<story><title>Compounding Knowledge</title><url>https://fs.blog/2019/02/compounding-knowledge/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>keiferski</author><text>This concept is essentially the reason why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer.” The former treats a piece of information as an independent, context-free item, while the latter allows you to “digest” the information and understand the answer at a deeper level, to the point where it changes the types of questions you ask.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately our society doesn’t seem to recognize this and actively encourages not learning certain facts because they are easily googleable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jshowa3</author><text>Fortunately, Google exists so you can learn new things and develop foundational knowledge. Its all about what you do with the knowledge, and has little to do with the fact that you&amp;#x27;re Googling.&lt;p&gt;For example, I was Googling how to create a VM hypervisor last night in FreeBSD. I know very little about hypervisors, but I&amp;#x27;ve read many blog posts and now I know what they are, what they do, how to setup failover clusters, etc.&lt;p&gt;The point is, people don&amp;#x27;t really sit and read the things they look up. That&amp;#x27;s the bigger problem.</text></comment>
<story><title>Compounding Knowledge</title><url>https://fs.blog/2019/02/compounding-knowledge/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>keiferski</author><text>This concept is essentially the reason why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer.” The former treats a piece of information as an independent, context-free item, while the latter allows you to “digest” the information and understand the answer at a deeper level, to the point where it changes the types of questions you ask.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately our society doesn’t seem to recognize this and actively encourages not learning certain facts because they are easily googleable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sametmax</author><text>There is a balance here.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I&amp;#x27;m incredibly more productive in Python because I know the stdlib and most frameworks and tools API by heart.&lt;p&gt;But it took me 10 years of practice, and my daily rate is way more than it used to be. I&amp;#x27;ll also refuse a lot of gigs outright.&lt;p&gt;You want juniors to be able to work too, and you can&amp;#x27;t expect them to know the entire world. Yet they can be useful, worth the money, and a great addition to your team.&lt;p&gt;Besides, even I don&amp;#x27;t know all the answers. I can&amp;#x27;t. The field of IT moves too quickly. I have to select what to learn, and what I set aside as &amp;quot;something I can google&amp;quot;. There is no other choice, because we are limited in time and space.&lt;p&gt;But beyond that, you may want to sacrifice efficiency in some (or many) areas to preserve your energy, divide it in several activities, or just keep it to do something else that is not learning related.</text></comment>