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Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

shwin.co

161–170 of 372 posts

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#161

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…

> ...experts suck at empathizing with learners...

Or maybe we just don't want to coddle them. When has learning anything been easy, and why do you expect people to be able to acquire new knowledge and skills without putting in the effort? It shouldn't be grueling, not for its own sake, but yeah, you might have to stare at a compiler error for a few hours or even a few days before you figure out what's broken. Truly, how else are you supposed to learn if you don't, eventually, do it yourself?

I'm so sick of this anti-expert, anti-knowledge attitude. It's why we have bootcamp juniors being thrown into otherwise-senior roles, with laughably predictable consequences for the field.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#162
post #10

I 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 sub…

Right. I noticed this acutely in an abstract algebra course. We learned several different proof methods, then the exam was just "prove these theorems with the tools you have". I'd never been challenged with math like that before. I mean, I bombed it lol, but nobody was going to pass if they didn't remember, say, how to do a proof by induction or what it means. At some point, you need to be able to recall this information. Maybe the psychologists categorize these things differently, but I'd argue it's clear that some form of memorization is necessary for the task.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#163

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…

> ...experts suck at empathizing with learners... Or maybe we just don't want to coddle them. When has learning anything been easy, and why do you expect people to be able to acquire new knowledge and skills without putting in the effort? It shouldn't be grueling, not for its own sake, but yeah, you might have to stare at a compiler error for a few hours or even a few days before you figure out what's broken. Truly,…

This attitude seems unrelated to the topic at hand quite frankly. Experts suck at empathizing with learners not because of this spite, but often because it's actually quite difficult to switch gears in language and understanding. It's a completely different way of sharing knowledge, where you have to explicitly express things that are just assumed shared understanding among colleagues.

Also, to answer your questions in a very simple way: the entire reason you even became an expert is because another expert somewhere along the way gave you an easy in to the knowledge, they coddled you. This is why you can "stare at a compiler error for a few hours before figuring out what's broken". Without that expert, you wouldn't even understand what a compiler even is.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#164
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. Also it takes a surprisingly long time for children to learn language. I used to think it sorta-kinda happened over a year or two, but having children myself revealed how wrong I was. I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native to…

> I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand, not merely memorize.

Sometimes those made up words were way more fun than the correct ones.

I could usually see why my little ones combined them that way.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the caveat that I haven't looked in a while, the rot seemed very anglo-specific. Coming over from Germany almost three decades ago, it was amazing how much US text books just didn't cover. There were a few developments in Germany that pointed in the same direction, but there a large gap at the time. Meanwhile, even back then, eastern Europe certainly had even higher standards. (I replaced a lot of math textbooks…

The influence of religious and conservative types has weakened US textbooks. Do a deep dive into how Texas can dictate what is presented in schoolbooks nationwide.

Be careful about reading and comprehending schoolbooks in Texas. Parents don't like to be pressed on most of the content, and are sometimes going to great lengths to get your book banned entirely.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#166

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…

Memorize means "to retain in and quickly recall from memory". Weather that is by synthetic or natural process is irrelevant. From the point of understanding how memory and recall work, yes burning your hand is an act of memorization.

Sure there is a natural repetitive process that leads to base learning like L1 you mention.

On the other hand no one adds or multiples enough in daily life for natural memory formation. Humans consider the skill vital enough that we have developed methods to memorize them. Same for spelling, especially for infrequently used words.

Flashcards used with Spaced repetition isn't cargo cult, it is a well studied, and pretty good method of inducing memory formation.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#167
post #118

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.

But LLMs to date can't really differentiate well between a creative insightful answer, and a nonsensical one. The selection process is still done by a human.

This is true. I hadn't thought about that aspect.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That seems like a much more recent and much smaller phenomenon. The censorship and attempted or succesful modification of school curricula (esp. evolution/biology and sex education) by 'right wing' christian groups goes back many decades across much of the southern US.

>smaller

Didn't some states remove math requirements for highschool graduation?

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#169
Kind of shocking to see so much angst against memorization here.

Memory has been long thought to be a critical component of intelligence, with elaborate mnemonics systems developed by people to help memorize more things (see Francis Yates' The Art of Memory, and to a lesser extent her book on Giordano Bruno).

I would contend that memorizing concepts is a first step in understanding them. Also, that generally understanding concepts isn't a one and done thing, usually there's layers. Personally I found that memorizing things in math helped me immensely when years later I needed to actually understand the things I had memorized.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#170
post #140
post #11

"a flash of inspiration connecting internalized concepts" Well, okay, but rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts. One of the reasons people make fun of the author's approach to creativity is that systematic memorization fundamentally can't teach taste —so the systematic approach reeks of awkward, try-hard, low-brow, tasteless art. More broadly, memorization doesn't help much wit…

> One of the reasons people make fun of the author's approach to creativity is that systematic memorization fundamentally can't teach taste—so the systematic approach reeks of awkward, try-hard, low-brow, tasteless art. Well... can you think of an artist who didn't have a deep knowledge of their art-form before they pushed it forward? Three that jump out for me, in no particular order, are Picasso, Borges and Jack Wh…

Picasso was a hack. People often cite his "early masterpieces", but those pieces are pretty mid in the context of 19th c. painting.
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