Some certainly are. For many facts, memorized data is orders of magnitude faster than digitally-stored knowledge. This is enough of a difference to be qualitative—it’s not worth looking up, but if you know it, you’ll make use of it.
There’s the additional level of internalizing some knowledge or techniques, where you don’t even need to consciously expend effort to make use of it. For some things, that’s worth a whole lot.
If you’re a computer nerd, think of it as tiered storage. On-core registers are way faster than L1 cache, which is faster than L2/3 cache, which is again faster than RAM, which is faster than local SSD storage which is faster than remote network storage. It’s not a perfect analogy, because the limits of each tier aren’t as clearly defined, and it’s highly variable how easy it is to move/copy knowledge across tiers.
Indexing and familiarity matters a lot too. Searching for something where you think it’s partway through some video you saw 2 years ago is NOT the same as looking up a reminder in your personal notes a week ago.
Some certainly are. For many facts, memorized data is orders of magnitude faster than digitally-stored knowledge. This is enough of a difference to be qualitative—it’s not worth looking up, but if you know it, you’ll make use of it.
There’s the additional level of internalizing some knowledge or techniques, where you don’t even need to consciously expend effort to make use of it. For some things, that’s worth a whole lot.
If you’re a computer nerd, think of it as tiered storage. On-core registers are way faster than L1 cache, which is faster than L2/3 cache, which is again faster than RAM, which is faster than local SSD storage which is faster than remote network storage. It’s not a perfect analogy, because the limits of each tier aren’t as clearly defined, and it’s highly variable how easy it is to move/copy knowledge across tiers.
Indexing and familiarity matters a lot too. Searching for something where you think it’s partway through some video you saw 2 years ago is NOT the same as looking up a reminder in your personal notes a week ago.