Just in time knowledge

The idea of just in time (JIT) comes from manufacturing, where processes are changed so that parts are manufactured only when needed, reducing unnecessary stock. Can we take these lean ideas of waste reduction and apply them to knowledge?

JIT knowledge, means not knowing specific knowledge until you need it and then looking it up. This is especially possible nowadays due to the internet’s vast streams of information, discoverable moments away. This means it’s now practical to look up information on demand.

Sources non-JIT

Childhood

I think I need to mention one of the largest sources of non-JIT knowledge in our life: education. I think early primary school is actually JIT friendly because learning maths, how to write etc. is needed at this stage of life to be able to interact in the world successfully.

The first major source of high levels of non-JIT information is secondary school, as this covers a broad set of topics. It depends on the school but many different subjects are taught alongside the core subjects (maths, English and science).

University narrows the scope considerably, taking an in-depth view of a narrow slice, often looking at sub-topics within a field. This may still give you knowledge that you won’t need but is more likely to come up in the future (if you get a career in that field).

Later Life

Vast quantities of information are received passively as an adult, and most of this information doesn’t impact your day-to-day life. For example, most of the news isn’t particularly relevant to you personally.

It’s also common to receive non-JIT information in the workplace. For example, meetings might explain how a certain sub-system works, even if you don’t interact with it. Another example would be long email chains that you’re included in but that aren’t relevant to your work.

I’m sure you can think of many more work and non-work examples.

Gists

Memory

There are two memory biases relevant to the rest of this article:

Verbatim effect: There are two types of knowledge: gists and concrete facts and figures. Gists are remembered better than verbatim facts. I can remember that Milgram’s experiment uses a shocking box and that many people will follow authority, but I can’t remember the numbers of participants or the variations he tested. This concept comes from Fuzzy-Trace theory.

Context effects: Ideas in context are much easier to remember than memories that are currently isolated. This is why you can remember a memory after someone reminds you of a detail.

What this means

Of the knowledge gained in education, small amounts are remembered verbatim, more is remembered as gists, some requires context effects to recall, and some is completely forgotten.

If we retain the gist of information, it’s much easier to return to it later and refresh our memory of the specifics, as we don’t need to learn it all from scratch. When you revisit the material, contextual memories help you out.

One example of this is from my childhood. I couldn’t understand why you would ever use pointers, and I spent days trying to work out why they were useful. A year or two later, when I returned to the topic, it was plainly obvious from just reading a brief summary.

Therefore, remembering the gist of information can unlock deeper detailed knowledge with just a little prompting.

Non-jit info needs to be gist level

Non-JIT information needs to be information that is ‘gistable’. If it’s gistable, people will have a takeaway from the information you’ve given, since they’ll forget any concrete details. If the information only contains concrete facts, most of it will be lost.

This is one of the core problems with adult information, much of it isn’t really gistable. For example, with a news item, we can’t extract a gist from “X has done X” unless it’s particularly significant.

Can we use JIT and the internet instead

I think the strongest argument is that many ideas develop from combining concepts from different disciplines in novel ways. For example, this post combines JIT ideas from manufacturing with concepts from psychology about memory.

Another obvious problem is that if you don’t know something exists, you can’t search for additional information about it. Therefore, you may be missing an important piece of the puzzle.

This argues that early investments in education are important, as they build up your foundation of gists that you may need in the future. Different people will need different gists, but everyone benefits from that foundation. I didn’t expect to use some knowledge from school, but years later those gists helped me dive in quickly when it became relevant.

So the answer is: it depends. If it’s specific information the internet can provide, we should learn it just in time, even though we’ll be slower at learning it without a foundational gist. If we have a wide array of gists for foundational information and we get a ‘cache hit’, we can spin up much quicker and then use the contextual information we’ve stored.

I’m not a psychologist, this post contains my thoughts on the matter.