[mmargenot]

> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work.

You don't have to remember everything. You have to remember enough entry points and the shape of what follows, trained through experience and going through the process of thinking and writing, to reason your way through meaningful knowledge work.

[rafaquintanilha]

"It is requisite that a man should arrange the things he wishes to remember in a certain order, so that from one he may come to another: for order is a kind of chain for memory" – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Not ironically I found the passage in my Zettelkasten.

[mmargenot]

It's weird to read this from zettelkasten.de, given that the method is precisely about cultivating such a graph of knowledge. "Knowing enough to begin" seems to me to be the express purpose of writing and maintaining a zettelkasten and other such tools.

[wduquette]

I arrange my code to follow a certain order, so that I can get my head back into a given module quickly. I don't remember everything; there's too much over the weeks, months, and years. But I can remember enough to find what I need to know if I structure it properly. Not unlike, you know, a Zettlekasten.

[skybrian]

This is task-specific. Consider having a conversation in a foreign language. You don't have time to use a dictionary, so you must have learned words to be able to use them. Similarly for other live performances like playing music.

When you're writing, you can often take your time. Too little knowledge, though, and it will require a lot of homework.

[kjkjadksj]

There might be words I don’t use or chords I don’t know. It doesn’t matter though because part of expertise is being able to consult a reference and go “of course”, implement it, and keep moving.

[keremk]

Actually this is how LLMs (with reasoning) work as well. There is the pre-training which is analogous to the human brain getting trained by as much information as possible. There is a "yet unknown" threshold of what is enough pre-training and then the models can start reasoning and use tools and the feedback from it to do something that resembles to human thinking and reasoning. So if we don't pre-train our brains with enough information, we will have a weak base model. Again this is of course more of an analogy as we yet don't know how our brains really work but more and more it is looking remarkably aligned with this hypothesis.

[stronglikedan]

I always tell people that I don't remember all the answers, only where to find them.

[mvieira38]

Just to be clear, are you saying that to know something:

1- You may remember only the initial state and the brain does the rest, like with mnemonics

2- You may remember only the initial steps towards a solution, like knowing the assumptions and one or two insights to a mathematical proof?

I'd say a Zettlekasten user would agree with you if you mean 1

[mallowdram]

Of course you have to remember everything. Your brain stores everything, and you then get to add things by forgetting, but that does not mean you erase things. The brain is oscillatory, it works somehow by using ripples that encode everything within differences, just in case you have to remember that obscure action-syntax...a knot, a grip, a pivot that might let you escape death. Get to know the brain, folks.

[chrisweekly]

Interesting take. I respectfully differ. IIRC, Feynman said something akin to my POV:

Brains are for thinking. Documents / PKM systems / tools are for remembering.

IOW: take notes, write things down.

FWIW I have a degree in cognitive psychology (psychobiology, neuroanatomy, human perception) and am an amateur neuroscientist. Somewhat familiar w/ the brain. :)

[palata]

I don't think that the point of the article was "you are dumb if you don't remember absolutely everything".

The point, I believe, was that the more you remember, the better you can think. As in you should strive to remember stuff, and not just be lazy and rely on LLMs. I agree with that.

[HPsquared]

A bit like the memory palace. One memory leads to another. Not random-access.

[palmfacehn]

You only need the initial seed to restore the full state, provided you can reason your way from there. If you haven't applied yourself to problem solving, then perhaps you might need to memorize the full state.