Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
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Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#2Something I noticed from being raised by Indian parents while going through the US school system
And again after learning how to acquire new skills quickly
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#3I will disagree. Creativity comes from applying acquired knowledge (that's where memorization comes into account) in new contexts.
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#4This seems to resonate with my experience, although I feel myself bristling due to the baggage of the word memorization.
Although sometimes “memorization” doesn’t happen because you sit down to do it but rather that you keep using the same things over and over when solving problems that they become internalized. I find that to be a more fruitful path towards understanding that I don’t want to call memorization but it is.
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#5I genuinely thought creativity was something else until LLMs hit escape velocity and humbled me hard.
After that I realized that creativity wasn't some magical quality that would be hard to reproduce mechanically.
And that also made me a little sad.
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#6I will disagree. Creativity comes from applying acquired knowledge (that's where memorization comes into account) in new contexts.
Appreciate you reading!
But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in this new context?
It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization
i.e. you've memorized the match between inherent traits of the context with a specific application of that knowledge
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#7This seems to resonate with my experience, although I feel myself bristling due to the baggage of the word memorization. Although sometimes “memorization” doesn’t happen because you sit down to do it but rather that you keep using the same things over and over when solving problems that they become internalized. I find that to be a more fruitful path towards understanding that I don’t want to call memorization but it…
Thanks for reading!
And agreed -- it's this exact realization that led me to both this method and title
Imo this negative connotation has made many people refrain from calling internalization what it is
But acknowledging that it's memorization has actually made me more efficient at learning, since I can now consciously look for the heuristic, codify it, and try to commit it to memory
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#8I will disagree. Creativity comes from applying acquired knowledge (that's where memorization comes into account) in new contexts.
Appreciate you reading! But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in this new context? It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization i.e. you've memorized the match between inherent traits of the context with a specific application of that knowledge
To me, “memorization” implies an active process focused on learning a particular set of “matches” (to adopt the term you’re using here). But it seems to me that tacit knowledge (and other products of less concentrated/deliberate learning) often plays a substantial role in creativity.
That is, creativity fundamentally comes from internalized knowledge (as the article says) but internalized knowledge doesn’t necessarily come from memorization.
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#9I genuinely thought creativity was something else until LLMs hit escape velocity and humbled me hard. After that I realized that creativity wasn't some magical quality that would be hard to reproduce mechanically. And that also made me a little sad.
I'm glad you said this -- I felt the same way after making this discovery through my method outlined in this post
It similarly took the magic out of creativity and learning a bit, and made it all seem like work
The main way I've found around it is the joy in being creative once basic autonomy is achieved in new skills
Consciously discovering the heuristic is another fun part
Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
#10I think memorization gets a bad rep because you need to be acutely aware of what you're memorizing, like memorizing the sequence of an answer sheet instead of core concepts. But when done sufficiently rigorously, the foundations of memorization make room for higher-level critical thinking and reasoning.
Practice is an oft suggested solution to developing mastery, but I did like how the article framed it: creating subconscious heuristics and memory.