I used to think it wasn't necessary to remember much, as long as I could look things up. But over time, I realized that without a personal mental framework, it's hard to judge whether what you find is actually valuable.

Some insights only emerge when knowledge has stayed in your mind long enough to collide and connect with other ideas. Tools can help, but it's the knowledge that has been internalized and shaped over time that holds the real power.

I use AI at work, and certainly I’m doing less deep thinking over time. But at home, on side projects I still do it the traditional way. This is because I enjoy the process of thinking (rather than shipping. I actually never shipped any side project).

I guess I’m lucky, deep thinking (on interesting things at home) is a hobby so I feel less encouraged to automate that away. I never cared about my jobs, so as long as I bring home money, it’s fine.

It's like with math. You could theoretically only memorize the axioms and rederive everything else on the fly.

But in practice, you don't have enough working memory or processing power to do that, so you'd be stuck with the math a few derivation steps above the axioms only.

To actually use math for problem solving, you need to memorize everything up to the bleeding edge, and to train yourself to operate on intermediate-level abstractions intuitively.

> Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet.

This doesn't match the cultural shift in the last 20 years. A generation of people grew up with chat rooms and immediately discovered the ability to misrepresent oneself on the internet. "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog", as they say. That whole demographic assumes that media is lying by default. Compare that to previous generations that trusted certain media institutions like cable news, newspapers, radio shows, etc. because the production value and scarcity of media instilled trust.

Trust in media institutions is at an all time low, and will likely never recover. That has to be attributed to the newer generations. They are more skeptical of propaganda than ever before. To them, the high production value media outlets are just a quaint legacy variety of content slop.

Isn’t the irony of Pheadrus (the dialogue where Socrates speaks against writing) that its a written work, in a dramatic setting? Like, yes, writing, technology can make us stupid, but this article was written and transmitted to us via social media.

I use chatgpt to learn a ridiculous amount of knowledge that was not possible in 2020.

If you are using it to only decrease cognitive load (instead of keeping cognitive load constant while doing MORE), then you’re using it wrong

Off topic: This site has an input somewhere that takes focus on page load, but I can't see it. When I used the arrow down key some previously used suggestions jumped into view in a dropdown menu.

It's like a cache level issue.

In the old world, you had your wet brain memory. You needed to fill it with the order of the alphabet, so that you could make use of paper reference works. You also needed some arithmetic and some English style notes, in case you wanted to express yourself. You had to remember things like there/their/they're and that kind of thing. You needed a small encyclopedia so that you could have a clue about where general knowledge could be found.

On top of this, you were expected to layer on your professional knowledge. If you were a doctor, a huge number of Latin terms. A more detailed understanding of how the body works that you got from the base installation. Something about how the profession works. You would get a sense for what was likely through experience. A BS detector, in some ways.

All because your brain ain't gonna get bigger, and paper information technology was what it was: found in a library, limited in size, hard to search, slow to update.

Nowadays, the brain cache is no different in capability. But the external memory system you are accessing is completely different. It's massive, it can update in real time, and it's very searchable.

So you need to keep different things in your brain cache to take advantage of this.

But what do you need?

The only component that really matters is the BS detector.

Not only do I not need to be able to do long division, I don't even need to know that a calculator exists for calculating my tax, a calculator containing the Haversine formula is out there somewhere, and a so on. I just assume something like epochconverter exists, and that I can plug a timestamp into it and get something readable out.

I just assume that I will be able to find things that I want, the tradeoff being that I don't have sit there and refresh my math knowledge to calculate distances on a sphere, type out a program, and run it for a single output. The other side of this coin is of course, I don't know whether the guy whose work I am borrowing did it correctly, whether he has some sort of interest he's not disclosed, and whether it's safe. I also have to compromise on any variation between what he built and what I wanted.

I do this with almost everything now. I can't help it, having grown up and been educated before the internet exploded, and having started work just as the explosion was happening.

So I'd say you actually don't have to remember everything, but you do have to use your judgement in everything.

As someone who can answer all of those questions about the workout plan in depth, it’s not a bad plan. It’s actually quite good. Missing a little detail but that’s OK.

Wasn’t a good example for me.