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People have this weird disdain for memorization. Memorization is the same as knowing. Can you imagine that there have been points in your job that would have gone smoother if you'd known more?
I don’t believe them to be the same. I have friends who repeat words to me GPT style, that I know them to be imprecise in the spirit of the discussion.
Someone should make a match three or other addictive game that periodically shows you flash cards instead of ads.
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Oh man I could not disagree more. “Math facts” don’t require any sort of conjuring, in fact cease to seem mystical at all, once you have a deep understanding of the material. Take your favorite math textbook—do you seriously think the author wrote all that down by rote memorization? Of course not: it came naturally as a byproduct of study. Memorization for the sake of memorizing is the worst possible way to learn mat…
The 2 aren't mutually exclusive. If you give 2 middle schoolers a test and one knows all of his time tables by rote, he's going to fly circles around the "kid with deep understanding" that's writing out the multiples manually.
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You can memorize every note of a difficult piano piece, but that doesn't mean you know how to play it well.
Yes, memory is a necessary but not sufficient component of learning. "Piano playing" seems like a really poor example to argue against the value of memorization.
In fact, I would argue that most of the forms of knowledge that are truly valuable are exactly the kinds that aren't amenable to memorization. Think about any skill that's in high demand and takes decades to master. You're not going to get there by studying Anki cards.
Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside. When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- uni…
I use anki with my young son on sight words. Works great but wish it was a little easier to do what I want instead of following protocol exactly. I know the whole point of anki but sometimes I just want to test him on older stuff or stuff he hasn’t seen for various reasons. Can never quite figure it out on the phone.
One possible way to get there on mobile: 1. Start reviewing a deck. 2. Click the gear button. 3. Choose “Custom study” and select one of the options. 4. If studying tagged cards, go tag some cards via the Browse view.
[1] https://docs.ankiweb.net/filtered-decks.html#custom-study
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Yes, memory is a necessary but not sufficient component of learning. "Piano playing" seems like a really poor example to argue against the value of memorization.
The post I was responding to said "Memorization is the same as knowing". I specifically chose a counterexample to suggest that knowledge is deeper than memorizing some facts about the world. In fact, I would argue that most of the forms of knowledge that are truly valuable are exactly the kinds that aren't amenable to memorization. Think about any skill that's in high demand and takes decades to master. You're not go…
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> “ I guess most of us can understand a sentence like "a string is an immutable sequence of characters," quickly read it, and move on. ” Can we? In the context of learning a new unfamiliar programming language… is it saying there is a string type or is it telling you that there isn’t a string type but only a sequence of characters? Like APL a string is an array of characters not its own type but in C# [string] is a t…
Do you think all those questions are someone who looks at the sentence and has no idea what it means would even think to ask? I don't know how you'd convert the knowledge to flash cards most effectively; my point is you have a ton of knowledge committed to memory about programming concepts and that allows you to more easily assimilate new knowledge, because you aren't having to spend time wrestling with the basics to…
And I'm also saying that rote learning and background knowledge can hinder progress and require time unlearning, like the beginner needs to spend time learning. e.g. a mathematical sequence like "even numbers" can be infinitely long and the sentence probably doesn't mean that strings can have infinite characters in them. I guess, if you don't know the meaning of the words the sentence doesn't help you, if you know the words from a different context but don't know the programming language then the words don't help you, and if you already know the language then the words add nothing for you. Learning is impossible, Q.E.D ;-)
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Do you think all those questions are someone who looks at the sentence and has no idea what it means would even think to ask? I don't know how you'd convert the knowledge to flash cards most effectively; my point is you have a ton of knowledge committed to memory about programming concepts and that allows you to more easily assimilate new knowledge, because you aren't having to spend time wrestling with the basics to…
The context was about whether rote learning was helpful, and I read your comment as suggesting that it was - not just that background knowledge helps but that rote learning without understanding can help someone gain understanding later. By asking about Anki flashcards I was wondering what someone might rote memorise without understanding which would then help with learning about that programming sentence (I can't qu…
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Why is it useful? My job at least isn’t bottlenecked by me not memorizing enough things. Or maybe it is! But I’m not convinced
People have this weird disdain for memorization. Memorization is the same as knowing. Can you imagine that there have been points in your job that would have gone smoother if you'd known more?