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billswift comments on The Great Brain is Located Externally - Less Wrong
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There are three kinds of information:
1) survival information - things you may need without time or access to look them up, like finding or making shelter, food, and water if your plane goes down in the wilderness, self-defense, and first aid.
2) things you use frequently - it's a hassle to look them up repeatedly, but you will eventually start remembering them even without any special effort to memorize them.
3) things you find interesting and might even use someday, which would be a waste of time and effort to memorize.
Many things have moved from number 1 with the advance of civilization, which I don't consider a great loss. Other things, like your mention of songs, have moved from 2 to 3, again I think an improvement.
Useless and harmful information don't seem to fit into this scheme.
I was writing from the point of view of the user; from that POV "useless information" is just noise.
I am not sure I see the point of your proposed information classification scheme.
Information varies in a number of ways: how useful it is; how frequently you need to access it; how often it changes; your level of confidence in its accuracy; its size - and so on. I am not sure if there is much point in trying to collapse any of these dimensions down into a few discrete categories.
I think I see the point. Bill's scheme isn't really for the information itself, but rather for the human latency requirements for information. Any given bit of information in its situational context might require near-zero latency, relatively low latency, or not have a strong requirement at all.
I was just considering how important or useful memorizing the information could be. That is, when and whether the "external brain" is adequate.