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Comment by antiterra | Hacker News Reader

I often have an urge to pull out my phone to look up some info that is pertinent to the conversation, especially if I can’t quite remember something.

I eventually learned to just let it go unless it was of immediate importance, but the constant impulse to use my phone as a reference device persists.

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I find in many circumstances looking it up ruins the conversation. If you quickly need a fact sure, but it you're discussing something more as an intellectual exercise, either in memory or reasoning, which in my experience is way more often, its ruined when someone pulls up wikipedia and reads out the "answer".

That's just your cohort. We might discuss the answer, but we tend to look it up and then talks about that result.

Which is fine with me: I'd rather not have someone's skillfully crafted BS in my head if it isn't connected to actual truth if I can help it.

Oh, I love doing that. I think the trick to doing it pleasantly is being able to do it quickly, and being in the habit of fact-checking yourself. It can provoke a conversation about the actual state of affairs, or the difference in understanding that you had, or new questions even.

I sometimes use this to effect. If a conversation goes down a dead-end, it's easy to take the twenty seconds then to look up that thing you wanted to tie into the conversation, and now you can rope the conversation back to that point and explore a different path.

I'm at this point right now where I take notes about things I want to loop back on when I'm having casual conversations over the phone. But since my note-taking device is my phone, I don't do much note-taking in person because using a phone like that appears disrespectful. Not sure how to break that limitation.

It's OK not to know something in the moment.

Leave it at the tip of your mind and roll.

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