> every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map
That's a stupid thing to memorize, not to mention constantly churning due to political instability.
You really need to gatekeep what you stuff into your noggin.
Most educated people could recognize certain countries by shape, like Italy, Africa, USA. But every country? Come on ...
And your response at someone else's joy is to swat it down and call it tedious and stupid?
I wonder about why this is.
I don't know what you're imagining by "it", but my remarks are only about memorizing all countries by border shape, not the use of spaced repetition as a whole.
That's the "it" I have swatted down.
Memorizing names of countries -> continent, I could swallow. That is useful. Or even latitude and longitude (rounded off to nearest ten degrees, say). Or some general indication: is it to the north, south; landlocked or coastal.
So if someone talks about Venezuela, the kid knows it's a coastal country in South America's north.
If you can't tell me that, what's the use of recognizing the shape of Venezuela and mapping it to a name?
The OP was a positive story. There could be an interesting discussion to be had around the subject of useful things to remember. But you literally used the words "tedious" and "stupid", and this sort of comment doesn't usually result in good conversation or debate.
You'd do well to heed the downvotes and constructive feedback you're getting :)
Here are some quotes from HN guidelines in case you missed them!
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
"Africa is a nation that suffers from terrible disease ..."
Pointless self imposed limitations don't help.
I was reading an interview with Andy Matuschak[1].
> One of the things that I think is kind of weird about this memory system stuff, or like memory champions, or something like that is “Oh, if you do these things, will you start to forget other normal human stuff?” And what's weird is, no. I've been doing this memory system stuff for years and I just know more stuff now. This is aligned with the experimental literature, which seems to suggest that, there's probably upper bounds but we're not close to them. Some of these memory champions have memorized maybe two orders of magnitude more things than I have practiced. Certainly people who are multi-lingual have really, really absurd numbers of things memorized. So there isn't a resource management argument.
The notion that stuffing your brain with trivia will be damaging is merely an unwarranted fear.
When I stop responding and the wife asks if I'm still listening, sometimes I tell her I'm swapping right at the moment.
I doubt anything requires Anki; rather it's more efficient than the alternatives.
