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I store a lot of "I've read the solution for that problem somewhere while researching something else." I still can't recite the stdlib doc for any of the programming languages I work with. There's only so much stuff I can cram in my head and reference docs are fairly easy to look up.



I store a lot of "I've read the solution for that problem somewhere while researching something else."

Yes, this is more what I was thinking of as "encyclopedic knowledge" (which may not be what the parent post to mine meant by the term).


"encyclopedic knowledge" is usually meant to be "I can recite the cities phonebook by heart"


Not necessarily; an encyclopedia isn't just an unconnected catalogue of facts--at least, it's not supposed to be. An encyclopedia article about a given subject is supposed to show the subject as a connected whole; it will contain facts, but will also contain important relationships between the facts, general principles, theories that explain the facts, etc. If you have that kind of knowledge of a subject, you don't have to memorize all its facts, because you can easily get to them from the facts you do have memorized via one of many interconnections.




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