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Trivia is not useful knowledge in today's world. The most important thing is problem formulation. Once you have figured out the right question to ask, answering it is usually easy.

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This is why I'm so fascinated with Vernor Vinge's "wearables" future, and why I think parts of it are such an accurate representation of the near future. For instance, high schools have classes called "Search and Analysis" -- basically advanced Googling & result interpretation. People have recognized that the ability to formulate the proper query is almost as important as being able to understand the results.

Check out his short story Fast Times At Fairmont High[1] and the short Synthetic Serendipity[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor...

[2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...

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