This all still sounds nifty, but, I’ll repeat, why worry about memorizing when I’ll never be tested for a grade and can access knowledge nearly instantaneously?
If a piece of information isn’t accessible for your mind, you can’t notice unexpected connections between things.
For instance, some time ago I came up with the hypothesis that happiness might be an evolutionary mechanism that made us take more risks when we had spare resources and could risk doing so. But as someone pointed out, the opposite interpretation sounds just as plausible, if not more so. That is, when you have lots of resources you should concentrate on not losing them, and when you have few, you should take more risks until you’re in safer waters.
Now, later on I ran across an article with research about how moods affect our decision-making. Happy moods are related with heuristic, “business as usual” kind of decision-making; sadness triggers a more systematic analysis of the situation. That seems more in line with the interpretation that’s opposite to my original one.
Now, “happy moods are linked with heuristic processing, sad moods with systematic” is a piece of trivia. But it happens that this piece of trivia helps tremendously in evaluating my original hypothesis. Had I read that article earlier, and memorized that piece of trivia, I might have gotten my hypothesis right from the get-go.
For that matter, a lot of novel hypotheses seem to basically just involve the putting together of a large number of trivia. Somebody learns of one thing, and then of another seemingly unrelated thing, and then of a third thing, and then she notices the general pattern connecting all of them and formulates it out loud. But this requires that all of those trivia pieces are actually in your head, so that your brain can find the connections. If you need to know three different pieces of trivia in order to solve the problem, the fact that you could look them up at will doesn’t help if it never occurs to you that these are the ones you should be looking at.
My intuition is that we should be spending much more time memorizing trivia than we are. Not stuff like state capitals, obviously, but possibly useful details from whatever fields of knowledge we’re interested in and might want to contribute to.
I agree with all of this. Maybe it doesn’t come across clearly in my post, but I tried to differentiate between rank trivia and applicable knowledge, such as cognitive biases, decision theory concepts, logical fallacies, stuff you listed, etc. I don’t know what exactly differentiates applicable knowledge with near-worthless trivia, however.
If a piece of information isn’t accessible for your mind, you can’t notice unexpected connections between things.
For instance, some time ago I came up with the hypothesis that happiness might be an evolutionary mechanism that made us take more risks when we had spare resources and could risk doing so. But as someone pointed out, the opposite interpretation sounds just as plausible, if not more so. That is, when you have lots of resources you should concentrate on not losing them, and when you have few, you should take more risks until you’re in safer waters.
Now, later on I ran across an article with research about how moods affect our decision-making. Happy moods are related with heuristic, “business as usual” kind of decision-making; sadness triggers a more systematic analysis of the situation. That seems more in line with the interpretation that’s opposite to my original one.
Now, “happy moods are linked with heuristic processing, sad moods with systematic” is a piece of trivia. But it happens that this piece of trivia helps tremendously in evaluating my original hypothesis. Had I read that article earlier, and memorized that piece of trivia, I might have gotten my hypothesis right from the get-go.
For that matter, a lot of novel hypotheses seem to basically just involve the putting together of a large number of trivia. Somebody learns of one thing, and then of another seemingly unrelated thing, and then of a third thing, and then she notices the general pattern connecting all of them and formulates it out loud. But this requires that all of those trivia pieces are actually in your head, so that your brain can find the connections. If you need to know three different pieces of trivia in order to solve the problem, the fact that you could look them up at will doesn’t help if it never occurs to you that these are the ones you should be looking at.
My intuition is that we should be spending much more time memorizing trivia than we are. Not stuff like state capitals, obviously, but possibly useful details from whatever fields of knowledge we’re interested in and might want to contribute to.
I agree with all of this. Maybe it doesn’t come across clearly in my post, but I tried to differentiate between rank trivia and applicable knowledge, such as cognitive biases, decision theory concepts, logical fallacies, stuff you listed, etc. I don’t know what exactly differentiates applicable knowledge with near-worthless trivia, however.
Alright. I suspected that that might have been the case, but your post was a bit ambiguous.