We all know confidently incorrect people. People displaying dunning-kruger. The majority of those people have low education and without someone giving them objectively true feedback on their opinions through their developmental years, they start to believe everything they think is true even without evidence.
Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.
I could be wrong though.
I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.
So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.
I don’t think it’s related to patterns, it’s the methodology.
Sure, there’s some groundwork that needs to be memorized in different fields, but this is like learning your first words. These are necessary so that we can communicate with each other, and they serve as building blocks upon all rest is built upon.
Everything else we are mostly taught by learning how some old guy came up with an answer, making clever use of the tools that we also have.
After a while it sort of clicks that there’s a method to the madness, you build up and up until you get to the moon, and you get this feeling that anything can be explained logically - we might not know how yet, but surely it will be at some point.
Unless it’s quantum physics, fuck that.
It feels like there’s a lot of people who skipped these building steps, maybe they were just memorizing stuff to get by the exams without exercising their brains on the methods to reach those solutions, or were simply never taught, and now they just don’t have the tools to make sense of what’s around them, and will blindly follow a monster that assures them that they’ll be ok as long as they do this or that…