Facts

I have always struggled to ‘know things’ in the context of being able to recall stuff as needed for, say, exams or conversations.

But strangely, I actually know a lot more than most people. Its just that I store information differently; not as ‘facts’ but rather as private advisory theorems.

Effectively, in the interests of efficiency, I model information on the way in and then store the ‘model’ and ‘discard’ the facts. Well I don’t really discard the facts but store them in inaccessible memory cells, only to be rediscovered when they are otherwise rediscovered.

And this efficient process allows me to process a lot more information than most people.

Try and explain all that to your ambitious (for her son to succeed) mother! Especially when I used to get a bare pass in a very boring subject at school, based on yet another fact-regurgitation exam effort.

I have assessed my daughter’s schooling and things haven’t changed much. In the Internet era, where knowledge is just a keystroke away, they still want kids to incessantly memorise stuff. There is still not an emphasis on the use of information to create novel outcomes, as compared to recalling it, on demand and under pressure.