There are (at least) two main issues with offloading things from memory. You talked about one of them; I think the other is also worth mentioning.
As you mention, speed/ease of lookup is an issue.
The other issue—and personally I find this to be more of a limiting factor—is missing insights. Cases where you could have looked it up had you known, but you didn’t know enough to know that you should have looked that particular thing up in the first place. (This is hard to provide an example for due to hindsight bias.)
Indexing can mitigate this to an extent, but is nowhere near a full solution.
Insight is hard to talk about, even harder to sound sane and logical while discussing. We could perhaps model “having an insight” as 2 stages: Asking an interesting new question, and producing a useful answer to that question. These 2 steps can often be at odds with each other: Improving the skill of making your answers more useful risks falling into habits of thought where you don’t ask certain possibly-interesting questions because you erroneously assume that you already know their whole answers. Improving the skill of asking wild questions risks forming too strong a habit of ignoring the kind of common sense that rules out questions with “that shouldn’t work”, and yet is essential to formulating a useful answer once an interesting question is reached.
The benefits of erring toward the “produce useful answers” skillset are obvious, as are the drawbacks of losing touch with reality if one fails to develop it. I think it’s easy to underestimate the benefits of learning the skills which one can use to temporarily boost the “ask interesting questions” side, though. Sadly most of the teachable skills that I’m aware of for briefly letting “ask interesting questions” override “produce useful answers” come packaged in several layers of woo. Those trappings make them more palatable to many people, but less palatable to the sorts of thinkers I typically encounter around here. The lowest-woo technique in that category which comes to mind is oblique strategies.
I don’t know whether this is exactly what you meant by “missing insights”, but I’ve noticed that I use search way less than I should, in my own notes & resources as well as in web search engines.
In the case of my own notes, adding more SRS cards usually fixes this: if I’ve been actively learning cards on some concept, I often do remember that I have resources related to that concept I can check when it comes up.
In the case of the web… well, this is an ongoing process. There have been whole subdomains of my life where it hadn’t occurred to me that those are also things you can simply look up if you want. I’ve been trying to notice the moment where I realize I don’t know something, in order to trigger the “so I should Google it” action, but it takes time.
Usually, the central set of ideas or concepts of a field or the main points of insights of a book are a small subset of all the information out there. I think it’s realistic to target those to be memorized with the benefit that it’s easier to go from those to the rest of details either in your notes or searching.
For that reason I have a specialized note type in Anki just for definitions.
There are (at least) two main issues with offloading things from memory. You talked about one of them; I think the other is also worth mentioning.
As you mention, speed/ease of lookup is an issue.
The other issue—and personally I find this to be more of a limiting factor—is missing insights. Cases where you could have looked it up had you known, but you didn’t know enough to know that you should have looked that particular thing up in the first place. (This is hard to provide an example for due to hindsight bias.)
Indexing can mitigate this to an extent, but is nowhere near a full solution.
Any ideas?
Insight is hard to talk about, even harder to sound sane and logical while discussing. We could perhaps model “having an insight” as 2 stages: Asking an interesting new question, and producing a useful answer to that question. These 2 steps can often be at odds with each other: Improving the skill of making your answers more useful risks falling into habits of thought where you don’t ask certain possibly-interesting questions because you erroneously assume that you already know their whole answers. Improving the skill of asking wild questions risks forming too strong a habit of ignoring the kind of common sense that rules out questions with “that shouldn’t work”, and yet is essential to formulating a useful answer once an interesting question is reached.
The benefits of erring toward the “produce useful answers” skillset are obvious, as are the drawbacks of losing touch with reality if one fails to develop it. I think it’s easy to underestimate the benefits of learning the skills which one can use to temporarily boost the “ask interesting questions” side, though. Sadly most of the teachable skills that I’m aware of for briefly letting “ask interesting questions” override “produce useful answers” come packaged in several layers of woo. Those trappings make them more palatable to many people, but less palatable to the sorts of thinkers I typically encounter around here. The lowest-woo technique in that category which comes to mind is oblique strategies.
I don’t know whether this is exactly what you meant by “missing insights”, but I’ve noticed that I use search way less than I should, in my own notes & resources as well as in web search engines.
In the case of my own notes, adding more SRS cards usually fixes this: if I’ve been actively learning cards on some concept, I often do remember that I have resources related to that concept I can check when it comes up.
In the case of the web… well, this is an ongoing process. There have been whole subdomains of my life where it hadn’t occurred to me that those are also things you can simply look up if you want. I’ve been trying to notice the moment where I realize I don’t know something, in order to trigger the “so I should Google it” action, but it takes time.
Usually, the central set of ideas or concepts of a field or the main points of insights of a book are a small subset of all the information out there. I think it’s realistic to target those to be memorized with the benefit that it’s easier to go from those to the rest of details either in your notes or searching.
For that reason I have a specialized note type in Anki just for definitions.