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To which he answer "the capital of France" and everyone keep going. If I tell you that you need to go to Sucre for a meeting, do you know where that is? Probab

To which he answer "the capital of France" and everyone keep going. If I tell you that you need to go to Sucre for a meeting, do you know where that is? Probably not. You will google it, spend 5 seconds on the internet and boom, you know where it is. Putting countless hours to learn all of them is useless. This is time that could be spent learning things that are important in the modern world. The computers aren't going away. You will never have to search for the name of a town in a dictionary or encyclopedia for hours anymore. It's a 5 seconds tasks.

einhverfr 13y ago
Without looking it up, I would guess a city named after Juan Mariscal Sucre (or is it the other way around?) must be in either Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, or Bolivia. I would probably guess Ecuador on a hunch but that's probably wrong as their former currency was the Sucre and it would be funny to have a city named the same.
- jeltz 13y ago
  > Juan Mariscal Sucre Actually he was called Antonio José, not Juan, and the capital of Bolivia is indeed named after him.
hobs 13y ago
While everyone thinks "What an idiot." While you are 100% right that you dont NEED to know that Paris is the capital of France, displaying that ignorance for all to see is just bad form. While your analogy makes sense (bolivian capital no one knows about), knowing that Paris is the capital of France is incidental knowledge when you spend any time looking at western history for the last several hundred years.
- Raphmedia 13y ago
  The fact that you remember that Paris is the capital of France has nothing to do with what you learnt during high school. You know it, because it is general knowledge. You saw it in the movies. You had a phone call from someone living there. Only someone living in a cave would not know where or what Paris is, hence why you would call him an idiot. However, the capital of an area that isn't in the media very of ten? You won't remember them. "Quick, what is the capital of Cambodia? No idea? You surely must be an idiot! Let's fire you!" Nobody will ever say that. If I tell someone that they must go to Ankara for a meeting, I would pretty much expect them to answer with "where?" Having general knowledge is important. Knowing the main capitals of the world is important too. Spending hours and hours to learn all of the obscure ones and commit it to memory in a world where you can say "Ok Glasses, Ankara is the capital of which country?" is useless.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- kazagistar 13y ago
  That is a cultural problem, and one that is going away. Trivia used to dominate what people thought of as intelligence, but since it is so utterly useless in the era of online search, that particular brand of intelligence is a complete waste. People who have absurd volumes of trivia in their heads seem like less intelligent these days (at least to me) simply because it means they are not smart enough to allocate their learning time to things that are actually valuable.
bjterry 13y ago
According to the author of SuperMemo, the lifetime cost of learning a particular fact for life, in a perfectly structured spaced repetition system, is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes[1]. Thus, you should never memorize a fact that will come up so rarely and is trivial enough to look up that it doesn't exceed that lifetime threshold. The vast majority of state and national capitals fall into the "not worth it" category. Also, most students don't have nearly the efficiency of learning that a spaced repetition system affords (Especially Wozniak's highly optimized system wherein he has a database that he habitually has quizzed daily for years), so for them the cost is dramatically higher. 1: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/useless.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/useless.htm > lifetime minimum cost of remembering a single well-formulated piece of knowledge can easily be estimated to fall into the range from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (minimum cost is the cost that is achieved using the optimally spaced repetition schedule). This estimation can be used in cost-benefit analysis in deciding which mission-critical pieces of knowledge should be subject to learning based on spaced repetition

einhverfr 13y ago

Without looking it up, I would guess a city named after Juan Mariscal Sucre (or is it the other way around?) must be in either Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, or Bolivia. I would probably guess Ecuador on a hunch but that's probably wrong as their former currency was the Sucre and it would be funny to have a city named the same.

jeltz 13y ago
> Juan Mariscal Sucre Actually he was called Antonio José, not Juan, and the capital of Bolivia is indeed named after him.

hobs 13y ago

While everyone thinks "What an idiot." While you are 100% right that you dont NEED to know that Paris is the capital of France, displaying that ignorance for all to see is just bad form. While your analogy makes sense (bolivian capital no one knows about), knowing that Paris is the capital of France is incidental knowledge when you spend any time looking at western history for the last several hundred years.

Raphmedia 13y ago
The fact that you remember that Paris is the capital of France has nothing to do with what you learnt during high school. You know it, because it is general knowledge. You saw it in the movies. You had a phone call from someone living there. Only someone living in a cave would not know where or what Paris is, hence why you would call him an idiot. However, the capital of an area that isn't in the media very of ten? You won't remember them. "Quick, what is the capital of Cambodia? No idea? You surely must be an idiot! Let's fire you!" Nobody will ever say that. If I tell someone that they must go to Ankara for a meeting, I would pretty much expect them to answer with "where?" Having general knowledge is important. Knowing the main capitals of the world is important too. Spending hours and hours to learn all of the obscure ones and commit it to memory in a world where you can say "Ok Glasses, Ankara is the capital of which country?" is useless.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
kazagistar 13y ago
That is a cultural problem, and one that is going away. Trivia used to dominate what people thought of as intelligence, but since it is so utterly useless in the era of online search, that particular brand of intelligence is a complete waste. People who have absurd volumes of trivia in their heads seem like less intelligent these days (at least to me) simply because it means they are not smart enough to allocate their learning time to things that are actually valuable.

bjterry 13y ago

According to the author of SuperMemo, the lifetime cost of learning a particular fact for life, in a perfectly structured spaced repetition system, is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes[1]. Thus, you should never memorize a fact that will come up so rarely and is trivial enough to look up that it doesn't exceed that lifetime threshold. The vast majority of state and national capitals fall into the "not worth it" category. Also, most students don't have nearly the efficiency of learning that a spaced repetition system affords (Especially Wozniak's highly optimized system wherein he has a database that he habitually has quizzed daily for years), so for them the cost is dramatically higher. 1: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/useless.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/useless.htm > lifetime minimum cost of remembering a single well-formulated piece of knowledge can easily be estimated to fall into the range from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (minimum cost is the cost that is achieved using the optimally spaced repetition schedule). This estimation can be used in cost-benefit analysis in deciding which mission-critical pieces of knowledge should be subject to learning based on spaced repetition