I’ve been carrying around a significantly paraphrased and possibly even mangled quotation about intelligence vs. knowledge in my head for many years, and I’d like some help identifying the source & correct wording. It’s something to the effect of:
“The Intelligent Man knows nothing, but knows where he can look it up.”
Of course, I don’t know who said it… I always assumed I could just look it up. Total fail.
I think Mark Twain is credited with saying that there are things he knows, and there are things he knows where to look up.
I have a vague memory that it may not be original with Twain (or may be misattributed to him) and is based on something actually said by Samuel Johnson. That phrasing doesn’t sound like Johnson, though.
But, there’s two names you can try.
So check this out: I was originally going to mention that I usually attribute the quote to Albert Einstein, though to describe this attribution as “tenuous” would be generous at best. Anyway, in googling variants of RivkahChaya’s phrasing, I found this:
“[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. …The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”
In response to not knowing the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test: New York Times (18 May 1921); Einstein: His Life and Times (1947) Philipp Frank, p. 185; Einstein, A Life (1996) by Denis Brian, p. 129; “Einstein Due Today” (February 2005) edited by József Illy, Manuscript 25-32 of the Einstein Paper Project; all previous sources as per Einstein His Life and Universe (2007) by Walter Isaacson, p. 299
Unsourced variants: “I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book” and “Never memorize what you can look up in books.” (The second version is found in “Recording the Experience” (10 June 2004) at The Library of Congress, but no citation to Einstein’s writings is given.)
You go, brain! While I’m disappointed that the above isn’t more soundbyteworthy, the minor ego boost may have been worth it. (Plus, I can totally still use it in its mangled form if I want.)
It seems like a common enough sentiment that there may yet be other sources out there, so don’t hold back. But thanks to the first respondent in any case.
Somewhat similar Knowledge is of two kinds: Samuel Johnson
Probably said, off the cuff, by many people, and finally incorporated into a widely-distributed compendium of sayings by one of the handful of people whose compendia of sayings worked its way into the popular memes of the times. Usually, Twain, Franklin, Lincolln or Churchill, who are well-known enough to have been credited with virtually every popular saying that was going around.
My dad told me at an early age, “The next best thing to knowing is knowing where to find.”
Since that exposure to the concept (1940’s) I have seen many paraphrases, but I have yet to identify any one of them as the source. I suspect that if there is one source that it mist be ancient.
There are things we know we know, and things that we know we don’t know. There are also things that we don’t know we don’t know.
Apologies to Donald Rumsfeld
I was told that a long time ago, by one of the family PhDs, in the form, “A university education consists of learning where to look things up.” No cite for a source, but I’ve found it to be true… as long as it’s not taken as a simplistic idea. Looking up the right thing in the right place can be a bitch.
Well, while the sentiment may be old, it may not be much older than the printing press. Now, I realize that Samuel Johnson came along a couple of hundred years after the printing press, but the way he has phrased the sentiment would be pretty useless before public libraries and cataloged books. It would be silly advice to tell someone to go look something up, when there were no printed books, and most of the population was illiterate.
The thought may be original with Samuel Johnson.
It’s getting harder now that anyone can have a website.
Yes and no. Some of those “anyones” are, for example, Springer, Nature, NCJRS, the United Nations, NASA, the EPA, the DOE, and so on.
Getting a good source is, to some extent, as easy as getting on scholar.google.com instead of www.google.com. The annoying bit is, unfortunately, that most of the papers it links to are only available to subscription holders.