[lapinot]

Memorization might be a part of it, but imho the important part is (emphasis mine):

> So they ended up reading *reference manuals* and writing down or memorizing the answers to their questions because they couldn't look up information very easily.

Good reference manuals are dope and they're so much better than tutorials or FAQ like stackoverflow because they are written to be general, you don't have to generalize yourself (which usually isn't trivial). You're almost never reading about a particular problem but about a class of problems, not about a technic but about a class of technics. In freshman we learnt ocaml (actually caml light, yeah you guessed i'm french) and we were all handed a text copy of https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/caml-light-0.74/cl74refman.... To this day i still love reference books, usually when i have a problem i look it up, get my answer, and then end up reading the whole chapter or so giving much more background knowledge.

[coffeefirst]

Recently I realized that when you had paper documents—books, manuals, libraries, filing systems, whatever—the only way to make them accessible at all was to have organizing principles. Some of these were brilliant.

Most people gave all that up because "search."

But aside from search being flawed (good luck finding an old Google Doc), when information was actually organized, you might be able to remember where it was. Without structure, you can't remember where it is because it isn't really anywhere.

[drBonkers]

any good examples of brilliant accessibility to learn from?

[SamBam]

I'd say that being able to make use of a good reference manual is still the process of learning the basic outline of the material, learning what it is that you know and what it is that is contained in the manual (and what isn't in the manual!), and even learning your way around the manual itself in order to find stuff quickly.

I'd say this skill is very different than never learning any geography because you "could" look it up on Google Maps some day if you wanted to.