261–270 of 372 posts
Just because you can put things into boxes does not mean that everything belongs in a box. Whatever essential element you seek to create, whether or not it is concrete or abstract, can simply be put forward as a target of memorisation, without pausing to think about whether you can truly memorise it.
E.g. a heuristic for determining the best heuristic. Simple, just memorise it, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything you “know” is because you have memorized it. It has nothing to do with either effort, or consciousness. Memory is the basis of knowledge.
Which is why the thesis here is boring/less useful. “All colors come from memorization” is also accurate. “All thought comes from memorization”. At that point, you’re factually accurate but saying little of use. If you’re trying to teach creativity, what do you make people memorize? The author even points out: some cultures are great at memorizing and bad at innovation and vice versa. That’s interesting to talk about…
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…
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.
> A DJ can't mashup two songs unless they're familiar with both 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…
and i assumed that they mean "when you were more horrible at the guitar than you are now whose songs did you learn to play on your guitar ?"
and that can be the same with writing as a trick one can write out an other author's work often until there is actual influence on vocabulary and style.
Then you take that and make up new stuff using the that new musical or lyrical style or collective style.
until someone shows up and does something so outside of the paradigm and yet still sublime that a new source of derivation exists.
wash. rinse. wipe hands on pants.
> A DJ can't mashup two songs unless they're familiar with both 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…
As a classical pianist their comment about scales memorization was highly problematic.
"Another strategy that works well in both humor and famous EDM drops is "violating the expectation", but you need to know the expectation before you can violate it. Once you learn music theory, you're able to violate it in ways that resonate."
You absolutely do not need to know anything about music theory to know how to play with expectation of a drop. If you aren't just feeling what the right thing is to do then you're not being creative, you're just following a set of predefined rules, which is likely to be dull.
For me creativity comes about when the brain stops 'actively thinking' - when I enter a flow state and creative things 'just happen' because of that zen like state. I get that when I DJ, play the guitar, play the piano, or even when I write code. It's like the subconscious brain has taken over for a while and is working on instinct.
It's true that you don't get to that state if you haven't practised enough. That's primarily because you don't want to be actively thinking about hitting the right key, finding the right fret, or knowing how something is architected. That active thinking will kill the creative flow, stone dead.
I'd argue creativity isn't memory in that sense, you need (memorised) technique, but it seems far too reductive to say that the creativity that emerges from ones subconscious is only memory -- it's clearly 'something else'.
I've also met plenty of smart people in my life who are creatively bereft!
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…
> If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are you going to remember the concept?
You touch upon the different levels of knowing it. Yes, having to carry a card with the formulas on it shows no knowledge. But, if you have to memorize the formulas, your knowledge is still not adequate. You're just regurgitating a formula that you memorized so you can plug in numbers. You don't understand the "why" of Ohm's law. Of course voltage is equal to current times resistance, it's obvious by what these things are! It should be as self-evident as "Of course distance is equal to speed times time!"
Another example: You can have the Lorentz transformation formulas memorized but still not really understand the "why" of Special Relativity.
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…
Never listen to the grownups, everything they say is a lie.