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There’s a third category here, and that’s functional skill. It’s quite a separate thing from either understanding or rote learning. They all feed into each other, of course, but the point I tried (and apparently failed) to make is that it’s functional skill that’s useful in real-world contexts.

Sometimes the thing holding you back from improvement is a lack of facts, and sometimes it’s poor understanding of theory. In my experience, however, the fastest way to get better at doing something is almost always to practice doing that thing; most of the time a sufficient collection of facts and theoretical understanding will come along as a side-effect of that work.

How much of their prior training was memorizing specific facts, and how much of it was drilling the mechanics of solving typical problems? The former is what most people use spaced repetition for and what I believe is of limited utility; the latter is incredibly valuable and I never meant to imply otherwise.




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