In Praise of Memorization

We all remember a couple of things school teachers forced us to learn by heart that, in hindsight, make zero sense. That doesn’t mean memorising facts you can look up within seconds is worthless. This essay makes a great case for memorisation (well, with a z, but I think it holds true on both sides of the Atlantic). In short: If you know something about a lot of things, that gives you more dots to connect. In the author’s words: «The point is that memorizing data gives you a bank of material to run through when forming and testing a hypothesis»