Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Praise of Memorization

pearlleff.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 152 posts

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#91

Post by mikkergp »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #30
historia_novae wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything Did you ever learn another language? It's impossible without memorizing a massive amount of things, especially when the writing system is different than the one one is familiar with. In fact the most famous researcher in vocabulary learning (Paul Nation) states in one of his book that rote learning is one of the most efficient use of…

Curious, I've learned English to a nearly native level without memorizing a single word.

I’m curious about your definition of the word memorization here, surely you’re not looking up every word in a multi-lingual dictionary?

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#92

Post by gameswithgabe »

I wonder if there should be a distinction between memorization and intuition. The author alludes to the fact that if you can build an intuition to the fact that daylight savings time was right in the middle of world War 1, then you can remember more easily that it was in 1916.

I have found that I cannot remember certain mathematical properties at all. For instance I always forget whether to use sin or cos to get the x component or y component. But, I had a few teachers force us to memorize the fundamentals: SOH, CAH, TOA. Using the fundamentals allows me to prove to myself very quickly what I should use. It's the same thing with the quadratic formula. I can never remember it, but I had a calculus teacher show us how the equation is derived. I can remember what a parabola is, and I also remember the fundamentals of calculus. Using these two things I can derive the quadratic formula pretty easily.

So I wonder if there's a 2nd metric that we're missing. Where we need to memorize fundamentals, and critically think about how to use those fundamentals. I don't know, this could just be more anecdata though :)

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#93

Post by Qem »

Yoric wrote: post #25
historia_novae wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything Did you ever learn another language? It's impossible without memorizing a massive amount of things, especially when the writing system is different than the one one is familiar with. In fact the most famous researcher in vocabulary learning (Paul Nation) states in one of his book that rote learning is one of the most efficient use of…

I can't speak for the GP, but my personal experience is also that I really dislike memorization. That being said, I speak 5 languages, have written books in two of them, have given public presentation in three and can introduce myself and go and buy bread in a few more. That's in addition to computer languages, of course :) I suspect that the parts of the brain involving in learning by rote and learning a new languag…

I also dislike it. As a small child, I remember hating the boredom of needing to learn by rote the times tables at school. That left my appreciation of mathematics scarred for many years. Only when I was approaching my teens I started to like math again, when presented geometry at school. That makes me think, does this traumatic experience with arithmetic tables right at the beginning is what gives math a bad reputation among lots of students, setting them in a course to hate the subject for life? Sometimes I think it would have been better for society to settle in a number system with a smaller base, say 8 or 6, instead of 10, so the tables got a lot smaller (64 or 36 entries, respectively, instead of 100), giving young students a better experience with aritmethics from the outset.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#94

Post by mikkergp »

hikarudo wrote: post #71
danielbln wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one learn a language without committing it to memory (the meaning of memorizing).

conscious vs unconscious memorization

This seems to focus on the wrong part of the benefit of memorization, I don’t think the method of putting the information in or ‘active’ memorization is what provides the benefit so much so as it is that the information is available for active recall.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#96

Post by somenameforme »

quartesixte wrote: post #15

Disclaimer: Anecdata. I volunteer tutor high school kids in my local community. Particularly math and history. The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization. Recent history curricula and pedagogy in HS has placed an emphasis on “analysis” and “critical thinking.” But the students who struggle all struggle for the same r…

I'd claim (perhaps not even contrary to what you're saying) that memorization and competent analysis/understanding are really two sides of the same coin.

"Here is some long sentence that doesn't really say anything and which you've probably never read in your life before."

You could now probably recite that sentence with near perfect accuracy; at worse changing it in very slight ways that are still functionally identical. That's an absolutely remarkable degree of memorization - one pass for 22 words, 119 characters!? Of course the reason it's easy and natural is because you have an intuitive understanding of what you're memorizing and so one word kind of flows into the next to create the singular whole.

Amateur chess players often find chess masters able to recite their games from memory as evidence of some sort of super-human memory that must be what enabled them to become masters in the first place, but it's completely false. It's the exact same story - when a strong player plays or sees a game, the game tells a story to him not especially different than a very short story. And so people are not recalling random moves or positions from memory but instead the story that those moves and positions tell. A master reciting a game is no more impressive than a "normal" person reciting the plot of a famous short story, let alone one that they wrote!

So for instance I remember from high school memorizing the order of the presidents (yeah... great school...) but finding it relatively easy by instead remembering the logical stories there. For instance instead of just remembering JFK-LBJ-Nixon, etc you remember the story of JFK getting assassinated, LBJ coming to power (and JFK's wife's view of him), then Nixon coming to power and grinding the old axe he had with JFK and scrapping the space program, followed by his VP (Ford) becoming president after Watergate, then losing to good but incapable Carter which led to TV Star Reagan, etc, etc.

I couldn't tell you the order of the presidents at all, unless you give me one and then I can recount the story of how we got from him to where we are now. Because like most of all people I suck at memorization, but also am pretty decent at recalling interesting stories.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#97

Post by tartoran »

omnicognate wrote: post #39
turboponyy wrote: post #5

I've never regarded memorization highly. Whenever we had to learn the times tables or the squares at school, I would just work them out in my head instead of memorizing them. Of course, I still ended up learning the squares and the times tables by heart, but not because I actively memorized them, but because I just used them so much that I couldn't help but remember them eventually. I'm of the opinion that this leads…

I had a similar view as a kid, driven mostly by the fact that I wasn't very good at memorisation. I found that I could get by in maths without it, eg. deriving the quadratic formula by completing the square rather than memorising it. I didn't value memory much as a tool in maths. After having studied maths and physics at university and worked as a programmer in a mathematical field for 20 years (and studied much more…

I’ve had a similar intuition and approach as a kid though in school I had to memorize definitions and formulae, I never fully commited them to memory, instead choosing to derive them on the spot thinking I was practicing a different muscle, understanding. The bad part was building a bad habit of avoiding rote memorization at all costs whict lead to similar limitations later on. Only later on did I understand that it’s all about building good habits that yield great returns over time.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#98

Post by drBonkers »

coffeefirst wrote: post #86
lapinot wrote: post #24

Memorization might be a part of it, but imho the important part is (emphasis mine): > So they ended up reading *reference manuals* and writing down or memorizing the answers to their questions because they couldn't look up information very easily. Good reference manuals are dope and they're so much better than tutorials or FAQ like stackoverflow because they are written to be general, you don't have to generalize you…

Recently I realized that when you had paper documents—books, manuals, libraries, filing systems, whatever—the only way to make them accessible at all was to have organizing principles. Some of these were brilliant. Most people gave all that up because "search." But aside from search being flawed (good luck finding an old Google Doc), when information was actually organized, you might be able to remember where it was.…

any good examples of brilliant accessibility to learn from?

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#99

Post by quartesixte »

queuep wrote: post #66
orzig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anki (or similar). Spaced repetition is the most underrated tool I know of. And I barely use it: 8 cards per day, probably 1.5 minutes total with a noticeable bump in ease of professional life

Ah.. I thought it was more of so you could practice remembering stuff. Like some people remembers what somebody said in a meeting 3 months ago and some don’t even knew we had a meeting about it

You know, funnily enough, as someone who considers themselves to have a good memory, I cannot for the life of me remember most meetings, or most conversations for that matter in any sort of verbatim.

What I do focus on is remembering key details, as well as key emotional responses and postures. I try to take away from any sort of interaction any 1) new details that I find to be important and 2) how they reacted to other bits of information.

This helps me create a sort of holistic picture of a person, which I then take with me to my next interaction with them. I find this ultimately more useful than remembering the actual things said, as for the most part the counterparty does not either. However, their fundamental emotional posture(s) and motivations rarely change that quickly and having that knowledge helps me shape conversation faster and better.

Re: In Praise of Memorization

#100

Post by quartesixte »

somenameforme wrote: post #96
quartesixte wrote: post #15

Disclaimer: Anecdata. I volunteer tutor high school kids in my local community. Particularly math and history. The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization. Recent history curricula and pedagogy in HS has placed an emphasis on “analysis” and “critical thinking.” But the students who struggle all struggle for the same r…

I'd claim (perhaps not even contrary to what you're saying) that memorization and competent analysis/understanding are really two sides of the same coin. "Here is some long sentence that doesn't really say anything and which you've probably never read in your life before." You could now probably recite that sentence with near perfect accuracy; at worse changing it in very slight ways that are still functionally ident…

This is fantastic! And a method I teach to students who I find to be narratively inclined. Works wonders, and is similar to my main method of memorization of historical facts.
Post reply on HN