Pretty much all of the critics you mentioned were right in some small way. Relying on printed material does have downsides compared to memorization - for a modern example, consider the disadvantages of googling for information vs. actually learning it.
There’s a difference between Googling and comprehension. Google is a great substitute for remembering facts and details. It means there’s more room in my brain for concepts and things that can’t just be Googled for.
Treat Google as an augmentation of your brain. You both do what you’re good at (facts vs. concepts) and you end up better overall.
I don't know if I completely believe the more room for your memory part. That's my excuse for not memorizing things that take a few minutes to look up. I don't necessarily believe it as a truth. I've heard the memory of people in countries where paper is scarce tends to be amazing. This was before the everyone had a phone. I think we would have to measure how much memory is achievable for certain tasks before we can calculate room saved for concepts and where the threshold becomes an advantage. Anyway I'm a skeptic either way.
I feel I don't really understand the last line, in that I cannot find any disadvantages-
Google being so widely available means that people stop caring about memorizing things that are easily googleable, but that is pretty orthoganal to "actually learning". Google being available makes this distinction clear. If it can be easily googled for, it's a fact and remembering facts is for paper and bits. Most things aren't on google. Use your brain for the hard stuff.
I disagree. It's more about how often or how deeply you need to leverage information. Having facts in one's brain for immediate integration and synthesis matters to the translator or chemist, for instance.
By having information in your brain, your subconscious self will have worked out how to apply it in clever and novel ways as an extension of your problem solving capacity.
You can see it in your daily life too - for instance, you might occasionally find yourself programming with a new container or data structure library. The interface is hopefully simple enough to figure out at a glance, and you can look up things you don't know. But you'll likely move slower than if you had known the tool like the back of your hand. And more importantly, the lack of familiarity prevents your brain from being able to fully work at the level of the problem, since it's now forced to juggle with all the new information about the shape and behavior of the API.
Googling something once to figure out how to do something is an advantage. But, if you constantly google the same task over and over again you should probably put in the effort into learning it.
Mindlessly cutting and pasting from the search results such as from stackoverflow can be anywhere from a waste of your time to extremely dangerous. But, on the other hand when it works it makes you much faster than if you tried to solve the problem yourself.
Consider the advantages to googling: I can get expert advice on areas I know nothing about and use that advice to complete tasks that I would otherwise need specialist help with.
Example 1: I only cook occasionally, yet I made great Kimchi the other day by watching a YouTube video.
Example 2: I replaced the big end bearings on a small petrol 2 stroke by using a YouTube video.
We learn how to choose good instructional material and we learn how to apply it.
Learning is expensive in terms of your own time and the time of an expert teaching you. Imagine spending years to learn a foreign language to understand a single article on the internet vs just using google translate and accepting the low quality. It's best to have as many substitutes to learning as possible.
