Your stale memories are not the old ones (opens in new tab)

We have a lazy mental model of what makes a memory stale, and it is costing us. The model is age. Old memories are suspect, recent ones are fresh, so you decay the old stuff and trust the new. Recency weighting, time based decay, a half life on every note. It is clean, it is cheap, and it is wrong often enough to matter. Take the case that broke it for me. You write a memory today about how some module works. Tomorrow you refactor that module. The memory is one day old, as fresh as it gets, a...