Einstein reportedly said “Never memorize something you can look up in a book”. When asked the speed of sound he said , “I do not know but that number is commonly found in textbooks”.
I am not going to spend my life reading manuals. Reading my furnace manual years before a problem arises is unlikely to help me.
However, I completely agree that RTFM is a great thing to do with confronted with a gap in knowledge or problem to be solved. Not the whole manual probably, just the relevant parts.
I think it is much more important to store ideas in your head than information. That said, those ideas do not come from nothing.
I might not read the man pages of every command on a Linux system. At least, not all of them. But I should know high-level what commands are available and what they generally do. That allows me to think of them when they would be useful. But I probably have no idea what the proper syntax is for any of them when I go to use them.
And “the manual” is not always the best place to get ideas, even if it is the authoritative source for specific knowledge.
Time spent reading the manual is time not spent doing something else. Spend your time learning. Spend most of it learning what is possible. In my view, that is the best strategy.
I think reading the manual gives you the concept of what something is capable of doing. No one is saying memorize all the commands and their flags.
But if you read all of them, maybe some day you’ll have a problem and realize, wait… I’ve seen something like this before. And you can then look up the specifics.
The main point I took away from your comment, and the thing that I think is missing in most of the other comments, is application of this concept to the real world. You nailed it. Always read the manual is a nice sound bite and something that can be flippantly thrown around to feel superior but that is terrible advice without any context.
What it should say is: Always refer to the manual.
Part of being a human is prioritizing tasks based on need and/or want. Another part is understanding your personal needs to accomplish a task. Reading a manual may provide value. Spending the 2 hours with family also provides value. If I choose the latter I can still refer to the manual when needed.
It drives me crazy when people double-down on some distinct thing (always read the manual) and then preach that it should always be the case or apply to all situations. There is a concept of diminishing returns and people should teach how to figure that out rather than blast out a good sound bite. Let people identify what works for them and be respectful of that. I’m not sure why that is such a hard concept for people.
Einstein reportedly said “Never memorize something you can look up in a book”. When asked the speed of sound he said , “I do not know but that number is commonly found in textbooks”.
I am not going to spend my life reading manuals. Reading my furnace manual years before a problem arises is unlikely to help me.
However, I completely agree that RTFM is a great thing to do with confronted with a gap in knowledge or problem to be solved. Not the whole manual probably, just the relevant parts.
I think it is much more important to store ideas in your head than information. That said, those ideas do not come from nothing.
I might not read the man pages of every command on a Linux system. At least, not all of them. But I should know high-level what commands are available and what they generally do. That allows me to think of them when they would be useful. But I probably have no idea what the proper syntax is for any of them when I go to use them.
And “the manual” is not always the best place to get ideas, even if it is the authoritative source for specific knowledge.
Time spent reading the manual is time not spent doing something else. Spend your time learning. Spend most of it learning what is possible. In my view, that is the best strategy.
I think reading the manual gives you the concept of what something is capable of doing. No one is saying memorize all the commands and their flags.
But if you read all of them, maybe some day you’ll have a problem and realize, wait… I’ve seen something like this before. And you can then look up the specifics.
We may not be disagreeing. I guess it depends what you mean by read.
The main point I took away from your comment, and the thing that I think is missing in most of the other comments, is application of this concept to the real world. You nailed it. Always read the manual is a nice sound bite and something that can be flippantly thrown around to feel superior but that is terrible advice without any context.
What it should say is: Always refer to the manual.
Part of being a human is prioritizing tasks based on need and/or want. Another part is understanding your personal needs to accomplish a task. Reading a manual may provide value. Spending the 2 hours with family also provides value. If I choose the latter I can still refer to the manual when needed.
It drives me crazy when people double-down on some distinct thing (always read the manual) and then preach that it should always be the case or apply to all situations. There is a concept of diminishing returns and people should teach how to figure that out rather than blast out a good sound bite. Let people identify what works for them and be respectful of that. I’m not sure why that is such a hard concept for people.