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Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

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Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#321

Post by Eudaimion »

calf wrote: post #263
wokwokwok wrote: post #45

Is there anything substantive here? It’s just a bunch of arbitrary unprovable assertions. Everyone here seems to have, broadly speaking; neither a) the qualifications to knowledgeably comment of the (honestly poorly understood, afaik) function of “creativity” or b) anything more meaningful than “here is my naive personal lived experience and opinion” to contribute on the topic. It’s just armchair psychology. If you w…

It's pseudoscience, author would benefit from reading (and memorizing) the current scientific literature on learning and cognition. There's a bad trend, Hacker News gets this kind of blog-style self-promotion every month that gets much comment attention, but the essays are not well-researched and with made-up assertions written by programmers talking out of their lane ("Engineer's disease") and not having done homewo…

> It's pseudoscience, author would benefit from reading (and memorizing) the current scientific literature on learning and cognition.

How so? Can you share what you have read and that is relevant and applicable in real life?

> There's a bad trend, Hacker News gets this kind of blog-style self-promotion every month that gets much comment attention, but the essays are not well-researched and with made-up assertions written by programmers talking out of their lane ("Engineer's disease") and not having done homework on the subject.

You are on the wrong site, this is not a scientific journal there is no need for scientific rigor in every post and comment.

P.S. The real life world is full of events and things happening if you cannot learn by yourself (create theories models on how the world works aka. pseudoscience apparently) and need academic verification for everything. Then you some kind of disorder :/ good luck

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#322

Post by cableshaft »

> The inspirational lightning bolt writers and artists experience can't happen unless they know how to write or draw.

It absolutely can happen (from my experience), but you might not be able to do anything about it. Like I have new melodies and songs pop into my head fairly often, but I'm not good enough at making music to translate those ideas into finished songs (I have made some songs with FL Studio in the past, so it's not totally impossible, but my focus has been on other things).

I also have ideas for stories fairly often too, and while I could write them, they tend to get backburnered for my game ideas, which I also have.

For me, I have plenty of creative ideas, I just don't have the energy or system built up to help me get those out there in a fast enough manner, and I likely won't ever have that, it would pretty much require other people to handle almost all the rest of the work beyond the inspiration and testing out a few things.

As an example, I've made over 60 prototypes for board game ideas in the past five years alone, but still have only gotten one of those games picked up by a publisher. If I were Reiner Knizia, all 60 of these games probably would have been released, because he's built up an engine around him (people willing to playtest all of his designs enough to be polished, and has enough of a reputation that finding publishers willing to publish most of his designs is super easy), and never has to worry about the look and feel or the manufacturing or even the theme of the game, that will all be handled by the publishers.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#323

Post by jvanderbot »

cableshaft wrote: post #322

> The inspirational lightning bolt writers and artists experience can't happen unless they know how to write or draw. It absolutely can happen (from my experience), but you might not be able to do anything about it. Like I have new melodies and songs pop into my head fairly often, but I'm not good enough at making music to translate those ideas into finished songs (I have made some songs with FL Studio in the past, s…

The spontaneous melody inspiration is probably because you're exposed to music a lot and could easily recompose using those scales, instrument concepts, etc.

And 60 prototypes sounds a lot like practice to me. I wonder if that person you named (who I, a layman have never heard of) made a few games before they got to where they are. All that practice builds up ammunition for creativity.

The consensus I'm seeing reading these comments is that the article is a lot more useful if you replace "memorization" with "deliberate practice". The first implies little deep understanding but lots of practice. The second implies both.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#324

Post by kiba »

Jensson wrote: post #289
kiba wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

> But all knowledge a person have is based on memory No it isn't, tacit knowledge isn't based on remembering something it is based on having made a model that parses something. That is what you want to build, memory itself is mostly redundant compared to those models, as those models lets you easily rediscover information but memory doesn't let you parse problems. Memorizing something implies there is a piece of info…

It's all memories to me whether that's concepts, models, tacit or otherwise. They are all just information stored within our brain.

Otherwise we're arguing semantics.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#325

Post by smcin »

WalterBright wrote: post #182
zharknado wrote: post #132

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…

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…

Zero of the EEs I have known need that (where did yours graduate from?)

The mnemonic to remember V = I * R is as a triangle with V at the top and I, R on the second row, the same way you remember the relation Distance = Speed * Time or Mass = Density * Volume in high school. Or any other triangular multiplicative relation.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#326

Post by jjk166 »

WalterBright wrote: post #280
jjk166 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are questions like max takeoff weight, fuel burn rate, max dive speeds, etc. Stuff a pilot had better know or he's a dead pilot. You don't want a pilot who is creative when it comes to max takeoff weight. Obviously there are good reasons to memorize certain things, creativity just isn't one of them.

You can't be creative if you don't remember the facts. BTW, bombers in WW2 were routinely overloaded on takeoff, at high risk to the crews. If one of the 4 engines wasn't delivering the max power, the result was crashing inside a planeload of fuel and bombs.

Forgoing factor of safety is not creativity.

You most certainly can be creative without remembering the facts.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#327

Post by xanderlewis »

qingcharles wrote: post #5

I 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 have to say, you were naive to ever think that. Rolling a die can produce creativity — and I’m not being facetious.

Creativity, at least in fields traditionally considered to be ‘creative’ like music and visual art, is 90% randomness and 10% retroactively attempting to ascribe meaning to the randomness. And this is coming from someone who hugely values and defines oneself via an ability to be creative.

Also, LLMs haven’t hit ‘escape velocity’; that terminology has spread like a meme (because it’s an attractively dramatic yet easy to understand idea) but isn’t backed up by any science. Maybe one day we’ll have the fabled ‘AGI’, but ChatGPT isn’t it.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#328

Post by unshavedyak »

naasking wrote: post #84
kqr wrote: post #60

I was the sort of person who did not believe in memorisation as a solution for anything. Then I tried getting really good at spaced repetition for a year (yes, it is a skill that needs to be trained for good results) and I've completely changed my mind. Spaced repetition allows me to become proficient even in things I don't get the natural opportunity to practise daily, so that when the day comes and I need them, I h…

You're always memorizing something at some level, even in math where you can derive so much after memorizing some core concepts and deductions.

This is similar to a loose life-thought i've had for a while, though i lack a catchy phrase for it lol.

My thought is: You're always practicing a behavior whether you like it or not.

Your mind is always setting you up to do more of whatever it is you're doing now. Both physical and mental. To do it more efficiently. With more ease. With more frequency. etc.

It's good motivation for me to mitigate a lot of negative behaviors. Angry in traffic, self anger, etc. If i can reason at least, of course. As i'm not interested in doing a lot of things more than i am, so i should avoid doing them now - if possible.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#329

Post by llamaimperative »

kqr wrote: post #93
Llamamoe wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I can agree, as an extremely creative person with extremely bad memory - to a point where I pretty much never memorize anything , whether intentionally or by accident. What I find instead, is that by just processing novel information, especially if I focus on analysing it, my brain internalizes insights and builds model of that type of thing, allowing me to either imperfectly reconstruct what I've seen,…

I would describe myself exactly the same way as you, and I've always been that way (noticed it at first in school where I would take forever to hand in the memorisation half of an exam but finish the analytical half in record time.) I recommend giving spaced repetition a serious go. It doesn't cost much and you might be surprised how far it takes even someone like you. It completely changed how I view the role of mem…

I'm this same way -- very strong semantic memory, astoundingly bad episodic memory. I've been getting into spaced repetition and I was curious if you have ideas on what to memorize via SRS?

I don't really have things in my job or intellectual pursuits that clearly lend themselves to flashcard style memorization, so I've been doing SRS on sort of quasi-useless things to help 1) get in the habit of SRS and 2) build more "scaffolding" in my memory so when I want to SRS useful things it'll be easier.

(By (2) I mean I'm memorizing some historical dates/facts because I found early in using SRS that I'd traverse known facts like a graph, so simply having more known facts would make it easier to add and remember new ones -- most things I'll learn will have a date affiliated with them, so figure anchoring a bunch of dates in my memory won't be totally useless)

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#330

Post by saltcured »

smcin wrote: post #325
WalterBright wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Zero of the EEs I have known need that (where did yours graduate from?) The mnemonic to remember V = I * R is as a triangle with V at the top and I, R on the second row, the same way you remember the relation Distance = Speed * Time or Mass = Density * Volume in high school. Or any other triangular multiplicative relation.

That's odd to me... if I were to visualize any product relationship, it would be a box with edges labeled with two factors and the inside (area) labeled with the product.
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