Posted by maksimur 9/10/2025
Concepts have to be "internalized" into intuition for much of our thinking, and if they are externalized, we become a meme-copy machine as opposed to a thinking machine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_the_Direction_of_the...
> To find what you need online, you require a solid general education and, above all, prior knowledge in the area related to your search. > > [...] > > If you can’t produce a comprehensive answer with confidence and on the whim [...] you don’t have the sufficient background knowledge. > > [...] > > This drives us to one of the most important conclusions of the entire field of note-taking, knowledge work, critical thinking and alike: You, not AI, not your PKM or whatever need to build the knowledge because only then it is in your brain and you can go the next step. > > [...] > > The advertised benefits of all these tools come with a specific hidden cost: Your ability to think. [This passage actually appears ahead of the previous one–ed.]
This is best read alongside: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154088
But online? @grok is this true?
And he likely had a point. What I recently noticed is that my father, who had very little formal education but happened to have very old-school teachers who hammered him with memorizing a lot of poetry, which he continued in adult life, is more verbally fluent somehow than a lot of young kids who don't have command of grammar any more. ("would of")
Granted they likely don't write or read much either but directionally if you keep outsourcing mental work, you degrade. When I studied Japanese I liked the term a teacher had for his defense of memorizing Kanji by handwriting, which he called "neuro-muscular". Like playing scales on the guitar or piano there is something that keeps you snappy in memorization and rote practice that goes away if you only passively search.
It's elementary deduction from basic learning practices we've known since O'Keefe in 1973.
> allocortex's ability to navigate freely
If your allocortex is navigating freely, something has gone badly wrong. Put it back under the neocortex where it belongs and seek immediate help from a neurologist.
Do they? Let's check your source.
> To investigate this hypothesis, participants aged 20–34 perform a concentration and attention test in the presence and absence of a smartphone. The results of the conducted experiment imply that the mere presence of a smartphone results in lower cognitive performance, which supports the hypothesis of the smartphone presence using limited cognitive resources.
So, no. The presence of your smartphone on the desk in front of you is distracting, but that distraction goes away if you remove the smartphone. That's not "cognitive decline."
> Sorry, that's a narrative argument
No, that's me pointing out a competing plausible hypothesis. I'm not saying Covid is necessarily responsible for your anecdotal incidents; I'm saying that until you can prove Covid wasn't responsible, you have no standing to state conclusively that phones were.
It's destroying their ability to experience reality as paths, free navigation, vicarious trial and error, all of this is fundamental to memory consolidation: the brain's fundamental unit: action-syntax in memory, is built from non-screen topological integrations of landmark and allocentric experiences. Phones destroy this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6059409/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20922-0
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/brb3.70656
https://www.mdpi.com/2254-9625/15/6/98
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40255102/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00246-025-03862-0
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/12/4/503
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40172268/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40173157/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-025-04024-x
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...
“A growing body of evidence has found that children’s brains can structurally and functionally change due to prolonged media multitasking, such as diminished gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, where attentional control and complex decision making abilities reside, among other really important skills, like the development of empathy and understanding nonverbal social communication,”
Other studies discuss distraction, cyberbullying, bad diet/poor exercise, toddlers' sensory processing abilities, anxiety, and lost sleep. None of this covers stupidity, and much of it is not about teens.
The most interesting study you cited finds structural brain differences in preschool-aged children who spent more time on screens. It's still a stretch to make claims about the intelligence of teenagers based on the fact that babies who spend too much time on screens are, at age 3, less developed.
There's also a magnitude problem. Even if we assume smartphones do have some cognitive effect on teens, how can we know it's the only or largest one? You can't attribute anecdotes about kids being dumb to the presence of smartphones.
You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity, imagination, learning all stem from free navigation and vicarious, trail and error path integration. It is deductive that devices that impair this impair learning. Learning is based on free exploration of space. Mammalian intelligence is way-finding that stitches together landmark and non-landmark space.
The idea you can't see a relationship between pre-school, three year-old impairment, short-form cyberbullying (in teens) and teen loss of learning, retention, attention-span, creativity, suggests you are the subject group. If you can't reason correlationally, than science is beyond your grasp. Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information, then make arbitrary statements.
That was the tip of the iceberg, that list.
Phones damage children's lives in multi-dinemsisons of emotional, memory, learning capability. You may be the study group's ideal subject. Face that possibility.
> You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity
"Basic science" is something of an oxymoron here. Measuring creativity is anything but basic. You're appealing to intuition—an intuition I share to some extent, but not one that we can call scientific
> The idea you can't see a relationship between three year-old impairment and teen loss of learning
I can see how there might be a relationship. There also might not be: Some kids are late bloomers, and the children in this study hadn't even gone to preschool yet.
Where's the meta-analysis finding a causal link between smartphone use and impaired cognition in teens? If you want to talk about science, you can't extrapolate things like this based on how you figure they're probably working. Science is empirical.
> Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information
You're getting awfully aggressive¹ about this. Have you considered putting your phone down?
When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond. Until then you are just spinning narratives.
Ironic that you would level a criticism like this while touting "non-empirical science," whatever that is.
> You chose to make a narrative claim using No Child Left Behind
Do me the courtesy of paraphrasing my claims accurately. I said the drop in test scores you're attributing to phones could more plausibly be caused by NCLB, which is a carefully couched statement that doesn't actually draw any concrete conclusions.
I'm gesturing broadly at the absence of conclusive evidence, and you're telling me you don't need conclusive evidence to make definitive statements. I'm hardly the one spinning narratives here.
Gesturing broadly at a lack of conclusive evidence is simply naysaying the connections that educators, child development experts, neuroscience researchers are detailing. If you can't counter their connections and simply sit on the ledge of denial, you ain't thinking, you're in denial.
Stay in storytelling.
That article articulated the reason slightly differently, arguing you need to hold multiple concepts in your head at the same time in order to develop original ideas.
Still, I'm not sure you have to remember everything, but I agree you have to remember the foundational things at the right abstraction layer, upon which you are trying to synthesize something new.
Fitness guidelines is very much not a settled science, and is highly variable per individual beyond the very basics (to lose weight eat fewer calories than you burn, to build muscle you should lift heavy things).
For every study saying that 8-12 reps x3 is the optimal muscle growth strategy there is another saying that 20x2 is better, and a third saying that 5x5 is better. If you want to know how much protein you should eat to gain muscle mass, good luck; most studies have settled on 1.6g/kg per day as the maximum amount that will have an effect, but you can find many reputable fitness sources suggesting double that.
You can memorize "facts", but they will change as the state of the art changes... or is Pluto still a planet?
The ability to parse information and sources, as well as knowing the limits of your knowledge is far more important than memorizing things.
Few people have the time to figure things out and so it isn't knowable even though all the steps are easy to lay out.
But we produce a lot more made up stuff to generate views and sell products
Pragmatically I suspect this might be because most of the market don't actually read these things, and are just as happy with made up bs.
"In knowledge work the bottleneck is not the external availability of information. It is the internal bandwidth of processing power which is determined by your innate abilities and the training status of your mind."
I’ll say this: between store, search, synthesize and share, store and synthesize are consistently the most difficult to nail down.
A society that wishes to succeed in creating an activated and knowledgeable populous should be interested in how to train people to notice better, and to create insightful follows.
In the words of David Deutsch (paraphrasing): knowledge consists of conjecture and error correction
> “I just ask ChatGPT for that, too!”, the AI generation might ask. Ok, and then what? How can you assess the answers … you are taking on an impossible task, because you can’t use enough of your brain for your cognitive operations.
So it’s Zeno’s paradox of knowing stuff?
It can’t be impossible to know things, you’ve just got to decide when you know enough to get going on. Otherwise you’re mired in analysis paralysis and you never get anything done.
I do agree that deep knowledge of the foundations a subject - particularly a skilled practice or craft - is a path to proficiency and certainly a requirement for mastery. But there are plenty of times when you can get away with ‘just reading the documentation’ and doing as instructed.
You do not first need to invent the universe in order to begin exercising, you can just start talking a 20 minute walk after lunch.
I would say your own knowledge is like a memory cache. If you know stuff, then the relevant work becomes order of magnitudes faster. But you can always do some research and get other stuff in the cache.
(Human mind is actually more than a cache because you also create mental models, which typically stay with you. So it's easier to pickup details after they get evicted, because the mental model is kept. I think the goal of memorising stuff in school should be exactly that - forget all the details, but in the learning process build a good mental model that you have for life.)