Because there's still no good exabrain. Notes.txt quickly becomes an unsearchable, undiscoverable mess of crap; wikis are hard to maintain and too heavyweight; desktop wikis never really work right and usually have shit mobile experiences.
In the meantime, to remember a fact for the rest of your life, you need to add it to the SR deck and spend 30 seconds in the rest of your life reviewing it.
Spaced repetition is a clear win; any attempt to resist it is madness. Imagine being able to just keep everything in RAM and never, ever touch disk.
Human competitive advantage (creative latency at human timescale) vs. computer/robot algorithm operating at HFT timescale.
As for the benefits of human-robot brain-algorithm cooperation (e.g. human+Google), that depends on the level of coherence between the goals of the human and the goals of the creators/financiers of the algorithm.
Agree with parent. chipuni's strategy seems like trying to pigeonhole a reference when statistically, you're most likely always going to be on a computer and have access to a reference that's searchable.
The advantage for many is the actual physical association.
I liken it to learning how to get around a building by actually walking around the building, as opposed to just seeing a map. Ultimately, when there are no other distractions going on, one is probably as good as the other.
Not that I don't think you can't get this in a notes.txt. Just, I understand why some would want a physical card deck where they flip a question into an answer. Involving your body seems logical as a benefit for some.
One needs to have enough context to now how to formulate queries that can get handled by search. Having a larger vocabulary doesn't prevent one from using search, it enables one to look up more relevant information w/o having to rediscover it each time.
