Comment by MoroCode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MoroCode | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of whats written here. I think there is a major point you're overlooking here. There is simply just too much information we're expected to know nowadays. You could argue that the amount of information we have to cram into our brains in such a short amount of time makes it very difficult to build good long term memories. High School and university curriculum's are forever expanding jamming more and more in the same period of time. Even in professional settings such as being a web developer or data scientist for example where new things are being invented by the second that then become the standard. At some point you'll need to offload long term memories to external sources. So while you may forget the actual content of what you need to know, you could for example remember what to google and the summary of the content you expect. Essentially our long term memories is transformed into pointers for external information banks. We only keep whats absolutely essential to perform our functions.

The problem is that if you don't commit information to long-term memory you can't use it reason effectively in other contexts, and you have to add it back to your short-term memory every time you look it up -- so outsourcing your memory to a knowledge bank is limiting the complexity of the tasks you can handle.

So there might be more information you're expected to know in modern jobs -- but if you spend a bit more time consolidating rather than acquiring new information, you can build the foundations on which more advanced skills can rest.

For transparency: I work with the OP

A key point here is that our brains don't work like computer hard drives. Our brains are a lot closer to how, in biology, a single cell stores the entire DNA "data" that's needed to replicate but just using a few base pairs.

We likely store information more in some type of loose graph structure, where we recall / "remember" something by re-creating links to that piece of information. There seems to be very very little "storage cost" for the billions of pieces of information we keep in our brains.

> There is simply just too much information we're expected to know nowadays. You could argue that the amount of information we have to cram into our brains in such a short amount of time makes it very difficult to build good long term memories.

I would also argue that the time we spend memorizing "facts", of questionable utility, takes away from the time that could be spent on learning better methodologies for thinking.

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