Comment by BeetleB

As I said, they won't make you better at applying statistics (or programming) - just at recall.

Disciplines like programming, math, and well any technical discipline require both memory and analytical abilities. SR takes care of only the former. The barrier I kept running up against was forgetting definitions and theorems in math - especially if it had been a year or longer since I last used them. This helps mitigate that problem.

> Let's say I put pathlib.Path().iterdir() in my Anki card, what would be the point of that for someone who is happily using glob or rglob?

That's for you to answer - if you prefer doing it with glob/rglob, that's fine. For me, the card was "What is a better way to traverse directories/files than os.walk?".

The next time I reach for os.walk, I'm reminded there is a better way.

OK, let's be real. It doesn't always work. Perhaps only 30% of such cards lead to actual behavior change. In a typical scenario (70% of the time), I'll get the card right, but using os.walk won't trigger the part of my brain that says "Oh, there's a better way". Still, it's a very low price to get that 30%. And the bonus is if I see someone else's code where he uses scandir, I'll immediately know what it is for.

> However knowing why and when recall is important would be crucial instead of knowing bare formula.

Obviously. You'd have to find a way to embed that into a different card.