
Are Professors Obsolete? - michael_nielsen
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/are-professors-obsolete.html
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msg
Facts are the machine language of knowledge. Hopefully you didn't spend
university, in whatever major, memorizing long binary strings. You were meant
to be climbing the abstraction ladder (say, to higher level programming and
language design) and pushing the boundaries of what can be expressed and
known.

DRY is for every discipline, not just software.

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kiba
Even if I can google programming answers or use stackoverflow, it probably
takes 5 minute for me to get my answer. In other words, just because knowledge
exists on the internet, it will take me a non-trivial time to retrieve these
information.

Rote memorization allows me to bypass the latency and allows me to get things
done faster. The rest of my brain is focused on retrieving all my experiences
on how to debug or knowledge or how the framework I am using interact. I use
Google and stackoverflow as needed.

My suggestion is to use SRS software like anki or supermemo and build your own
deck of things to memorize such as how to get the size of an array, how to
capitalize a string, etc. A good rule of thumb is to memorize anything you
have to google twice. This will save you many 5 minutes of development time in
the future.

~~~
silvestrov
Even more important: You need to know a lot before you can ask the interesting
questions. You need knowledge in advance about algorithms and tools to have an
idea about possible solutions and thus what you should Google or ask
stackoverflow about.

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gatlin
No. A _good_ professor (and I'll leave it as a lemma to determine if the
majority of professors meet this standard) is able to package up information
and ideas in such a way that they take root and flourish in the student. A
professor can take years of mastery, introspection, and mistakes and present a
simple idea to a student in 5 minutes which will keep that student up all
night.

I have very rarely found this on the Internet.

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DrJ
Going beyond the question, one could say that Professors provide a view into
the avenue beyond just business. I have personally found that being able to
chat with professors about stuff beyond just Q&A and `what should I do` to be
very insightful/helpful.

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cdcarter
Professors are not obsolete. Professors who spend their students' tuition on
research and professional equivalencies instead of teaching and putting a
majority of their efforts into their classes are.

