It isn’t about the memory system

[W]ho you are is not the point. Being a good person is not the point. The point is the thing that a good person is looking at: the friend in need, the child dying, the beauty and the pain, the great song of the world.

— Joe Carlsmith, On sincerity

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I’m a big fan of Anki: I’ve been use it ~daily for about two years, adding stuff I’m learning & experimenting with unusual applications.

Similar for MathAcademy, to a much less degree — but there are a number of basic math topics that I never picked up in middle & high school that I now understand, and new ones on linear algebra and calculus that I’d never learned in the first place.

But the memory system is not the point: the point is the thing that a memory system user is looking at: the math to learn, the Mandarin to practice, the great scholarship of the world.

I think people sometimes get caught up in trying to make sure that they only use their memory systems for content they actually love. But I think this gets things backward: learn content you actually love — and, if it turns out that the most effective way to durably retain that knowledge is via some kind of memory system, so be it.

The end-goal is not to be proficient with memory systems (though it might be a reasonable intermediate goal); it’s to learn something. Make that thing your focus, not the memory system.