I think in most of the mentioned note taking methods (zettelkasten, digital gardening) spaced repetition is kind of frowned upon in a way. It is seen as a necessity because of the way the educational system requires you to conjure up a certain set of knowledge at a particular time (a test). With zettelkasten and digital gardening (or any other method with similar goals) the process and habits that you acquire over time become more important. The goal is not to optimize for the (short-term) memorization of some knowledge only to shove it aside and move on to the next set of knowledge to memorize for the next test. Rather these methods are trying to design a process by which you can build on ideas iteratively. In order to really embrace these methods we'll have to see changes in the educational system as well or we'll end up with methodologies optimized for the educational system that is currently in place (which is what spaced repetition is in my view).
If you have poor recall, how do you know what you need to look up? How do you know what entry points you have in your 'zettelkasten'? If you have no intention to recall information, why even bother taking notes? Instead of searching your notes, or following a zettelkasten ID trail, search the internet. We want to be able to _use_ information.
I'm all for the zettelkasten method, for good notetaking habits...however there's also a tendency of many notetakers, or productivity porn on notetaking, to waste so much time 'notetaking' and 'organising' that they never _act_. (I've been very guilty of this in the past).
Recall isn't bad. It's essential. It is, however, not the _only_ thing to use. You want to use spaced repetition for the most important, most used information. Stuff that's a bit more niche, rarely used, yeah just search that.
There's a word for this in German: Bulimielernen (bulimia learning). I.e. learning a large number of facts in a manner that you can barf them up exactly once (in the exam) and forget them immediately after.
Naturally, this only works on knowledge-base exams, not skill-based exams (e.g. math). This also shows up in the results: math exams generally seem to have worse grades than other exams, and math exams seem to have lower thresholds to pass (e.g. 25 % vs. 60 %).
I'm curious why you think maths is exempt from being 'gamed' per se, by this technique.
I'm also not sure where you're getting "math exams generally seem to have worse grades than other exams" and "lower thresholds to pass" from.
At university I specifically remember some of my friends not understanding the calculus they were doing _at all_, yet they could still answer questions because they rote learned the technique.
Spaced repetition is not the same as cramming, and spaced repetition (if applied correctly) leads to long-term memory formation.
It's not perfect for every type of information, and there are some aspects of memory (most notably contextual memory) which can make it less effective than one might like. But it definitely is more useful than just for exam cramming...
Spaced repetition is not the same as short-term memorisation. In fact I'd argue that you haven't fully memorised something with an SRS until the interval between reviews is at least a month or two -- which isn't really "short term" especially when you consider that school terms are also on the order of a few months.
I consider Spaced Repetition a mental model of how we learn and retain knowledge. I think your objection is with flash card systems and I don’t disagree with your assessment.
I think of Spaced Repetition more generally. A paper based Zettelkasten system can be enhanced with a paper based review scheduling system; say 43 folders as described by David Allen in Getting Things Done with a simple SuperMemo algorithm for interval spacing.
When we gain good recall of Zettelkasten structure/content I suspect that we inadvertently mimic Spaced Repetition. I can be convinced otherwise.
I wonder why people conflate notes with recall. The root is probably that note taking is introduced in school for things you have to recall in exams later. For me the point is that I do not have to train the recalling because I can search my notes instead.
Maybe taking notes helps me recall things and maybe it doesn't. And maybe writing them gives me better recall than typing and maybe it doesn't.
But, yeah. I rake notes to remember things I need to do, to capture some key points, or to be able to "play back" a meeting/talk/etc. to others in either verbal or written form. This is one reason I usually type notes for anything that I'll want to play back in any detail; it's faster and easier to capture more or less verbatim than writing notes by hand. To the degree that recall is helped, I find it's mostly by "processing" the notes in some form.
Spaced repetition, while reasonably useful, doesn't come without its challenges as well.
For instance, how can you be sure at the outset that you have designed a good prompt [1] that will enable recall versus recognition?
And even once you have designed a good prompt, that brings up the question of epistemology: how can you be sure at the outset that the "information" you wish to ingest is factual and that it will be useful to you later on? It's easy to imagine memorizing a compelling aphorism like:
> The German word for "passion", which literally translates to "enjoyable suffering". Because if you think you’re passionate about something, you must be willing to ask yourself if you’re willing to suffer for it. If you are, that means you are passionate. Otherwise, it’s just a hobby. [2]
But, while beautiful and compelling, it turns out that this definition/translation of the word "Leidenschaft" is misleading: "Leiden" means "suffering" and "schaft" simply means "-ship". This is very similar to the word _passio_ which is the Latin root of the English word (and whose meaning shines through in "The Passion of Christ", for instance).
When using spaced repetition systems you must be extraordinarily careful around vetting the content that you are putting into them, and most of the time, you would be better simply "coming back to the same reading" on a given topic (thereby effectively building your own ad-hoc SRS process).
The brain exists in order to recognize patterns, but it also likes to over-fit!
how can you be sure at the outset that you have designed a good prompt[?]
The link to Matuschak that you supply explicitly argues that you need to go back and revise prompts based on developments in your knowledge and new connections found. This includes eliminating prompts that are too easy, reformulating them for greater personal import and adding new ones to shore up areas of weakness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition