We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

I agree with the point being made, even if it is taken to an extreme. I would say you don't need to remember everything, but you do need to have been exposed to it. Not knowing what you don't know is a huge handicap in knowledge work.

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”

I am sympathetic to memory-focused tools like Anki and Zettelkasten (haven't used the latter myself, though) but I think this post is a bit oversimplified.

I think there are at least two models of work that require knowledge:

1. Work when you need to be able to refer to everything instantly. I don't know if this is actually necessary for most scenarios other than live debates, or some form of hyper-productivity in which you need to have extremely high-quality results near-instantaneously.

(HN comments are, amusingly, also an example – comments that are in-depth but come days later aren't relevant. So if you want to make a comment that references a wide variety of knowledge, you'll probably need to already know it, in toto.)

2. Work when you need to "know a small piece of what you don't remember as a whole", or in other terms, know the map, but not necessarily the entire territory. This is essentially most knowledge work: research, writing, and other tasks that require you to create output, but that output doesn't need to be right now, like in a debate.

For example, you can know that X person say something important about Y topic, but not need to know precisely what it was – just look it up later. However, you do still need to know what you're looking for, which is a kind of reference knowledge.

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What is actually new lately, in my experience, is that AI tools are a huge help for situations where you don't have either Type 1 or Type 2 knowledge of something, and only have a kind of vague sense of the thing you're looking for.

Google and traditional search engines are functionally useless for this, but asking ChatGPT a question like, "I am looking for people that said something like XYZ." This previously required someone to have asked the exact same question on Reddit/a forum, but now you can get a pretty good answer from AI.

While I agree with the gist of the article, I think the AI example is poor, because we know AI can make stuff up and it's a problem. So this failure of AI to be reasonably correct weakens the argument. In the old days, you would rely on an expert (through say a book, like encyclopedia) to tell you this. The issue then becomes who you trust.

I would say your own knowledge is like a memory cache. If you know stuff, then the relevant work becomes order of magnitudes faster. But you can always do some research and get other stuff in the cache.

(Human mind is actually more than a cache because you also create mental models, which typically stay with you. So it's easier to pickup details after they get evicted, because the mental model is kept. I think the goal of memorising stuff in school should be exactly that - forget all the details, but in the learning process build a good mental model that you have for life.)

Indeed, I thought that "decades old" sounds like an underestimate there: Socrates is said to have criticized writing for letting people to not train their memory, so that would be millennia by now. Though of course it is possible that the article's author would not agree with that, and would have a beef with more easily searchable content only, like the people who criticized tables of contents. I do not mean that they were all wrong though: probably the degree to which knowledge is outsourced matters, maybe some transitions were more worthwhile than others, and possibly something was indeed lost with those.

See also: https://www.pearlleff.com/in-praise-of-memorization