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Comment by Karellen | Hacker News Reader

...and about the written word, by Socrates

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept13/2013/09/29/socrates-writi...

In a sense Socrates was right. It's always better to be able to recall something from your memory rather than having to look it up in a book. The classic example is the multiplication table. The problem is that humans have rather limited capacity for such a 'recallable on demand' memory.

The problem is that you have to invest actual effort to memorize things. Memorizing things you very rarely need is not worth it, even if you're amazing at memorizing things. It's impossible to memorize everything you would benefit from having access to in written form.

On the other hand just because something is written down somewhere is not at all equal to 'having access to it'. Once you forget it it might as well not exist at all. The information needs to be internalized to be any useful, and for that at least some of it needs to be kept in your memory

And that's why digital documents are better (for average use-cases) than paper. Another argument for using technology to make things easier at the cost of possibly losing skills you no longer urgently need (such as "maintaining a library of paper books").

I'm terrible at recalling specifics but I feel that my "superpower" is that I'm really good at remembering if say a solution to a certain problem exists, and just enough breadcrumbs to find that solution again, be it a few key words that I can search for or similar.

This coupled with an broad interest in just about anything means I can often help people far outside my specific field, usually rather swiftly as well.

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