Noesis-space

Note: it may be that I happen to lie somewhere on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to this very particular skill of memorising statistics, such that it proves less actionable for most: nonetheless, I think it may be worth trying. "Never memorize something that you can look up" —  Albert Einstein To be honest, I've always found this quote rather stupid. Of course, it's meant to be hyperbolic. But human memory capacity is not particularly zero sum, and one suffers a much greater time delay in the procurement of relevant information through manually looking it up. In addition, in the age of Google, this sentiment would suggest that one should remember almost nil. I will make the case that storing a somewhat large amount of specific statistical information that most people don't try to remember, namely, the population, GDP and GDP per capita figures for most at least semi-important countries, and the population counts of the world's...