From a Psychology textbook I read (and other sources, including here): "Elaborative Rehearsal" is a kind of reviewing that improves retention: instead of just rereading atomic "facts", it's more effective to look for meanings and connotations, to ask "why?", and to see how it fits in the bigger picture. Having a good understanding of principles and relationships makes transfer easier, i.e. it makes it more likely that you'll be able to use what you learnt in different contexts (i.e. in daily life and not just on LessWrong / when studying psychology).
Anki seems pretty bad at all of those, so something that puts more emphasis on the global structure of knowledge (like a Memory Palace / Method of Loci) may be better.
On the other hand, I mostly remember the above because I put it in Anki and review my decks every day :)
From a Psychology textbook I read (and other sources, including here): "Elaborative Rehearsal" is a kind of reviewing that improves retention: instead of just rereading atomic "facts"
I'm my experience psychology literature does not easily present atomic facts. Finding atomic facts in a article is a process that means that you have to understand what the article is about.
I took a book about learning theory and it told stories about how Aristotle did this and that and how some experiment turned out in a specific way. It names a bunch of facts but I didn't found anything that looked like an atomic fact in the first two chapters.
LessWrong seems to be a big fan of spaced-repetition flashcard programs like Anki, Supermemo, or Mnemosyne. I used to be. After using them religiously for 3 years in medical school, I now categorically advise against using them for large volumes of memorization.
[A caveat before people get upset: I think they appropriate in certain situations, and I have not tried to use them to learn a language, which seems its most popular use. More at the bottom.]
A bit more history: I and 30 other students tried using Mnemosyne (and some used Anki) for multiple tests. At my school, we have a test approximately every 3 weeks, and each test covers about 75 pages of high-density outline-format notes. Many stopped after 5 or so such tests, citing that they simply did not get enough returns from their time. I stuck with it longer and used them more than anyone else, using them for 3 years.
Incidentally, I failed my first year and had to repeat.
By the end of that third year (and studying for my Step 1 boards, a several-month process), I lost faith in spaced-repetition cards as an effective tool for my memorization demands. I later met with a learning-skills specialist, who felt the same way, and had better reasons than my intuition/trial-and-error:
Here are examples of the typical kind of things I memorize every day and have found flashcards to be surprisingly worthless for:
Here is what I now use in place of flashcards:
Spaced repetition is still good for knowledge you need to retrieve immediately, when a 2-second delay would make it useless. I would still consider spaced-repetition to memorize some of the more rarely-used notes on the treble and bass clef, if I ever decide to learn to sight-read music properly. I make no comment on it's usefulness to learn a foreign language, as I haven't tried it, but if I were to pick one up I personally would start with a rosetta-stone-esque program.
Your mileage may vary, but after seeing so many people try and reject them, I figured it was enough data to share. Mnemonic pictures and memory palaces are slightly time consuming when you're learning them. However, if someone has the motivation and discipline to make a stack of flashcards and study them every day indefinitely, then I believe learning and using those skills is a far better use of time.