Why is it useful?
My job at least isn’t bottlenecked by me not memorizing enough things. Or maybe it is! But I’m not convinced
Can you imagine that there have been points in your job that would have gone smoother if you'd known more?
Understanding is efficiently arranging and coordinating those nodes in an efficient path for most situations
Wisdom is knowing in which contexts to actually apply that path of nodes
Tacit knowledge is similar to wisdom just it generally lacks memorisation
There's not a perfect mapping in English between Memorisation, Understanding and Wisdom and their most pragmatic corresponding analogues in nature, but I have found this distinction between terms useful in the whole memorisation v understanding debate
Adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge is learning facts. Memorization is making the nodes persistent. Both are important, but they're not equivalent. You need to do both.
You can learn without memorization (you can learn a lot and forget everything you've learned by the next day). You can memorize without learning the subject matter (for example, you can memorize a counting song in Mandarin Chinese without knowing that what you've memorized are numbers).
Flashcards can be used for learning, but they are optimized for memorization. We shouldn't expect them to be the best tool for learning, because that's not what they're designed for. One might get better results learning from another resource, and then using flashcards to memorize the concepts they've learned.
Learning facts, understanding how they correlate and memorizing both the facts and the correlations are all different steps. Memorization is useful and necessary, but it's not equivalent to learning and to understanding. Each step helps with the other steps. They can happen at the same time, but not necessarily.
In fact, I would argue that most of the forms of knowledge that are truly valuable are exactly the kinds that aren't amenable to memorization. Think about any skill that's in high demand and takes decades to master. You're not going to get there by studying Anki cards.
On the other hand, what a professional mathematician does is create new tools for proving theorems. This can't be memorized because, by definition, the knowledge didn't exist. It's true that they draw on previous experience having solved similar problems. But it's not clear to me that this knowledge is most efficiently gotten by drilling the same problems over and over.
I think this idea of using Anki for learning everything is misguided because it attempts to reduce complex topics and pragmatic know-how to a set of trivia questions. An example from the article: the author wanted to understand the AlphaGo paper, and some example flashcards were "who plays first in Go" and "where did AlphaGo get its training data". They probably could have acquired a much deeper understanding by playing a few games of Go and implementing a reinforcement learning algorithm for tic-tac-toe. Incidentally, that also sounds a lot more fun and motivating to me than studying flashcards.
You might if you were an editor. I guess your job probably doesn't have much to do with that so you see it as pointless but there is a different sphere of knowledge where having various things committed to memory would save you time. For instance, if we're interested in learning a new programming language, I guess most of us can understand a sentence like "a string is an immutable sequence of characters," quickly read it, and move on. If you weren't familiar with the concepts in that sentence you'd burn a lot more time before making heads or tails of it.
Can we? In the context of learning a new unfamiliar programming language… is it saying there is a string type or is it telling you that there isn’t a string type but only a sequence of characters? Like APL a string is an array of characters not its own type but in C# [string] is a thing and if you iterate it you get [char] type. In Prolog a string is traditionally a linked list of ASCII code numbers, there isn’t a string type or a char type … but there is still a string to chars conversion function. So is the sentence telling you that there is a char type? In Python a string is iterable but you get strings of length one for the characters rather than chars. But wait what about Unicode and surrogate pairs and glyphs, where does “sequence of characters” fit on those things in this language?
What does ‘sequence’ mean in this unfamiliar language - is it saying strings are an array or a list, or that sequence is a trait or behaviour which generalises over many types? What is immutable specifically, sequences or strings or characters or all data? What are the consequences of that? In APL you can assign into an array even though they are immutable (it will be copied behind the scenes) so it seems like it is an implementation detail you can ignore but wait that means dropping one character from the front copies the rest of the string in memory (slow) whereas in other languages trying to change a string at all is an error - compile time or runtime? You might think Prolog can do it if strings are linked lists but surprise, Prolog lists are immutable.
So if you read that sentence and move on, what have you really learned about the new language? In the context of this thread how would you Anki-fy the concepts immutable or sequence or string?
And I'm also saying that rote learning and background knowledge can hinder progress and require time unlearning, like the beginner needs to spend time learning. e.g. a mathematical sequence like "even numbers" can be infinitely long and the sentence probably doesn't mean that strings can have infinite characters in them. I guess, if you don't know the meaning of the words the sentence doesn't help you, if you know the words from a different context but don't know the programming language then the words don't help you, and if you already know the language then the words add nothing for you. Learning is impossible, Q.E.D ;-)
There's some grains of truth to aspects of the culture resisting individualism (which isn't inherently negative I don't think, as distasteful as that may sound to Americans), but not only is this a mischaracterization, it's also missing the upsides of having a population that all has stashed in their heads a whole shitload of math and science that enables them in all sorts of interesting ways.
For example, on a construction team, any single member is capable of more geometric reasoning than the same team in the usa (in my limited experience working with construction in both countries), making for faster, more accurate, and cheaper builds. Or, when bringing a software engineer up to speed with a new framework or whatever, I find they retain mundane details remarkably quickly, probably by having a well honed memorization method. That's really nice for when you're trying to think of how to implement something and basically the entire library documentation is just at hand in the noggin.
On the other hand, memorising things you do understand is a time saving measure at the point of memory access as well as something that allows you to play with concepts/ideas/facts in your head while doing anything else, which I've found to be quite useful. You do have to be selective about it, and software like Anki shouldn't be used to build memories for everything (for one, it can be so boring that you'll be turned off of SRS entirely if you overuse it).
They are not the same which is why they are two different words. For example, memorising first 1000 prime numbers is not same as knowing prime numbers. The former person will not be able to figure out 1001st prime number because it's not in their memory bank but the later can calculate it. Sure it takes time to calculate but it's not impossible.
Now, I'm not belittling memorisation. A baseline memory is needed otherwise one'll be wasting time and energy figuring out everything from first principles all the time. This is akin to rainbow tables saving time. But as with all things in life finding right balance is key. As you pointed out, it's useful to memorise things at work to save time and energy.
Try learning Spanish from scratch with a "bad memory" and let me know how it goes.
I am fluent in three languages. Learning words is the easy part, fluency unlocks when you are able to think, or feel, in that language. When you have thoughts that you cannot losslessly translate back to your native language.
Knowing Spanish words is not knowing Spanish. Memorization is the first and easiest 5% of the whole process.
Although already a power Emacs user, it was a significant step up when I started memorizing keystone for various modes via spaced repetition.
I think this could be less likely if you're very specialized, but if you're a consultant or freelancer and have to work with lots of different technologies, locking down the differences and unique aspects for each could save a lot of time.
The use case you mention is more suited to a personal knowledgebase with good search capabilities and/or networking, like Obsidian, Tana, Roam, org-mode, whatever. That way you have the knowledge somewhere, you can search it (of course, this can be lossy - like writing good cards this requires writing good notes), and you can build up all the context you need.
I think the article misses the mark on the dichotomy here - it's not search vs. flash cards, it's owning your knowledge vs. relying on external, potentially ephemeral sources. Flash cards and spaced repetition are great for certain use cases (Anki is incredibly popular among language learners for a reason), but not for all of them.