[moosey]

I often hear a thought process to the effect of:

> Why learn something in depth when it can just be looked up?

And the answer is that you can't daydream about something or think about it deeply unless that information is easily pulled up from your memory. Daydreaming, out the "default mode" of the brain organizes and helps is too understand information. If I had taken the care to study and memorize information regarding, well, everything in school, via a tool like Anki, I would have a lot more information that I could use to connect disparate ideas together. The brain can't do this to the full extent possible unless that information is memorized.

That being said, it's important to know that memorization has a cost in time. The time for a single data point is low, but 20-30k data points in Anki is a serious time commitment.

If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life.

[the-dude]

“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ― Albert Einstein

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...

[amelius]

Does the second quote apply to "reading HN"?

[the-dude]

Let me take another look

[BeFlatXIII]

> If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life.

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.

[Jtsummers]

Anki and similar systems can be used for practice problems, not just "read card" or "read card, say the reverse side, check if correct". There are some add-ons for math that actually generate problems, or you can construct the cards in a way that they promote use and not mere recall. "Io {parlare} con mia moglie" can be one of many such cards that prompt you to conjugate, or set the article, or properly determine the plural. Or can be combined with reading comprehension or listening comprehension scenarios (play or show some sentences, follow on with questions about what was heard or read).

[Jensson]

You should see your memory as a library of functions, not a database of facts. Facts helps you answer test questions, library functions is how you solve problems.

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.

[ketzu]

I think facts have gotten a bad reputation nowadays. Many functions only work as composition of facts.