First off, some context: this post is a submission for a contest I and others sponsored.

What you have written is a useful LW post, but I do not think it fills the requirements of the contest. In case it is not clear: I do not want to come across as an enemy; I bear you no ill feelings. I have decided that the original format of the contest was poorly chosen for the reasons , and I am going to restart the contest using a more traditional format. If you feel treated unfairly, please email me and we will arranged a video chat to discuss it (my email is my username at gmail.com).

My concerns in the order I noted them:

• Your introduction seems a bit odd and confusing. I think it would have been significantly clearer to directly address the prize you were responding to and the purpose of the post.
• You only cite one academic source (granted that it's a survey paper). How hard did you look for other academic sources? You don't mention this.
• You don't explain the structure of the evidence: for example you might have said something like " there is quite a bit of related old academic research and one new literature review but little ongoing research. There is a good amount of both older and ongoing non-academic research"
• your quoted equations look like they mean R = e - d t instead of R = exp(-dt)
• you don't seem to address several of my questions. In all cases it is perfectly OK to say something like 'academic research does not seem to address the question of X. non-academic research and writing has Y to say about the issue' (when it's true anyway). If there is no good evidence on a particular topic, I'd like to know about that. My questions were:
  • What spacing is best? (you do address this significantly; I would have also liked to hear about quantitative discussion about how large spacing should be (if there was any))
  • How much does spaced repetition actually help memory? (I see your anecdotal evidence, which is good, but I would also like to hear about any non-anecdotal evidence)
  • Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs? (no discussion, but maybe not a good question)
  • Does the effectiveness vary across domains? How much? (no discussion)
  • Is there research on the kinds of questions that work best? (some discussion of non-academic research, but no mention of academic research)
  • What questions do researchers think are most important? (no discussion)
  • Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on? (no discussion)
  • What, if any, questions do researchers think it is important to answer? Are there other unanswered questions that would jump out at a smart person? (no discussion)
  • What does spaced repetition not do that people might expect it to? (no discussion)

This all still sounds nifty, but, I'll repeat, why worry about memorizing when I'll never be tested for a grade and can access knowledge nearly instantaneously?

If a piece of information isn't accessible for your mind, you can't notice unexpected connections between things.

For instance, some time ago I came up with the hypothesis that happiness might be an evolutionary mechanism that made us take more risks when we had spare resources and could risk doing so. But as someone pointed out, the opposite interpretation sounds just as plausible, if not more so. That is, when you have lots of resources you should concentrate on not losing them, and when you have few, you should take more risks until you're in safer waters.

Now, later on I ran across an article with research about how moods affect our decision-making. Happy moods are related with heuristic, "business as usual" kind of decision-making; sadness triggers a more systematic analysis of the situation. That seems more in line with the interpretation that's opposite to my original one.

Now, "happy moods are linked with heuristic processing, sad moods with systematic" is a piece of trivia. But it happens that this piece of trivia helps tremendously in evaluating my original hypothesis. Had I read that article earlier, and memorized that piece of trivia, I might have gotten my hypothesis right from the get-go.

For that matter, a lot of novel hypotheses seem to basically just involve the putting together of a large number of trivia. Somebody learns of one thing, and then of another seemingly unrelated thing, and then of a third thing, and then she notices the general pattern connecting all of them and formulates it out loud. But this requires that all of those trivia pieces are actually in your head, so that your brain can find the connections. If you need to know three different pieces of trivia in order to solve the problem, the fact that you could look them up at will doesn't help if it never occurs to you that these are the ones you should be looking at.

My intuition is that we should be spending much more time memorizing trivia than we are. Not stuff like state capitals, obviously, but possibly useful details from whatever fields of knowledge we're interested in and might want to contribute to.

Can an admin please format this? It was pasted from open office. I tried tweeking the HTML but I can't get it to work.

Hope I managed what you had in mind. I had to manually re-insert your links, so you may want to check and see I got them all.

My entry has been submitted: http://lesswrong.com/lw/64k/memory_spaced_repetition_and_life/

I am working on this vigorously and expect to produce a submitted product soon. Proceed at your own risk if you are considering competing for this prize.

Why do you care if it is done to your satisfaction when the prize is awarded based on other's satisfaction with it?

Why do I care... what I care? Seriously?

But I do agree with your expected utility calculations. The problem is, I can't motivate myself to write under conditions of uncertainty like that. I understand that shouldn't matter, especially since I consider such a project worthwhile even in the absence of $155, but it does.

I'd like to work on this (be paid to substantially improve my http://www.gwern.net/Mnemosyne ? Where's the downside?), but you ask hard questions which would require a lot of research to be done to my satisfaction and during which I could be scooped. I'm not sure a race is the best way to run this.

I am an Anki user and I am interested in working on this project.

Whoa. I have also been vegan for a few years. You might want to look into creatine (which boosts intelligence, especially in vegans) and IF/CR if you haven't already.

Have you ever tried recording what you eat to see how the nutrients add up? I might try something like what you're describing in a few years.