I Google everything

I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though, where Googling clearly has benefit to help the conversation achieve its goals faster.

I say this not to you, but to people on the board in general. Given that I've seen self-centred comments like "I considered the project a success because I got paid and I had fun doing it", rather than thinking about the bigger picture, I can totally see people thinking thoughts like "Don't tell me how long it would take them to make and deliver 15 pizzas, I want to figure out on my own when is the latest we should give them a call, who cares what time people will arrive for the party? The important thing is having fun figuring out how late I can call the pizza place."

Sorry I can't think of a better example.

In the "real world", people end up doing a lot of such postulation. Or, they end up being pushed around by those who do or who have inside information.

P.S. Addressing the OP article itself, my version is/was "don't memorize what you can deduce in 30 seconds". For example, in physics, many of my classmates seemed to spend a lot of time memorizing all the formulae in the three chapters being tested. I would be familiar with them but also recall the few, um, "fundamental" formulae. Or, put another way, those formulae or expressions in which the relevant fields were usually summarized. During a test, it was trivial to start with these and manipulate to what I needed. But many of my classmate either had that variant memorized cold, or they got stuck.

The problem in the computer/tech world is that much of the detail we need to get things done, is partially or entirely arbitrary. What flag(s) did author/programmer X choose for their utility that I'm using? Maybe it was purely a personal choice. Or maybe they were influenced by environment/mentor/community Y. (In turn influenced by Z...)

Where you can track those influences, or simple memonics ("r" for "recurse" -- but wait, is it "r" or "R"...), there may be some rhyme and reason that builds up particularly over time and with increasing familiarity and breadth.

In other cases, though, X seemingly simply liked to use e.g. "s", and there may be no way to "deduce" or "infer" this.

  > google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example

I don't really appreciate people who want to "sit around and wonder about shit they can look up". I'd much rather sit around and think or discuss things that cannot be looked up, to define myself as a person based on opinions I form within documented knowledge...

Do I personally subscribe to absolute or relative morality? Thanks to documented knowledge, I have a decent grasp of the concepts, so I can have an informed think about the question. On the other hand, I could sit around arguing with a bunch of hipsters trying to figure out what the difference is (if there's enough time left after the preceding argument over whether or not water boils at lower temperatures in high altitudes).

And honestly, I've always looked things up, I had a set of old encyclopedias I bought from the library for about $10 when I was a kid, and if they didn't have what I was looking for I could go to the actual library and look through drawers of cards or microfilm to find the answer. I remember looking stuff up on computers about 20 years ago on SIRS, and even before that via BBS files.

Finding information is mainstream now, and all the pseudo intellectuals are crying because their power base of personally invented knowledge is crumbling and they lack the mental faculties to think freely on a higher level and reason for themselves.