant bits.
Michael Nielsen did an analysis of this after using Anki for a bunch of years: The average amount of time spent on a card over one's lifetime is about 10 minutes. And so he used that as a metric when encountering any new piece of information: "If I don't learn it, do I think I will spend more than 10 minutes looking it up in the future?" If yes, he'll make a flashcard for it. If not, he won't.
But yes, I definitely have disabled cards on topics that I don't think I'll want to touch again in the future.
if anything, it's higher level education (4, 5, and 600 level college courses) where i saw a lack of spaced repetition, or any sort of learning beyond the professor presenting the material. I guess it's expected that at that point you have your learning technique figured out.
In post-secondary education, the amount of material, typically due to the speed or density of delivery, may reveal that your learning technique isn't working. For example you may spend too much time on one topic rather than on a topic more heavily weighted in an exam.
Haphazard spaced repetition.
Just because spaced repetition isn't good for everything doesn't mean it shouldn't be used for what it is good at. It's good for remembering the specifics of things that you have already learned and understood.