241–250 of 372 posts
OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.” I reject this idea. The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization. Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to dr…
OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.” I reject this idea. The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization. Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to dr…
I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can use your example of a child learning their first language. They will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to conjugate, and how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest. But it’s all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of it. If that’s the case, we can’t explain it in words.
Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My students would ask things like “what’s the best way to structure this program?” And I would say “I don’t know. Let’s brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try writing it like that. Figure it out in code.” I think you become great at programming by licking all the programs you can find. Same with music and art and languages (go have conversations with native speakers).
There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.
As someone who’s DJ’d at a pretty high level I can tell you this is nonsense.
And to prove the point, here’s a mix I did recently [1] with brand new records that I’d just received in the post and had never played before or even listened to (other than the samples on the online store).
I used to take unlistened records to gigs and play them for the first time, live, in front of a crowd. Simply because I enjoyed the creative process of ‘making it work’.
Creativity for me isn’t “writing down heuristics on best DJ transitions” — I haven’t once considered that. It sounds, to me, to be the exact opposite approach to fostering creativity. Creativity for me comes out of play. It grows over time. It’s feeling and emotion, not memory.
I stopped reading after that. Especially as I am someone with a terrible memory but am also very creative in a number of fields.
OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.” I reject this idea. The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization. Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to dr…
> We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner. I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can use your example of a child learning their first language. They will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to conjugate, and ho…
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>Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions and critiques from mainstream norms No, that's just the art that Western readers notice because that's the only thing they recognize as art in the first place. Calligraphy (in China traditionally considered the most important form of visual art) for example has an astonishing tradition in East Asia, also notably related to the topic of the thread, memorization…
Are you seriously going to hold up calligraphy as an example of extreme Asian creativity? The art of writing letters with subtle flourish? It's literally an art of understatement, and embodies all the characteristics that I stated are reasons east Asians are culturally biased towards being less innovative.
Just because you're loud and brash and write your inventions on your forehead doesn't mean you actually are more innovative or creative than anyone else. I know we've had bad comedians in the West who have made careers out of thinking that being loud equals being funny but you seem to have made an entire worldview out of that idea.
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> You don't want a pilot who is creative when it comes to max takeoff weight. In certain combat situations, or when smuggling coke across South and Central America, you certainly do.
Gravity works just as well if you're in combat or smuggling coke. They don't suddenly give you the ability to takeoff under too much load
Until you get to those, you'd be surprised how far some creativity with weight distribution, getting rid of unneeded cargo or even plane parts, using stuff to your advantage, and a little daring to push the plane to its limits, goes...
Way beyond what the "by the book" pilot who isn't creative can achieve in times of need.
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Are you seriously going to hold up calligraphy as an example of extreme Asian creativity? The art of writing letters with subtle flourish? It's literally an art of understatement, and embodies all the characteristics that I stated are reasons east Asians are culturally biased towards being less innovative.
Yes. Understatement, subtlety and an eye for detail aren't opposites of creativity, it's actually sad that this even needs to be stated. There's no indicator at all that Asian societies are, in any way, biased against being innovative. I recommend reading Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows , it's a fantastic read on the indirect and minimal ways in which Asian societies express creativity and aesthetics. Just…
As for your comments about my taste, it's a good thing taste is entirely subjective, you can think I'm boorish and I can think you're boring and lack vision, and we're both entitled to our opinions.
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The EEs I have known that carried around a card with: V = I * R I = V / R R = V / I because they couldn't remember it were all bad at EE and bad at math. If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are you going to remember the concept? > It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!) I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engin…
> I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer. But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers. When people talk about memorization they talk about remembering the words without understanding the concepts, such a person is no better off than the person carrying around a text note with the concept written down. When you understand these concepts you will…
You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up.
Yes at some point you build up experience so you never really think of it but for it to become intuitive it needs to be learned by rot repetition
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> We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner. I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can use your example of a child learning their first language. They will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to conjugate, and ho…
Yes. Tacit knowledge is hard to teach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer. But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers. When people talk about memorization they talk about remembering the words without understanding the concepts, such a person is no better off than the person carrying around a text note with the concept written down. When you understand these concepts you will…
Without memorizing at first, it is much harder to understand the topic. Memorizing builds fluency, fluency builds proficiency. You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up. Yes at some point you build up experience so you never really think of it but for it to become intuitive it needs to be learned by rot repetition
But I learned Ohms law without learning any formula, or memorizing any picture. I just internalized that electricity are electrons that gets pushed by a force against a resistance, so it is obvious that the amount that gets pushed through is force divided by resistance. I couldn't write down the formula for that, because I don't remember which symbol represents what, but I understand the concept as good as any expert and I never need to look that up because my intuition instantly solves any related problem.
Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized.