[hprotagonist]

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html

Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of ‘meaningless’ detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals into their brains.

I'm a researcher. Absorbing data in a "blue sky" kind of way ("no idea if i'll need this, this doesn't serve any explicit purpose, but hey it seems interesting") is a survival trait.

[codeprimate]

Spend half your time learning many things shallowly and half your time learning a few things deeply -- your resourcefulness will know no bound.

[pepicon]

This. I take notes of concepts that I don’t clearly understand/agree but have a gut feeling that is interesting, and as I read it repeteadly overtime I often get surprised by how the concept evolves on my mind.

[Jaymz87]

Is this a quote from somewhere or something you just made up? Either way, I like it.

[hprotagonist]

i sure hope so!

[s-shellfish]

Being able to let go of data is similarly just as important, being able to have control over an internally oriented structure that allows for this process of accepting, selecting, absorbing, checking, retaining, and rejecting information, this is important for survival period.

[dynamic99]

How exactly do you "retain"? Do you memorize or do you have a way of going back to notes efficiently?

[hprotagonist]

I remember the breadcrumbs. like "big picture idea, roughly where to go to find it".

i cache data in a lab notebook, a mendeley collection of papers, and pinboard.

[s-shellfish]

Our ideas of memory come from our previous ideas of memory. It's much more malleable than you may have grown to understand.

It really is like bread crumbs when you have deal with things like information overload. There's that whole idea of a 'memory palace' that I like to think about before I go to sleep, because it gives me a structure to meditate on at the end of the day, the thoughts I want to retain and arrange in the ways I'm curious about retaining and arranging them.

A lot of the information we collect can appear ordered, but unless it's a rigorous order proven mathematically, there's no real way to prove anything about the efficiency of our memory. Some thoughts may be useful tomorrow and others may be useful 10 years from now.

So I think it's fun to give it a structure I remember and can travel into, because I chose how to organize it over a very long period of time.

But ultimately I think it depends on ways you are most comfortable thinking about information. My imagination tends to be very visual.