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> If you need to constantly look up informations, it means you have no long term knowledge of anything.

I don’t think this is a very charitable interpretation of what GP was trying to say. Of course you can’t get by being a blind conduit of Google’d/Wikipedia’d/etc information, but you certainly don’t need to (and probably can’t) cram everything you need into your memory for instant recall on demand.

How about a middle ground: memory can be thought more like an LFU cache, where “use” is defined as reliance on explicit details of a concept. For example, I rely daily on programming language syntax and best practices and therefore have them deeply embedded in my mental cache. Other knowledge however, like sorting algorithm implementations, I rarely utilize and probably won’t remember after the next time I’m quizzed on it in e.g. an interview or conversation with someone where I’m trying to sound smart (cache miss).

In many cases where I suspect that I’ll frequently encounter cache misses with a particular piece of knowledge , I often find it better to just cache high level details (useful properties of sorting algorithms) and Google the missing details. That or work with subject matter experts.



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