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The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

nautil.us

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Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#71

Post by WillPostForFood »

perliosse wrote: post #6

Important to note that repetitions are never exactly the same: new connections are found each time. Also, choosing what to repeat seems important. Drilling in what is already understood may help you become a good teacher but how does one develop new and original ideas?

Someone might be better equipped to write something new and original if they knew 10,000 words vs 1,000. Or to bring it to programming, do you think a programmer who has complete mastery of the syntax of a language might be better equipped to develop innovative software than a developer who had to refer to stack overflow to lookup whether == was assignment or equivalence?

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#72

Post by bsder »

SamBam wrote: post #56
bsder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I tend to agree with the thesis, personal anecdote does not make a valid conclusion. We probably have decent research on this at this point. Anybody versed in it weighing it?

... the author wrote a book on the topic, and teaches a fairly famous course on it. I'd hope you'd give those credentials at least as much weight as some HN self-proclaimed expert.

> ... the author wrote a book on the topic, and teaches a fairly famous course on it.

Sadly, that doesn't automatically mean anything from a correctness perspective.

Educational methodology, in particular, tends to be absolutely rife with fads more than fact and immediately sets off my alerts.

This is doubly problematic when someone touts how popular their course is instead of how effective it is.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#73

Post by bsder »

sn9 wrote: post #55
bsder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I tend to agree with the thesis, personal anecdote does not make a valid conclusion. We probably have decent research on this at this point. Anybody versed in it weighing it?

The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Not surprising as she didn't come up with the ideas herself. She stumbled on the underlying principles and did research like anyone else on the terminology scientific experts in learning use to talk about those principles.

> The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her.

Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in.

Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html

Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski/publication...

Are we going to wind up with another "10,000 hours" debacle?

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#75

Post by lokiboi »

tamana wrote: post #64
lokiboi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, otherwise all those IOI and IMO contestants would be pure geniuses, probably they are, but they practiced a lot to be good at a single task - problem solving in programming or mathematics for competitions. That's a good foundation built on insane amounts of repetition and memorization, but still, not many turn out to be Terence Tao or Peter Shor. Although https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_M…

You don't get to the IMO by mere memorization.

Pattern matching is huge contributor to solving problems fast or even having the problems reachable.

Just checkout these results https://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/

They practically solve a very hard problem (it might take days for me to solve it) in 5 minutes. If that is not some supreme pattern matching then I don't know what it is.

Bunch of proof strategies used in math competitions are the same.

You have to have a giant knowledge of algorithms: fast fourier transform, bfs, dfs, iterative deepening, dijkstra, a*, sweep line algs, practically have to master dynamic programming (there's DP on trees, hidden markov model like DPs etc.), flood fill, topological sort, bipartite graph checks, kruskal, prim, edmonds karp, bunch of combinatorics, geometry algorithms.

data structures like segment trees, fenwick tree, suffix trees, etc.

you see where I'm going, there's a lot of memorization, and a lot of repetition (which improves memorization).

same thing goes for IMO, you have to do a lot of proofs, have to memorize and repeat a bunch of proof strategies in a huge number of mathematical areas.

memorization and repetition!

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#76

Post by pbhjpbhj »

noobermin wrote: post #15
tucaz wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message, but not the messenger. Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste. The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way with…

I remember first learning Quantum Field Theory. One week, my head would ache from what I was reading but by the next week, that bit would be incorporated into new parts, so the "confusing stuff" become foundation for the next week's confusing stuff. Eventually, it became intuitive.

QFT was my watershed the point where I really needed to learn, study, concentrate, apply, ... it wasn't at all intuitive to me.

Unfortunately I hadn't learnt to do any of those things; result was scraping a minimum pass.

To me it was like trying to picture n-dimensional hyper-cubes.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#77

Post by pbhjpbhj »

SamBam wrote: post #56
bsder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I tend to agree with the thesis, personal anecdote does not make a valid conclusion. We probably have decent research on this at this point. Anybody versed in it weighing it?

... the author wrote a book on the topic, and teaches a fairly famous course on it. I'd hope you'd give those credentials at least as much weight as some HN self-proclaimed expert.

See also authors of dieting fads. Popularity doesn't make you right [nor wrong].

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#78

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sireat wrote: post #26

Author makes the point that repetition of a solid foundation is a necessary condition to reach unconscious mastery of some craft/skill. I am just not sure it is sufficient. Age/talent/nature do play a big factor. Also I suspect starting to learn serious math at age of 26 she is an outlier. Russian is my 2nd language (English is my 3rd) and both I learned through repetition via reading prodigious amounts in each langu…

>my brain seems to require more repetition to acquire the same knowledge that my daughter picks up near instantly. //

Perhaps you're hitting storage limitations?

Hypothesis: you need more repetitions to tell your brain to store the info in a more accessible manner, like more cache-hits indicating the data should be placed in a higher level cache?

Additional hypothesis: without wiping earlier memories the brain needs to rearrange how things are stored - maybe recategorising, re-"compressing" - in which case new knowledge would need to be for in to a right framework, conceptually, and possibly placed physically to optimise it's storage.

I'm imaging the brain like a spider-diagram - when you start you can easily find a space to draw a new concept and the lines connecting it. As you go on that becomes more difficult.

Now to work on creating an experiment to test my wild hypothesising!

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#79

Post by pbhjpbhj »

fitzwatermellow wrote: post #32

My latest hack is to return to paper and pencil. After going paperless about a decade ago, re-wiring these particular neural pathways is quite an obstacle in itself. But in terms of retention and creative flow it is unparalleled. I bring it up because I think the foundation for the memorization and repetition feedback cycle begins with elementary school lessons in handwriting, cursive, the alphabet and spelling. And…

Such digital natives would be doing hours of input practice for other media though?

Is it the specific mechanics of orthography that you SD as valuable?

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#80

Post by pbhjpbhj »

danso wrote: post #8

> What I had done in learning Russian was to emphasize not just understanding of the language, but fluency. Fluency of something whole like a language requires a kind of familiarity that only repeated and varied interaction with the parts can develop. Where my language classmates had often been content to concentrate on simply understanding Russian they heard or read, I instead tried to gain an internalized, deep-roo…

>if you can actually write out code by hand, then you probably know the fundamental patterns (I'm talking fundamental, as in a common for-loop) essential for higher programming.//

What if you can write the pseudo-code but not the specific syntax without a reference it auto-fill out your IDE? Is that enough?

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