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What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
by wendyshu 6y ago
What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
- dieortin 6y agoI guess people shouldn’t study history anymore when they can just look up things on the web
- wendyshu 6y agoThere's more to learning history than memorizing facts.
- arkitaip 6y agoCompetency and efficiency.
- Viliam1234 6y agoIf the facts are in your head, you can make a connection between them. If they are in different places on the web, unless someone else already linked them for you, they remain separate.
- wendyshu 6y agoCan you give an example?
- waxachasee 6y agoAnki is used a lot in medical education. There's a lot of small details, and you can string them along to form the big picture. An example is going from symptoms -> diagnosis -> treatment options -> drug side effects. You can't just memorize use drug X for Y, but you incorporate information that you know to formulate the best plan. Suppose the patient has kidney disease - you've memorized X is nephrotoxic so you find another treatment. I will say this is easier for some and harder for others. I've noticed some people have a lot of difficulty recalling facts without a specific cue when using Anki. It's best used with traditional learning, but you can focus more on the why.
- wendyshu 6y agoSure there's a lot of memorization in medical school but I'm more interested in computer science, the context of the article.
- tomlue 6y agoUnknown unknowns. Knowledge availability is another big one. I used Anki to learn molecular biology. I work in bioinformatics and understanding molecular pathways means I can more fluently build hypotheses with colleagues. Without having memorized these pathways, unknowns unknowns and lack of knowledge availability would prevent a lot of discovery.
- quicklime 6y agoBecause it helps you quickly connect those facts together into a larger idea later.
- BeetleB 6y agoIt's common for me to read something, and forgot it even existed. I can't look it up unless I know it exists. With flash cards, I am reminded that it exists every once in a while. As an example, here's a simple card: What is the recommended way to traverse all the files (including subdirectories) in Python? Answer: scandir and not os.walk os.walk is my standard goto. Then I learned about scandir, but kept forgetting that there was a better alternative to os.walk. So I made a card for it. The other answer, of course, is speed. If I'm going to Google "what is the alternative to os.walk?" or something similar every time I need it, it adds a lot of friction and I simply won't bother. And no, I don't do this often enough that looking it up each time will force it to become ingrained. And frankly, when you do math/physics, you do need a number of concepts in your head. Solving a complex problem requires multiple parts/stages, and solving requires you to have them in your head so you can put them together. My biggest mistake when I was in grad school was thinking I could get by without memorizing. It worked fine for undergrad level math, but it was a real problem when I took higher level courses. The professors were split on whether memorizing is a good idea, but the fact is the professors used this stuff a lot more than I did.
- wendyshu 6y agoThanks for providing these details. For your Python example I'd just use a snippet. On the other hand, Google's pretty fast and always updated. It's all a personal trade-off I guess. I wouldn't say it's common for me to forget I knew something. But maybe the cost of creating, maintaining, and reviewing card decks is worth it for you.