151–160 of 184 posts
I always find it so strange and a little creepy to treat "intelligent" as a category like "brown haired" or "diabetic." You take a test and receive a score (an "intelligence score" apparently) and if you are past X points you are intelligent. Now you are among the set of intelligent people in the world. I know this is an agreed upon reality (especially among us nerdy types), but it always rubbed me the wrong way. Eve…
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I elaborated as a reply to a sibling comment, but repeat after me: You need to memorize things in math , especially if you want full understanding. It is a necessary tool. I realized this when I saw one of the higher math geniuses in university, one who really understood most things better than most of us, learn equations and lemmas from flashcards one day. That memorization may become superfluous after you worked wi…
The OP article is in part about how people whom memorize things perform worse because their memory is incorrect, while people who understand things will spend more time making sense of a problem of solution instead of more quickly guessing part-blind. Not-memorizing forces you to practice more and develop deeper intuition which helps you reconstruct info. Memorization is a side-effect or learning, not a cause. Our br…
But I got there by, at first, "blindly" memorizing FS, FT, DFT, DTFT, and Laplace and z transforms. This allowed me to not only apply them to problems while, at the time, not being fully comfortable with them yet, but also, and this is really the biggest part of the point I'm trying to make, to "look at them" while I was either solving problems or just furthering my understanding of the field when, say, lying in bed before falling asleep.
To an extent that would not have been possible if I had to "refer back" to their definitions on paper.
It was a tremendous tool (that is what memorization is, a tool) to just be able to recite, say, the DFT, or the DTFT, even while my intuition was still gradually building up. And to internally look at the differences between DFT and DTFT. The same is true for the countless other little factoids in my arsenal of flashcards. I literally built a lot of math understanding, both abstract and of actual engineering problems I was working on, when sitting in my car, on my 45 minutes commute to work or back home.
> Our brains are connection machines, not encyclopedias.
And memorization is a tool for making new connections.
A while back, I created an online experiment, based on a 2020 study, that identifies dogmatic thinking. https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html Without giving too much away, this tracks with the 2023 study's results, in that people with higher intelligence scores are less likely to trust their System 1 gut reaction and more likely to involve their System 2 deliberate, logical processes.
There are two measures of intelligence: Correctness and Speed. Correctness is the primary measure, and if two parties are correct then speed differentiates their level of intelligence. This is the only measure that has been quantified and scientifically correlated with many other attributes of human existence like success and happiness. This measure is is called IQ. If both people get an answer correct, then literall…
green user to shadow banned speedrun?
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I've always felt like I have awful short term memory. I use tiling WMs so I can see information side-by-side. If I need to type something exactly, I forget the exact details almost immediately. I need to derive things to understand them, ie music theory. I'm jealous of people who can memorize and take at face value but if I'm looking at a chord, I need to know the components that create that chord, which gets frustra…
Hey, do you drink alcohol ? A few years back I accepted a challenge to take a year off drinking from a family member. I cannot tell you how much it improved my memory. Before that I was always losing things, frustrated I couldn’t remember the names of things etc. After about 3 months I felt like I had doubled my memory. I wasn’t really a heavy drinker, but I would go for a few months having 1-2 beers a day. Anyway ju…
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The reason I love vim and i3/kitty so much as a combination is exactly this. I have 4 monitors in the exact state I left them when I get back, with the last TODO comments I added and what the problem was (that I thought about deeply overnight). For me the best way to get into the flow is by directly getting back to where I left. If I take time to wake up, make breakfast or anything else I usually lost my ideas alread…
If you have a truly great idea. Write it down. Just writing it down, will help you remember. If not: You have the paper.
This is underrated. And, specifically...writing it down, with a pen or pencil. Typing it doesn't seem to have the same effect, even with some ritual of typing it into a fresh/separate document.
There are two measures of intelligence: Correctness and Speed. Correctness is the primary measure, and if two parties are correct then speed differentiates their level of intelligence. This is the only measure that has been quantified and scientifically correlated with many other attributes of human existence like success and happiness. This measure is is called IQ. If both people get an answer correct, then literall…
It's not clear to me from Google that IQ tests are timed. Some sections of some tests are. I don't think any test is like "For question 4, you get 10 points for answering within 2 seconds, 5 points within 4 seconds, and 0 after." A time limit on the test could just be to keep you from accidentally measuring conscientiousness in people who are willing to spend 10 hours to get everything right. That said I'm pretty sur…
Even without the concept of an IQ test the fact that if you were given two people who both answered 50 questions correctly, one person took a full day to complete the questions while another person answered them in all in 2 minutes. Clearly our conceptual intuition of intelligence says the Faster person by literal definition of "intelligence" is more intelligent.
Like what is the experiment in this article measuring here? If it's comparing people who got the exact same test scores then the experimenter can't identify differing levels of intelligence because everyone got everything right. How can they say the faster person is stupider then the slower person if the scores are the same?
The only way to truly compare is to find people who got the answers wrong, but in this case your measuring the speed of arrival at a wrong answer which is in itself a pointless measurement.
Obviously wrong answers are faster to come up with and obviously a person with more wrong answers is going to be faster and stupider then the person with right answers.
I strongly suspect this effect is correlated with a weakness in short-term or working memory. Independent of general intelligence is the necessity for those with a weak short-term or working memory to compensate by relying on long-term, in depth understanding in order to JIT the necessary short-term structures into being on the spot, (often repeatedly as these images decay rapidly) in order to solve a problem. Wherea…
I am more comfortable with deep thinking, or reflection, which allows me to come up with more complex analysis, while this process translates quite well when I have homework challenges.
I used to test some of my mental capacity with pseudo-IQ tests and realized that the factor that would penalize me the most was lack of time.
> needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors [1] As someone else said, I can solve problems very quickly if the solutions don't have to be correct... But more seriously, it seems like different people might have different thresholds for when they consider a problem solved? If you decide to go back and review the problem and solution (even just mentally) to make sure you didn't make mistakes, of…
Call me naive, but if my proposed solution is not correct, the problem isn't solved.