Maintaining memorized information only as long as it is required to achieve a real goal is a feature, not a bug. That almost everything taught in school is forgotten shortly after is an indictment of a system determined to embed largely useless info, not of students' character.
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I think school gets way with "We're teaching you *how* to think!" far more often than is warranted, but to the extent one models working memory as amenable to exercise: "Be able to free-associate over these X,000 pages for a few months" not a thing working world values at zero.
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My claim isn't that "be able to free-associate over these X,000 pages for a few months" (or years) is valueless; it's that it's not something that can be *taught,* and that it has *less* (though non-zero) value in the internet age relative to what a non-amenable brain could do.
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I would 100% prefer to have a brain with an unlimited capacity for *relevant* recall, but assuming a limited ability to activate nuanced pathways to factual info, that which proves most consistently relevant is fine, particularly *now* that we all carry web-enabled phones.
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I think there's a ton of neurodiversity when it comes to this and it probably does a lot to drive interests. I'm extremely forgetful of "irrelevant information" so I was naturally drawn to math, where it was more important to understand a proof or derivation than memorize facts.
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