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Comment by tarakat | Hacker News Reader

Being able to look things up, even in seconds, is not equivalent to knowing them. When someone suggests "let's do X", you cannot reply with "but that would cause Y", if Y is buried in some pdf file on your computer, or one Bing search away - how do you know you should search for Y, when there are infinite other things you could search for.

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Back at university one of the first things we were told about being an a good engineer was: "You don't need to know everything, but you do need to know where to look it up".

It's a statement that I agree with. There is just too much knowledge to know it all. These days there is a very real skill in knowing how to search i.e. a second order version of the above statement "you need to know where to find out how to look this up".

There's a HUGE difference between looking something up to reactivate sleepy memories and learning something new for the first time.

There are some really technical things ive done in the pasy that I couldn't do without a reference right now, but once I've got the reference I don't need to be reminded about low level details or edge cases or gotchas - it's all still there in my head I just need to see the road map and it will all come back to me.

Yep, my dad used to sum this up as "All Engineering school does is teach you where to shit." I guess I may have gone with "where to eat" but he had a flair for the dramatic.

But still, there's "minimal required knowledge".

Like how to use google

Nope.

I wouldn't want to go to doc that has to Google basic stuff.

Conversely, I wouldn't want to go to a doc who doesn't know how to Google basic stuff.

Underestimating the amount of knowledge required or of importance to know (yes, even when google exists) is just another form of the infamous Dunning-Kruger.

Google’s search mechanisms and rankings have changed a lot over my lifetime. I don’t usually trust it to find the right answers to problems in my field unless it’s a very well supported technology. I don’t agree that “knowing how to Google” is a skill in its own right for this reason. Hell they even claimed not long ago they would fix quote searches but they seem worse than ever.

It depends. I haven't yet in my career come across something that I couldn't research online because I hadn't been taught it. Usually the first step is to discover which words to use, reading around the domain. Once I have the words I can usually find out everything I need to do my job.

Knowledge is so easily acquired these days that, while useful, it is not essential. I hire people with zero domain knowledge for that reason.

I see people struggling to find the correct initial keywords to search on all the time; and I have the same problem trying to google domains I don’t know. But this can usually be solved with sufficient effort, though I don’t know many people who are willing to put in that effort.

But more problematic is when people don’t know there’s a problem to google in the first place — it seems to do the job — which is usually resolved by both education and experience, but is ultimately a result if they don’t know what they don’t know.

The knowledge is generally out there, but you need to know you’re looking for it, and it’s only in the common/trivial problems that it’s so obvious that the compiler/tooling/customer just flat-out tells you you’ve missed something

Oh, rly?

Explain this to me by looking it up. https://imgur.com/Bj24AAR

The way I used to write/set-up tests when I was teaching is that you could use a limited set of online resources to answer, but if you have to search every question you won't have enough time to do it. So it also tested your ability to quickly locate the information you need should you not know it right away.

That's one of the main points of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and I think that I agree.

Long term subconscious memory is where a lot of the connections happen. If your long term memory only knows where to find things without knowing them then that ability is stunted.

Right but you shouldn't be tested on things that can just be "looked up". You should be tested on your ability to apply what you know, and teachers should be taking the time to write globally unique problems for every single test (gasp)

When someone suggests "let's do X", you cannot reply with "but that would cause Y"

This is reasonable. E.g. sure a person can google how to build a house, but also sure that at planning phase they’ll mess and conflict with a half of good rules of thumb. Or forget them right after reading, because there is no habit nor knowledge in their head, and all that info is pretty transient. Pro is not the one who has read an article, but the one who can tell a couple of their own notes about it.

Otoh, gp is also correct that tests should check how you are doing in a real life situation. So maybe use both ways of testing?

It is a lot faster to have things stored in your head than to look them up. You can just put a time limit on the test and tell people that they can either spend a year before the test starts learning the material and getting it into their heads, of they can try to learn biochemistry from scratch using Google after the 40-minute timer for the test starts.

The thing is, if you search for something enough you will end up learning it. It's a natural way to learn things.

This is how people become software engineers these days. They _constantly_ look stuff up, watch videos, and learn by doing that. Yes, you can still go to college and take tests that require you to "know" things, but honestly the vast majority of what I "knew" in college turned out to be short-term knowledge stored for tests.

By searching and learning, you

A person can certainly become a software engineer without a college education, but I worry that constantly learning things just in time for using them will give them disconnected snippets of knowledge in a lot of areas rather than a good concept of how the underlying system functions. I guess it depends on if they are studying computer architecture, complexity theory, and whatnot in those videos or if they are just copying snippets of code from SO.

I learned by doing, initially, because I started learning programming with minimal resources before going to college and had to unlearn or restructure a lot of the knowledge I had gained up to that point once I did. I would probably have gotten there in the end, but it would have taken me a lot longer. The world was different then, though. Instead of easy access to info before going to college I was lucky to find a book somewhere that someone threw out that talked about things in a peripheral way that I needed to know, or ran into someone I could discuss things with that were as info-deprived as I was.

That's where my skepticism of this approach comes from, I guess. But I didn't live in a world where knowledge was at my fingertips from a very early age, so who knows?

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