Currently, spaced repetition and incremental reading are not commonly used in creative domains. But I believe these are extremely useful tools for any domain where you are creating a theory that attempts to be both 1) consistent with itself, and 2) match up with reality.
Two of the goals when creating a philosophy are to create models of reality which are internally consistent and externally valid.
Internal consistency is where the various parts of your understanding of reality are consistent with eachother. The parts "integrate" without contradiction.
If your philosophy was divided into:
Internal consistency would imply that your theories regarding metaphysics are consistent with your theories about epistemology, ethics, politics and aesthetics.
Inconsistency in a spaced repetition system is incrementally eliminated by memory interference.
When you review a certain spaced repetition card over time, you want the underlying action of retrieval at each review to be exactly the same, since this will maximize the increase in the stability of the memory.
Question shown -> Input into brain -> Retrieval
You want the vectors of electrical activity in your mind to flow across the target synapses the same way at each review.
Competitive memory interference occurs when the action of retrieval differs between reviews.
Imagine you have two cards with contradictory information:
Card 1:
Q: French: What does "le chat" mean?
A: the cat
Card 2:
Q: French: What does "le chat" mean?
A: the dog
The cards are contradictory because the prompt is the same in both cases, but the answer to each card is different.
Over time you might fail each card 50% of the time because you are reinforcing a different answer at each review. Due to the competitive memory interference between the two answers, the intervals on the cards will gradually shrink until you are shown both cards on the same day.
This massively increases your chance of recognising that there is a contradiction in your knowledge.
The process is slow, but does not require you to actively search for contradictory cards. Through the process of competitive memory interference you systematically remove contradictory information from your collection over time.
TODO:
One of the key mechanisms employed by IncrementalReading
External validity can be understood as the degree to which your philosophy matches up with reality.
The difference between internal consistency and external validity is that an increase in memory consistency and internal consistency does not need to lead to an increase in external validity and verity.
By enabling you to maximize your retention of knowledge, Spaced repetition gives
Q: What colour is the sky?
A: red.
Q:
This article focused specifically on Philosophy, but the mechanisms of incremental contradiction resolution and retention maximization work with anything you add to your collection.
It even works between 'disconnected' domains of knowledge which are separated by a large number of nodes in the semantic network (eg. Biology and English Literature), systematically promoting a kind of "massive knowledge integration" across all of your knowledge.