[SEQ RERUN] Truly Part of You

Today’s post, Truly Part Of You was originally published on 21 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Any time you believe you’ve learned something, you should ask yourself, “Could I re-generate this knowledge if it were somehow deleted from my mind, and how would I do so?” If the supposed knowledge is just empty buzzwords, you will recognize that you can’t, and therefore that you haven’t learned anything. But if it’s an actual model of reality, this method will reinforce how the knowledge is entangled with the rest of the world, enabling you to apply it to other domains, and know when you need to update those beliefs. It will have become “truly part of you”, growing and changing with the rest of your knowledge.


Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Artificial Addition, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.