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caching the ideas in your head
caching the ideas in your head

Not committing things to long-term memory, but more like context stuffing

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committing things to long-term memory

Committing things to long-term memory means moving knowledge from temporary, fragile link not tracked into durable storage that you can reliably retrieve later. This is the opposite of caching the ideas in your head or context stuffing, where you only need the information for the duration of a task.

Techniques like spaced repetition, link not tracked, and link not tracked help make this transfer stick by forcing repeated, link not tracked — a link not tracked — that strengthens the underlying memory traces over time.

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context stuffing

This is analogous to a person gathering all the relevant papers onto their desk, and perhaps working with spaced repetition to caching the ideas in your head before sitting down to work through a problem — it's not about permanently memorizing the material, but about having it available in link not tracked for the duration of the task.

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do you need to write your own spaced repetition prompts?

There has been pushback on that idea from some serious practitioners, though. In tweet - Dwarkesh custom spaced repetition card creation tooling, Dwarkesh Patel feels that the process of creating the cards is often rote, especially for his primary use, which is caching the ideas in your head for his next interview.

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tweet - Dwarkesh custom spaced repetition card creation tooling

He pushes back on the idea that writing your own prompts may be more beneficial than using canned ones, saying that in many cases, it's very rote. His purpose is to just caching the ideas in your head as well as possible before an interview so if things come up, he's ready to talk about them.

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