A long (long, long) time ago a friend of mine said: Being smart is not about how much information you know but knowing where to get the information you need.
I tend to agree with that general statement.
I also agree that we will remember the things we actually understand much better than those cases were we just memorized a set of rules or other “facts” that have little meaning to us—except when they become those meaningless things we have to use regularly ;-)
I think this has some important aspects related to how we think about our personal optimization or efficiencies regarding knowledge and information management—what we “know” (stored in our head) and what we have ready access to and can retrieve without much search effort that is in that “off-line” memory (books, notes, computers, more generalized things like operational procedures...)
I do understand this changes the focus of the OP and I am not rejecting that view—we do remember the things that we really understand and those things just seem “easy” and tent to “just make sense” without the need to (consciously) rederive the rule(s).
But I do wonder if it is really inefficient to study something only until you have a beginning understanding even if you know you don’t have an interest or need to fully understand as long as you learned enough to know where to apply that and created a good “index” to where to quickly locate that information should you need to actually use that “knowledge” in the future.
A long (long, long) time ago a friend of mine said: Being smart is not about how much information you know but knowing where to get the information you need.
I tend to agree with that general statement.
I also agree that we will remember the things we actually understand much better than those cases were we just memorized a set of rules or other “facts” that have little meaning to us—except when they become those meaningless things we have to use regularly ;-)
I think this has some important aspects related to how we think about our personal optimization or efficiencies regarding knowledge and information management—what we “know” (stored in our head) and what we have ready access to and can retrieve without much search effort that is in that “off-line” memory (books, notes, computers, more generalized things like operational procedures...)
I do understand this changes the focus of the OP and I am not rejecting that view—we do remember the things that we really understand and those things just seem “easy” and tent to “just make sense” without the need to (consciously) rederive the rule(s).
But I do wonder if it is really inefficient to study something only until you have a beginning understanding even if you know you don’t have an interest or need to fully understand as long as you learned enough to know where to apply that and created a good “index” to where to quickly locate that information should you need to actually use that “knowledge” in the future.