alt Hacker NewsDon't agree. If you know no facts, you'll be unable to think even the most basic thoughts. The more you know, the deeper your thinking can be as well as the more subtle.
For every fact you learn there is a necessary context and numerous exceptions when it's applied in other contexts. If you expect AI to spit all relevant facts at you every time you're clueless, you will have no idea when AI is wrong or lying. You will have to trust everything AI (or its owner) tells you.
Yes. Fact fluency allows higher level of abstraction. This is very clear in the case of mathematics - try doing algebra without having your addition and multiplication tables memorized, kids who fail algebra are often missing these basic facts, along with other basics like order of operations.
It's not just math either. Try to be an electrician without memorizing the basic principles of electricity and how they interact. You're going to have a bad time.
By induction we can see how this scales upwards, basically infinitely, to higher and higher levels of thinking.