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Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

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Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#331

Post by Jensson »

kiba wrote: post #324
Jensson wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

So you call practicing a serve etc memorizing" excercises? That makes you very strange.

> Otherwise we're arguing semantics.

You have the strange definition here, most people don't all sorts of brain updates "memorizing". Memorizing is when you commit something to memory for later retrieval, people do not include all brain updates under this word.

Anyway, then we can agree that committing facts to memory to retrieve them later is not the main way to become more creative. Instead it is better to do other form of brain updates that doesn't involve storing exact information in the brain.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#332

Post by Jensson »

darby_nine wrote: post #320
josephg wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship. It's just not compatible with the educational institutions people actually pay for. > I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. This is not contradictory. If your idea of teaching is just lecturing at people and occasionally verifying specific knowledge, obviously they're not…

> No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship

Apprenticeship is hard, there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice, if it was easy people wouldn't be so picky who they want to teach.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#333

Post by nickburns »

josephg wrote: post #242
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…

> 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…

Love this metaphor. To truly learn we must have a lick for ourselves, pun not intended.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#334

Post by WalterBright »

jjk166 wrote: post #326
WalterBright wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You most certainly can be creative without remembering the facts.

I've seen enough episodes of "Aviation Disasters", each of which dissects a crash or an averted crash, to not buy that.

There was once a 727 that suffered an autopilot failure, which rolled it over into a steep dive. The speed exceeded them max speed, and due to separation the controls could not "bite" into the air. The creative pilot thought he might increase the drag by lowering the landing gear in flight, which is a giant no-no. But he had nothing left to lose, and lowered it. The landing gear doors were ripped off and the gear was bent back, but it slowed the airplane enough that he regained control and saved everyone's life.

I know of another case with an F-80. That was the first US jet fighter, and it had straight wings and a powerful engine. They found out that if you overspeeded the airplane, which was too easy with its engine, it would violently pitch up and tear the wings off.

One day, in the Korean War, an F-80 pilot had a Mig on his tail that he couldn't shake. So he thought, I bet the Mig couldn't follow me in a pitchup, and so he rammed the throttles forward. The F-80 did pitch up, and the wings stayed on, and he shook the Mig.

When he landed, the wings were visibly bent up, and the airplane was scrapped.

I know about this because my dad flew F-80s in combat in the Korean War.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#335

Post by WalterBright »

Jensson wrote: post #294
WalterBright wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formulae. But if you didn't already know them, you didn't have the time to open the book and learn about them.

> The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formula. Yes, you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests. Don't underestimate how far mindless pattern matching can take you, you can get pretty high up in international competitions just by dumb pattern matching and very little broader understanding, tests average students can…

> you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests

Of course. But the issue is can you be a good engineer if you flunk the tests?

> tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level

That's a nope.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#336

Post by WalterBright »

Jensson wrote: post #250
ozim wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up. 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…

Did you simply intuited RC circuit design without anyone teaching it to you? How about the calculus needed to design an opamp circuit? Feedback circuits?

I doubt you could ace the MIT first electronic circuits final without taking the course.

> internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization

Internalizing it is memorizing it.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#337

Post by WalterBright »

Ekaros wrote: post #315
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…

Saddest part is that you only need first one and and then with memorization of most basic algebra you get the others.. Not even need to do it symbolically.

Yup.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#338

Post by WalterBright »

bondarchuk wrote: post #231
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…

Isn't that exactly the result of a focus on memorization instead of understanding (yes yes at some level that also involves memory), though? To a certain type of person memorizing an arbitrary arrangement of 3 symbols is quite difficult but OTOH it's easy to remember that current goes up with voltage and down with resistance.

> it's easy to remember that current goes up with voltage and down with resistance.

It's a linear relationship. An exponential relationship could also go up and down, but is very different from linear.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#339

Post by WalterBright »

redhed wrote: post #234
dingnuts wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer. This is just confirmation bias. Either you're in a field where you must have a degree, so everyone who couldn't pass tests simply never became an engineer (eg EE) and whether or not the test is a good measure is irrelevant because it nonetheless gates your sample OR you're in software engineering and the people who struggled on tests w…

I also failed a lot of tests and I like to think that I am currently a good engineer. Frankly I do not see much overlap between what I was expected to do in school vs. what I do at work besides lab work and projects, which were the things I did do good in.

> I do not see much overlap between what I was expected to do in school vs. what I do at work

Many engineers manage to avoid using any of the tools (such as math) they learned in school and just wing it. You can often get things to work that way, but they'll be inefficient and more expensive.

I remember an EE who was trying to reduce the noise in a circuit. He tried adding random parts for days, with no success. Finally a real engineer looked at it, did a calculation, stuck the right capacitor in and solved it.

Re: Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

#340

Post by WalterBright »

not_alexb wrote: post #283
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…

My high school had majors and one of them was effectively EE; the 14/15 year olds in my major had those formulas down inside of 3 weeks... what EEs did you know that couldn't outperform teenagers? ...I mean, I didn't even go to that great of a college and no one would have made it past the second year of EE without memorizing 10x more formulas than that. I'm just completely lost on how it's even possible to have an E…

> I'm just completely lost on how it's even possible to have an EE degree and needing a card

Amazing, isn't it? The word "cheating" comes to mind.

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