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0 pointsPakG113y ago0 comments

That's nice if the purpose of the conversation is only to figure out the population of Greece and to pass the time.

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.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

pasbesoin13y ago· 1 in thread

It's also useful for exercising and perhaps improving ones ability to postulate based upon limited information. In a situation where you can subsequently check the result.

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.

PakG1OP13y ago

If you're in a conversation where you will get pushed around by people who have inside information, and that matters, I hope that you're prepared with your own inside information and game theory predictions before you enter into the conversation.

dagw13y ago

I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though

If I'm in a situation where the demographics of Greece actually matter to an important decision, then chances are I knew I'd be in this situation beforehand and have spent plenty of time collecting, verifying and correlating every nugget of demographic fact and statistic I could lay my hand on.

But obviously sometimes haste if of the essence and then Google is great, but if I'm hanging out the pub with my mates, haste is almost never of the essence.

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