People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

Many would ask to see the page I'd read and I'd show them and they would ask how I got my code working from an example that had nothing to do with what our task was.

I think there is a lot of value to looking at a SO answer, generalizing it and making it work in your code and doing it quickly. Knowing which SO articles are junk and which ones are gems is something many take for granted but is actually something close to having the right 'gut' feeling.

When I had to actively memorize I paid way more attention to what I was doing. I think the online search multitasking is honestly very bad for sustained attention and very passive. As an alternative I started to look up library code directly and just read and I feel like I learned more about how python worked in a few weeks than I did in months or so of just typing things into google.

More generally speaking, most people today would be incredibly frustrated getting information about anything generally if they were plopped down 30 years ago. When I was a product manager back then, we paid consulting companies large sums of money to get the most basic competitive information faxed to us because you couldn't just look it up.

Leet code interview question where I could just find the answer in 5 seconds with a google search, might actually be good interview questions if they just let me use a google search.

You still have to know what to look for.

Being good at word problems in math I think are the only place where “being a math whiz” is what it takes to be “able to code”. How you setup your equations to solve a simple algebraic word problem, can make solving the word problem super simple, or more complex.

My kids do Singapore math, and holy crap does it force you to think about other ways to approach solving problems, a valuable skill.

I believe this is the real reason spam-answer/grifting sites are so bad. They pollute this shared commons of freely available information. From a policy recommendation I certainly hope these free resources are kept in place, timely, and free from spam/SEO farming.

The “own” snippet that comes up the most often for me is a binary-search implementation of integer cube root in Python - I know how to do it but the edge cases trip me up enough times that my pre-written answer is faster than trying to write it from scratch.

Certainly some things were harder and slower, but if forced you to use your brain more and think through some types of issues. You rarely got instant gratification of reading someone else’ solution to your weird problem or error.

It forced you to really look through the source code and think things through from first principles. To understand your runtime (C programs barely have a runtime really, but it still exists in complex programs that must run for long periods like a MUD). It forced a deep knowledge of your tool chains and made you really good at them. It forced you to be more narrow but also creative and deep. From a first principles perspective it taught me ways of working that are different to younger programmers, and even modern me. Often looking something up is right. But sometimes you are best served by learning something for yourself, through source code and such. I learned so much looking at other code based and constantly asking “why?”. Why is this code this way, etc. I can’t say if it’s better or worse, but I got really good at MUDs and it turned into a long career in tech with no degree :)

I'm not sure, but I suspect it's that it was the technology improvement more than it was my improvement.

What I find is that it can be faster to just look at the documentation that comes with the tooling. Usually a good stack overflow answer is just regurgitation of something that's already covered in the documentation that the asker clearly didn't read a lick of. When you start using a new tool, just skimming the documentation end to end can but you at such an advantage and set you up to get working with the tool in the correct way with a decent understanding of some of the caveats that might be at play with your particular use case (which is rarely something that can be gleamed from a terse stack overflow answer). Even just a pdf covering a language can be handy to thumb through the chapters and revisit common patterns like for loops that can vary in different languages, once again its easier to trod down a familiar pdf textbook than it is to try and trench up something relevant from google search these days.

This is more or less what I got out of the 2nd half of my higher education. Plus I got a ton of reps in, so to speak, to really refine my judgement and ability to research. It's the old adage about learning how to learn, teaching one to fish, etc. I'm sure this all applies to many fields, but especially one like ours that changes rapidly. Thanks to this education, I feel like I can switch careers pretty easily.

I make no mistake about it. I don't feel like I know what I know without the help of the Internet; I feel like I'm just some bloke who is good at sussing out what's important and how to apply it to my job. I think this is a skill that is missing from a number of my colleagues though.

The major difficulties are indeed around the things you mention, but one solution for that is having a few large projects open in another IDE window so you can search for functions, idioms, algorithms, patterns.

I guess I got used to it because I started coding professionally before Stack Overflow. There was Expert Sex Change, but it sucked, so I avoided it like the plague. It was mostly C#, so the combination of Static Typing + Intelisense also helped me not needing internet. Before C# I coded in Perl, so seeing other people's code wouldn't help anyway ;)

We used to have these little folded cards with the complete syntax of Pascal or C and that would be enough. Nowadays, you don't even know all the languages and libs that are in a given stack.

E.g., there are languages where the offline manual covers 99% of all your needs. I include bash and c, octave, matlab in this category.

Then there's languages that feel the offline docs are best left ad an afterthought, and focus most of their effort either towards funky online documentation websites, or effectively relegate it all to stackoverflow.

I'm fine with the built in `man` command, and of course offline documentation for almost everything. It's actually kind of weird that our first instinct is to waste internet bandwidth while we probably have a copy right with us.

I know it's sometimes easier to google particular questions and that some projects lack documentation, but many if not most programming tools include very good documentation in the same package. And many include their source too.

I think saying you'd be useless for lacking online access to that knowledge is an exaggeration.

Not being able to pull new dependencies is more problematic, in my opinion.

Programming information tends to be easily verified so organizing it's skill around filtering google, stackoverflow and so-forth is fine. The resulting program can be tested fairly easily.

Uncritically taking in other sorts of claims can be very problematic.

It seems like mastery and knowledge just for the sake of it is less of a priority these days. Why bother wiping your ass when the cloud can do it for you?

I think it's entirely possible to work offline first and foremost. You'd need the documentation for everything local. Operating system, programming language, libraries, frameworks, etc. Mass storage makes this more practical now than ever.

A lot of projects don't provide very downloadable documentation which would make it harder and, of course, you'd miss out on knowing when the documentation is lying.

The biggest problem with it is probably nothing intrinsic, but the fact that you'd be swimming upstream doing it.

I remember when I was at the South Pole I had to queue my internet queries for when the satellite was up.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-m... - Article I read years ago on this, I think it helps to frame the debate of memorization vs anti-memorization. In particular this sentence:

> I define memorization as learning an isolated fact through deliberate effort. [emphasis in original]

I'll emphasize isolated fact. A lot of people who say memorization and rote learning are bad or ineffective are probably framing it in the same sense as this author. They (mostly, there are exceptions) aren't arguing against committing information to memory, but of committing information to memory with no (or minimal) understanding attached to it.

If you just learn isolated facts, you become a meat sack Chinese room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). You can't connect the dots and perform the real interesting work of synthesis (combining information and ideas) or derivation (from what you know, determine new results). The author talks about students "knowing" that the sine of pi/2 is 1. What do they actually know, though? What can they do with that fact on its own without any understanding of what "sine" itself means and the contexts in which it is used?

Knowing how to look up and apply things is nice. Being able to discern which of the things you looked up are worth memorising, and then actually doing so, is even better.

By contrast, the critique of rote-memorization in education is that students have their time/effort/educational-opportunity squandered in courses that ask them to memorize information incongruent with expected utility. For example, kids had been asked to remember elements of a fictional narrative, or specific dates or factoids about historical trivia.

It's more of an issue of (cache/memory)-management and when/what information ought to be retained rather than an issue of memorization always being good/bad.

Generally, the critique of education is that students ought to be learning how to think and operate rather than memorizing trivia. Of course, learning to operate effectively can involve memorization at times, e.g. retaining an appropriately-tuned working-cache of relevant information, though exams that basically force students to waste their time/effort/opportunity memorizing trivia seem counter-productive.

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Hard to explain this, but it's important, so...

I think one of the worst parts of rote-memorization in education is that it messes up the mind's internal prioritization scheme, which I think makes people stupid.

For example, when someone's doing a math-problem, they need to remember the numbers that they're working with; such things ought to be retained in the term in which they're used, as required to do a math-problem.

For another example, when someone's studying a historical-happening, they need to remember dates, names, and so forth, well enough to piece it together. Though like with math, they ought to be able to write such things down or look them up, as appropriate; there's no value to memorization that goes beyond its utility in caching.

So, when a teacher asks their students to memorize dates, it's not that they're wrong in the notion that a good-student ought to, at some point, have memorized the very things they're asking the students to memorize. Instead, the teacher's big screw-up is that they're asking students to elevate such minutia from cache-trivia to deliverables. Alternatively, they're asking students to treat their mental-cache AS a deliverable.

And that's what I fear would make people stupid, because that's not how a healthy mind would seem to operate. This is, a healthy mind ought to have an efficient, tuned cache-management system; it's a mental-sickness to try to train one's cache to reliably operate over the course of days or weeks, as students had sometimes been asked to to regurgitate trivia on an exam.

Instead, a healthy mind ought to have an internal feel for when/how trivia is useful, then retain it accordingly. And a healthy mind shouldn't be obsessed with a fear of failing an exam for forgetting something; that'd be like designing a CPU around the ideal that a cache-miss is a critical-error.

In short, I'm trying to stress that it's not as simple an issue as memorization always being good/bad, but rather it's an issue of rote-memorization training students to engage in poor mental-hygiene practices, messing up their ability to think efficiently. (Obviously, this is in addition to the normal objection that students end up missing out on a real education.)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9810.Albert_Einstein

and there is :

"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking"

https://www.quora.com/How-true-is-Einsteins-statement-that-R...

I slightly disagree. I do agree that the end goal of having the information memorized is important, but drilling flashcards never worked for me. What makes information stick is drilling practice problems that touch on the knowledge to be memorized until it's established. It's more useful for recognizing when those facts will be relevant, too, compared to having a memory silo of 10,000 stored facts.

Every piece of knowledge has things you can do with it, things that relates to it etc, understanding how to work with the knowledge is the important part to learn and what you don't really learn by just looking it up on the internet. Basically you build interfaces and connects them and create a large structure of things you can do and apply to all sorts of things.

Knowledge isn't just the ability to produce true statements, it isn't knowing what things are or what things will be, it's knowing why things are and why things will be.

If I keep guessing coinflips, I don't have knowledge of the answer 50% of the time even though I can predict them that often.

Knowledge has an aspect of understanding why things are, not just that they are, and that aspect becomes incredibly weak with the "look up facts on wikipedia"-model of external knowledge.

The JTB-model of knowledge is probably incomplete, but it's arguably less wrong than a model that doesn't contain justification.

For somputer systems, the speed at which data can be accessed has a transformative effect on the algorithms that deal with it. I think this is the case for humans as well.

Intelligent people tend to think that you do not need to memorize because everything is out there at a button-press distance. But they do not realize that what makes the intelligent is that they can memorize lots of things without effort.

An important distinction is that calculators tend not to lie or make honest mistakes when producing facts.

The problem is similar to not looking and determining what the information of the article you Google is. This feeds into the now stereotype behavior of someone confusing a Google search with actual research. Google doesn't help with it's question-answer section, many of which are mis-categorized and from not-necessarily reliable sources.

Quantity has a quality all it's own.

A large quantity of poor quality of information is certainly not something that it would be useful to have automatically pouring through one's cranium, to say the least.

At least with news media, if there was a significant error in reporting, that would go out in an upcoming edition. Both would be recorded.

In recent times, news outlets, and other publications, _silently_ update things without issuing a correction or making it obvious there was a correction and the only way you can find out is by the internet archive, if it was there.

People learn arithmetic in school, but often become functionally dependent on calculators or computer. When this happens, I don't have the sensation that I "knew" the right answer, or that I did the calculation; clearly the device did the work. The separation is apparent.

What about when a script or tool you use every day does something you could in principle do on your own, but the computer is far faster and more reliable? Do you feel you "know" how to typecheck your code? Or to resolve dependencies?

> When information is at our fingertips, we may mistakenly believe that it originated from inside our heads

reminded me immediately of Chalmers standing with his iPhone in his hand, arguing that there is nothing special in the skull as a location that is required for establish ownership of an idea.

data point of one.

My concern is the difficulty of tracking down sources years later without a means of reference. Unless you are actively archiving and organizing those links in a useful way. What we have is more prone to forgetfulness, but also at the time that is our strength. Still a pain though

Well to some degree. At some stage we will forgo having a smartphone and have Google hardwired to our brain. I think that's where we're heading eventually. Tech companies want to be inside our head (if they're not already). Musk talks about the bandwidth problem of accessing information. If it was super readily available (i.e hardwired to our brain), then we could be superhuman.

This is why we're to some extent already cyborgs, just not in the cyberpunk aesthetic way of being half machine half human, but we're already half-way there with smartphones.