Agreed “remembering” stuff is critical in most life’s situations where if you did, you will appeared to be smart. This is probably why spaced repetition has been a key element in learning for the past few decades.

But “remembering” is only the beginning (you have to remember first!), after that, elements like understanding relations, connecting dots and remixing, timing, etc will truly make one shine.

In one way, it’s like the current “LLM + Harness” setup for agents. LLM is how well it remembers, but different harness techniques really matters, at times even a worse model mixed with great harness can outperform great model with bad harness