My father told me long ago that intelligence isn’t knowing the answer—it is knowing where to find the answer. After all of my education and learning I find this to be a very true statement.
It’s not clear to me whether this means that we should be alarmed and seek to hone our factual memories… or whether we should devote our attention to honing our Google-fu, as our minds gradually become server-side operations.
I do analysis for a living and am constantly asked on the spot detailed questions about very specific things, so I have to hone those memories. However when I was learning how to do this better (through associations and number games) I realized that I was simply being a human google search.
In my profession, one of a number of professional courses addressed the exact problem they were getting from their briefers: Good information, not enough analysis. So, the powers that be re-focused the school and made it analytically focused. The analysis filed has changed dramatically in the past few years and as a result is taking more of a pattern recognition and pre-emptive strategies approach.
So I don’t think we should be worried at all, or need to hone our memories in the abstract for bits of data. In fact, with the error prone nature of our mental hardware I would suggest that it does a disservice to factual recall in trying to do so. Instead, we can “outsource” the storage to a more accurate replication medium (like a reliable computerized bookmark favorites) and apply reasoning to this complex data in its unchanged form while re-programming our internal brain data storage to be, rather than the data itself, what database what we want to know is under (The “folder” it’s in rather than the contents of the “file”) .
The question becomes how do we make the card-catalog of our mind faster and more efficient?
My father told me long ago that intelligence isn’t knowing the answer—it is knowing where to find the answer. After all of my education and learning I find this to be a very true statement.
I do analysis for a living and am constantly asked on the spot detailed questions about very specific things, so I have to hone those memories. However when I was learning how to do this better (through associations and number games) I realized that I was simply being a human google search.
In my profession, one of a number of professional courses addressed the exact problem they were getting from their briefers: Good information, not enough analysis. So, the powers that be re-focused the school and made it analytically focused. The analysis filed has changed dramatically in the past few years and as a result is taking more of a pattern recognition and pre-emptive strategies approach.
So I don’t think we should be worried at all, or need to hone our memories in the abstract for bits of data. In fact, with the error prone nature of our mental hardware I would suggest that it does a disservice to factual recall in trying to do so. Instead, we can “outsource” the storage to a more accurate replication medium (like a reliable computerized bookmark favorites) and apply reasoning to this complex data in its unchanged form while re-programming our internal brain data storage to be, rather than the data itself, what database what we want to know is under (The “folder” it’s in rather than the contents of the “file”) .
The question becomes how do we make the card-catalog of our mind faster and more efficient?