Absorbing information for our brain is like training our machine learning model of the world. Even if we forget what we've learned, the data still trains our brains and model weights to make decisions.
Podcast: Andy Matuschak - Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, & Why Books Don’t Work | Dwarkesh Podcast
Machine learning models oftentimes work like black boxes. During the training process, the model learns from the provided data and extracts weights representing patterns and relationships within that data. These weights enable the model to make predictions or decisions without requiring it to remember the specific examples it was trained on.
Absorbing information for our brain is similar to training our model of the world. Our brain operates like a black box. Therefore, we might know how to do something without remembering why we know it. Even if we forget what we've learned, it still trains our brains and becomes weights (through spread activation).
Also from How You Know: "Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why."