TLDR: Western education creates a false dichotomy between memorization and understanding. I believe we should expect both. Having facts readily available in your brain (not just "Google-able") enables real-time bullshit detection, helps you calibrate who to trust, holds your own beliefs accountable, and provides the raw material for insight and critical thought. I offer some concrete suggestions (spaced repetition via Anki, tracking unfamiliar terms, connecting new facts to existing knowledge, etc.). Rationalists need to be careful to not focus purely on epistemics. We also need lots of knowledge. There's no way around memorization.

I believe memorization is unfairly maligned. It is on the shortlist of things I think are required for becoming a rational intellectual. Besides curiosity, these things are:

Good epistemics: a reliable process for obtaining, vetting, and updating your knowledge. How do you know a claim is true? That a study is well-designed? That an observation licenses a general induction? You need to recognize and avoid fallacies and cognitive bias, understand the probabilistic nature of knowledge, follow complicated chains of reason, responsibly evaluate both qualitative and quantitative evidence, etc.

Good knowledge. You need a wide range of properly-vetted, high-confidence information readily available in your mind. This includes brute facts (When was the Song Dynasty? What is silicate weathering?) and contested knowledge (Why did the Song Dynasty collapse? Will silicate weathering slow with climate change?). The key phrase here is “readily available”—these are not facts you could understand if you looked them up, but knowledge actually present in your brain. These are facts available to be thought with, not merely comprehended.

Intelligence. You can have excellent knowledge and rigorous epistemics but lack the ability to do anything interesting with them. You need the spark that connects disparate ideas, sees patterns, generates novel solutions. Creativity, insight, synthesis.

"Being intelligent" as an ingredient for being a good intellectual is so obvious that it’s almost trivial. Similarly, in the culture I grew up in (and on a blog about rationality...), good epistemics needs no theoretical defense as part of education. Every institution I’ve ever attended emphasized "fostering critical thinking" as its central goal. They ma...

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