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 drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself.
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.
It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1. They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.” They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body. Mostly subconsciously.
Yes, there are specific areas where drilling can help us accelerate or catch up. Many kids seem to need explicit phonetics instruction in order to make the leap to reading words. Phonological speech interventions are often drill-like. Practicing musical scales does make you more fluent in improvisation. Drilling the mechanics of a repertoire piece frees your mind to focus on higher-order expression and interpretation. They’re valuable, they have a place.
But this is just a small slice of learning. It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!), which to me is the crux of the issue.
If I had to reformulate OP’s argument to something I can get behind, it would be more about deliberate practice or “putting in the reps.” This is also often boring, and differentiates highly successful people from average performers. But it’s a broader and more purposeful set of activities than “memorization” would imply.
> 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 how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest. But it’s all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of it. If that’s the case, we can’t explain it in words.
Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My students would ask things like “what’s the best way to structure this program?” And I would say “I don’t know. Let’s brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try writing it like that. Figure it out in code.” I think you become great at programming by licking all the programs you can find. Same with music and art and languages (go have conversations with native speakers).
There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.
> There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.
There's being taught and then there's exploring and practice. It's the exploring and practice that is often missing today, IMO because we all want everything to happen so quickly.
In my sport of choice, jiujitsu, there's been a shift happening in teaching. Traditionally the teacher would show a move or two then have the class drill the move. The shift now is more conceptual where the teacher might say the goal is get chest to chest and then have the students operate at 20% figuring it out on their own. While there are some pretty vocal camps on both sides, I think having both methods is the best to learn from. Being taught a solution to a problem a student discovered on their own during discovery is when learning really takes hold IMO.
Finally, the best way to really learn that I have found is to teach something.
I appreciate the martial arts context. I share it, albeit in a different art. For our part, we spend varying amounts of time talking about concept/principle pieces of the puzzle, and demoing/drilling very specific techniques. We need (we think) both.
Over time, the regular drilling makes recognition of context a great deal faster, and the conceptual pieces make improv at that point start to look creative or magical, but it's not - it's just all that drilling, and familiarity, and interconnected understanding in gestalt that enables "creativity".
> 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 going to learn very much. Your job as a teacher is to facilitate a growth curve of increasingly more difficult and unwieldy problems to solve.
> Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
This is such a weird and amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing it! I don't know if I've ever heard this concept explained in quite this way before.
> [H]ow would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
Actually, I don't agree with that. If I look around the room I'm in now, there are a LOT of different objects, and I can imagine what they'd feel like on my tongue, even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects. To give a couple of examples: a partly used candle, the "lighting" side of a matchbox, guitar strings, lightbulbs, new bike inner tube. The reason I can imagine how they would feel, despite never having actually licked them, is that in our early years we're just exploring the world and building a mental model. We stop licking everything quite early when we figure out the class of things that's generally food, but by that point we've learned how to correlate the sense of feelings we get from our tongue with the sense of feelings we get from our fingers, because we also touch all those items a lot with our fingers. With enough examples, we become pretty good at pattern matching across senses, so e.g. I can look at an object, from the shadows see that it's bumpy, and have a pretty good idea what it'd feel like if I rubbed it with my fingertips or even licked it, or if it's glass, plastic, metal, fabric, I'd know it'd produce different feelings ranging from differences in friction, thermal conductivity, etc.
That's quite a lot of text, but the TLDR is that we don't need to lick everything to have a pretty good idea of how it'd feel on the tongue, just enough to have a general idea of the properties of different classes of materials. Given that most babies stop licking/chewing everything before they've reached nursery age, it's clear that for objects we encounter in later life it's not the licking per-se that matters for this "skill", but whether we've learned to associate the senses.
I guess taste is a bit different, but my default would just be to assume that most objects are tasteless unless they also have an odour.
> even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects
Are you sure you never licked those materials as a child?
I'm not sure when my earliest memories date from any more — some of what I thought were memories turned out to be dreams of things that never happened, others have mutated with each re-recollection — but one thing I can be sure of is that I don't remember any of the "stick random things in mouth" stage of my life.
When I look around my room, I find there are indeed things I cannot imagine what it would be like to lick them, but they're all made of materials I didn't have access to as a kid: soft touch rubber.
You're right that there's a problem with recollection. I can't remember going through such a phase either, but I know I did because there are photos of me as a baby sticking things in my mouth (although in the photos these are things designed for babies, like plastic cubes big enough to not be swallowed, but small enough to be easily handled by a kid, etc). In fact, I had no idea of the ages involved, so I searched online and found that most babies start this phase around 6 months and usually stop by 12 months, although some kids continue on until 3 or 4 years old.
But yeah, materials like the rubber in my inner tube... I'm pretty sure my parents wouldn't have allowed such stuff near me as a baby, likewise I wouldn't have been allowed near boxes of matches etc. I also can't imagine I'd ever have decided as an older child that I should try licking a bike tube or the striking surface of a matchbox. And so, I'm about as confident as I can be that I'd never have licked an inner tube in my life, but I can make a good guess from feeling it with my fingers what it'd likely feel like on my tongue.
There's very little where I'd go as far as to say "I cannot imagine what it'd be like", except maybe for things that would involve a chemical reaction, and where I might have some idea from extrapolation with foods - e.g. fizzing, an exothermic reaction, etc., but wouldn't necessarily be able to guess from looking or feeling with my fingers what the result might be. Most of the interesting ones are turned into food anyway, e.g. sherbert dip or sour sweets.
I definitely have had some surprises in later life - I remember first having ox-tongue when I was in my 20s and finding the texture quite uncomfortable, and since high single-digit ages, I've never been able to correlate the texture of liver with something that's edible.
I guess another example is with unfamiliar "exotic" fruits - there are some that would surprise everyone with their taste, but you can guess most of the texture characteristics of a fruit just by looking at it and cutting it into pieces, and you might be able to have a guess at taste from its smell.
Not really. Their point was that you need to lick a lot of objects. My point is that it doesn't need to be a lot, just enough to be able to form generalisations based on other observable characteristics. It's about the degree of "a lot".
I’m learning piano at the moment, and it is taking me a lot of playing to build up those generalisations you’re talking about. I’ve only been at it for 2 years at this point and I still feel like a beginner.
How much programming do you need to do to build an intuitive sense of all the programs? I’ve been programming for 30 years and I’d say I started to have a usable intuition around 10 years in.
I’m not sure what “a lot” means to you, but a decade of practice seems like a lot to me. It’s a lot more effort than most people are willing to invest in their hobbies and, in many cases, their careers.
I don't think they were being serious about licking. After all, you cannot "lick" a computer program.
And I actually disagree with you. My son went through a period where he put nearly everything in his mouth, bugs, bottle caps, spices, food, phones, credit cards, toys, rocks. Pretty sure we all did that at some point.
I quite liked your licking metaphor/symbolism. In fact, if I find out that something tastes good after licking it, I'll go even further. I swallow it. Ha ha.
My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts.
How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore.
So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on.
Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?
Kinesthetic learners know exactly what you are talking about. Others may have no clue. Just a moment ago I identified which pill bottle I needed to open by shaking it. The sound prompted an image of the pill shape and density. This interconnectedness of sign systems and our human ability to read them can truly emerge in brilliant every day ways. I agree nothing replaces experience, especially for kinesthetic learners.
Right. And, I think, real expertise in any subject is choc full of tacit knowledge. Even - and especially - in areas where we have good symbolic representations. (Like music, math, programming and languages.)
The problem with English is I don't actually know the rules. Something just feels "off" sometimes when someone makes grammatical mistakes.
I doubt I will ever gain this feeling (for lack of a better word) with another language. I mean how could I? Everything sounds weird and "off" when you're a beginner, right? For example: el bano, el agua, la naranja, la sillas. You're constantly suppressing warning signs flashing in your head.
For example, I remember being forced to memorize the multiplication tables. I doubt we do that in schools anymore. I feel like all that time could have been better spent learning something else.
I think this is a function of hours of practice. I remember the point when I started hearing the silent "h" in Spanish and also when I stopped understanding what native speakers were saying after 3 months because I'd progressed beyond the level where they felt they had to slow their speech down for me. Lots of plateaus in the learning curve.
All those really learning a foreign language get to the point, where they "chug it" and jump into the deep end, surrounding themselves with native speakers and going to that learning by context mode. Its the toughest phase, but works.
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 engineer.
BTW, one of the tests fighter pilots go through is they are blindfolded, and then have to put their hand on each control the instructor calls out.
I also have some written tests for certifying pilots. 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.
Not to mention that in combat, you need to understand the limitations not only of your own plane but also of both the allied and enemy planes in your airspace.
But you don't want CIVILIAN pilots to get too creative, though. Running out of runway with a 747 is no joke.
The max takeoff weight in the book isn't the actual maximum. It's the "certified" maximum. Anything beyond that may cause structural issues during takeoff, but probably won't be that big of a problem until you land. You'll need to be especially creative on getting very low on fuel, so you don't crash through your landing gear.
Until you get to those, you'd be surprised how far some creativity with weight distribution, getting rid of unneeded cargo or even plane parts, using stuff to your advantage, and a little daring to push the plane to its limits, goes...
Way beyond what the "by the book" pilot who isn't creative can achieve in times of need.
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.
> 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.
Both are examples of going way off the reservation of known emergency procedures. First, knowing enough to override the fact that lowering the gear at such speeds can be catastrophic, the second knowing the fact that the pitchup is a violent maneuver and how to induce it.
> I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer.
But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers. When people talk about memorization they talk about remembering the words without understanding the concepts, such a person is no better off than the person carrying around a text note with the concept written down.
When you understand these concepts you will remember those formulas, but memorizing the formula doesn't make you understand it. Therefore creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, there is something else there.
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 pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level compared to that.
But of course such an engineer can be useful to solve constrained problems, but I wouldn't call them good since they don't really connect to the larger picture so they need a lot of oversight.
The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things. You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board.
The ability to memorize opening moves may lead you into a stronger mid game, but it's not creativity. Creativity is searching for patterns where they can mate in three, or spotting positions where the bishop can attack two pieces at once in two moves.
> The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things
No it doesn't, understanding a concept doesn't come from memorizing N facts, if it did we could easily make everyone understand math in school but we can't.
Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula.
> You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board.
That is just a theory, there is little behind that. Much more likely you become a chess master by training a board state evaluator in your hand that is really good at evaluating board states, not by memorizing lots of board states. Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it.
That board state evaluator allows you to also remember board states easily, but you don't build that by memorizing board state patterns.
Memorizing is clearly a necessary, but not sufficient part of learning. If you are to become an expert in any subject whatsoever, from math to football fandom, you will need to develop an ability for remembering huge amounts of raw facts. One of the first hurdles in a math education is memorizing the multiplication tables. In biology or medicine you have to learn literally hundreds of systems that happen to exist in a certain way, and from all of the raw facts, could very well be a different way.
> Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula.
Sure, you can wing it at a primary or high school level if your teachers are impressed by your understanding. But you will never become a math expert if you don't remember the specific formulae, and many other more complex things. Even if you are fully able to deduce the theorems from scratch, you won't be able to function if you have to invent and then prove every single theorem you want to use.
> Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it.
No, it is precisely the other way around. DeepBlue is deducing how good a board state is by trying to calculate all possible follow-up moves up to a depth of 13 or something. In contrast, AlphaGo has memorized patterns occuring in billions of games (in a lossy archive format, of course) and basically can recall games that are close enough to the current game and what you need to do to win from the current position. And this is exactly how chess masters mostly work as well, to the extent that it has been studied, and based on their own reporting. They just recognize positions or certain aspects of a position, and can recall how the game works from that position.
> 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 the formula for that, because I don't remember which symbol represents what, but I understand the concept as good as any expert and I never need to look that up because my intuition instantly solves any related problem.
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 how many objects you memorized.
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 how many objects you memorized.
If you mean by rote learning and just remembering information in an arbitrary manner, then that's memorization. I doubt that such a person have even acquired the knowledge, except maybe for the simplest case such as multiplication tables.
I know how multiplication works actually, but I never used them. Instead I go for the memorized answer.
But all knowledge a person have is based on memory. How you acquire it is up to you, preferably in the most efficient way possible so that we actually retain the information and don't have to "study" as often.
> 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 information you can later recall. If there is nothing to recall such as with tacit skills then you don't learn it by memorizing, you learn it by practice and thinking and theorizing until it "clicks".
A computer can remember everything trivially, but it hasn't built any models based on the information so all that information is useful. The same happens in our head, the value isn't in the memory it is in the structures you built as an answer to that memory. The memory itself is a red herring, don't chase it, chase the understanding.
So for example, I have made a model in my head that parses electronic circuit problems for me, with that I don't need any formulas as it does the work. There is no memory tied to that model, it just solves things, there is nothing to recall, nothing to write down etc, it isn't a piece of information it is an active skill I have built. Saying otherwise is like saying that you memorize how to move your arm, no that is you building up intuition and reflexes, that isn't what we call memorizing.
You can call that a pattern matcher, you can't recall one of your heads pattern matchers. Pattern matchers can be tied to recall, but pattern matchers can also solve problems for you by themselves without ever invoking any memory. Pattern matchers are much more powerful than memories since they can solve a whole slew of similar problems while memories just solves one thing, so there is no need to go memory -> pattern matcher, you can go instantly to pattern matcher without ever commiting anything to memory.
> 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.
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
> 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 work beside you, but they don't tell you about their past performance on tests because you have a chip on your shoulder and they don't want you to look down on them.
I failed a lot of tests in college and now I'm a great software engineer.
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.
Some times the brain is wired to intuit the concept. That's something that fascinates me. You grasp the idea before any articulate explanation. Somebody shows you a problem and rapidly you start discussing solutions with the other person and even go further.
Most of the time memorization is a key role for creativity, the easier you can jump between ideas the more combinations you can explore (seems like the brain is constrained by some cache bottleneck in a way).
> If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are you going to remember the concept?
This is not mere memorization. The GP's point that not everything that makes you remember this is simply "memorization", and certainly all of those things contribute differently to creativity.
> I also have some written tests for certifying pilots.
Yes, piloting is one of the tasks where you absolutely need lots of random information memorized. You should also not do a lot of "creativity" in it.
A lot of pilots have saved their lives by being creative when the checklist solution didn't work. They were successful being creative because they knew the airplane's systems inside and out.
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.
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.
This is different memories? the one for the formula and the one for the concept. So you can remember the meaning of the word but don't remember how to write it. So can reproduce the formula from your deep understanding, but it is quicker to check it out instead of apply the first principle every time.
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.
> 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?
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.
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 EE degree and needing a card. Signal processing classes required math 100x more difficult than that. I had to know quaternions by my second dsp class.
I'm pretty skeptical that cheating to that level is plausible. Ohm's law is so fundamental that finishing an EE degree without knowing it would be akin to writing a paper on Gravity's Rainbow without knowing the basic rules of grammar.
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.
I’d say that’s the definition of “remember” rather than “memorize.”
To most people I’d wager “memorize” has a strong connotation for the synthetic version only, with an emphasis on a stripping-out of context.
I recognize that stripping away context can be valuable—-drilling a tennis serve over and over outside the real-time context of a game is extremely helpful.
Flashcards are rarely valuable in the same way. For semantically oriented tasks, an impoverished context is usually not very helpful. Receptive skills like letter and character recognition might be an exception. But even then you’ve got to make the leap to reading at some point.
> no one adds or multiplies enough in daily life for natural memory formation
To the contrary, there’s a fascinating study of children in South America who had very fluent mental math skills for making change because they sold fruit on the side of the road. They couldn’t solve the exact same problem in story problem format in a classroom, though. Synthetic contexts usually don’t transfer well to real life.
By far the best way to learn arithmetic facts is to ‘naturally’ use them in service of solving more interesting or relevant problems. Someone who spends the same amount of time doing nontrivial word problems, pattern-discovery projects, playing a game or solving a puzzle involving embedded arithmetic, or just talking about numbers in a group will come out vastly better prepared both for recalling or figuring out arithmetic solutions per se and for mathematical fluency in general than someone who does narrow practice drills. Arithmetic drills are not only a total motivation killer for most people, but also just suck at aiding retention. Time spent on arithmetic drills in school is somewhere between a waste of time and an actively harmful punishment.
> 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.
I think in common usage the word "memorize" very strongly implies that it's the lossless storage and retrieval of some highly specified sequence of information. No amount of studying American Civil War history would be referred to as "memorizing the Gettysburg Address" unless you could recite the speech word for word.
> 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.
Isn't that kind of the point for the other side?
Nobody memorizes the answer to 212+457. There are no flash cards for every possible addition up to infinity.
In my experience, the more people think that math is something to memorize, the worse they are at math.
Kumon students will be able to get 669 faster than the average non-Kumon student simply due to a large amount of practice though. Students don't memorizate of all the possible combinations, but imo that practice helps tune the mind to be sharp in that particular direction. very useful in some jobs.
it is to be noted that math isn't numeracy though. I have dyscalclia which hurt me with numbers but at the college level there are fewer numbers and more conceptual thinking. ended up with a math minor, though that's due to the CS degree requiring so many classes.
>OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.”
They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?
>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
It still is a kind of memorization, just not a voluntary one. And such learning is still is a very important function of mental development and evolutionary fitness, that shouldn't just be shunned "because trauma".
>Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself
Well, I see your cargo cult and I raise you tried-and-true.
"Absorbing the concept itself" might take more effort (including personal, for logistical reasons, not everything can be tailored to the individual learner, who might not even care enough for learning compared to all kinds of diversions, and have zero passion for the subjects, even if a clone with the teaching skills of Feynman with the presentation skills of Tonny Robbins, and the passionate conviction of Jean D' Arc was to present it to them.
But absorbing the concept is not enough, there needs to be instant recall, or at least fast enough recall) of all kinds of facts and factoids and tables, and also this "absorbing" also needs to encompass boring concepts, that are nonetheless crucial, if one is to be succesful in anything technical or scientific, or generally creative in any sort of organized way that combines concepts and information (not just Jackson Pollocking away).
To memorize means to commit to memory. It is an action. But memories are created by not just actions, but experiences. Experiences can create memories without you having committed them; without you having memorized anything.
Mental notes are a pretty commonly known concept; not that I'm claiming everyone can make them easily, or at all, but they don't typically require focused studying. I'd consider them an example of committing something to memory intentionally. Sure, studying is another way of committing things to memory. You can read something repeatedly and completely ignore it just as much as you can read something repeatedly with the intention of remembering it. You can also make mental remarks without them becoming mental notes. But it is certainly possible to create a memory on purpose. It's just that studying an entire subject requires you to train your understanding quite a bit in order to build a good memory of it, as opposed to memorizing a single simple idea or lesson that you already intuitively understand.
Please teach me to this magical "commit to memory" skill. Up till now memorizing has always been a side effect of some other process like studying for me. I would love to be able to skip all of that.
You can't create a memory of something you don't already have in your head. Studying puts stuff into your head for you to remember. Memory usually comes naturally after that happens, but it usually cannot come before, unless you happen to have perfect recall and memorize the image of whatever you are reading.
A good example of committing something to memory on demand is making a mental note. I don't know if everyone has this ability, but it's a pretty commonly known concept. You don't have to study the subject of the note in order to remember it; it's often something simple like "do this tomorrow" that you already understand, so it's easy to memorize.
They actually are, thou. Small kids are repeated the same things over and over, hundreds of times. They watch the same Bluey episodes dozens of times, get them read the same books dozens of times, listen to the same songs dozens of times.
> It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
Those are not opposite activities. Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak; and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.
Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers learn them by repetition. You can't be serious advocating "just go read stuff" as a way to learn a language. Some foundation, acquired by explicit learning, is required to even start reading.
> Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.
That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what's going around him (including language) at least 16 hours per day, every day. An adult has much less time for that.
> Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak
This isn't actually a settled matter. I did a literature dive a while back and found that drilling vocabulary flashcards shows the highest benefit on artificial recall tasks (like multiple choice tests), and over relatively short time scales (days to weeks). Studies that looked at longer time scales (months to years) and more organic tasks generally showed mixed results. Which I generally interpret as a sign that the literature in question is highly susceptible to the file drawer effect.
And that in turn suggests that the magnitude of flashcarding's value for this kind of thing has a lot to do with your goals. In a nutshell, are you more interested on the science on how to develop communicative proficiency over the long run, or are you more interested on the science on how to get a good grade in class?
I'm studying Chinese right now, and I do use flashcards, but it's not because I believe it's the best way, per se. It's because it's a convenient option for reviewing characters and words that don't appear often in the reading material I have. When they do appear often in my reading material, I find (anecdotally) that it takes a lot fewer organic repetitions to get the character or word to stick in my head than it does with flashcard repetitions.
It's also worth mentioning there's no particular reason to assume Chinese and Japanese schools are any less likely than schools elsewhere in the world to cling to inefficient pedagogical techniques out of a sense of tradition. So one can't necessarily assume that the way they are doing it is the way they ought to be doing it.
> 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 tongue. My oldest rarely contributes individual words to this dictionary anymore, but he still improvises expressions and idioms.
An anecdote I once heard provided in support of this point in a lecture: there are aspects of Spanish grammar that native speakers typically don't grasp until their teenage years.
I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure selection bias.
The one thing children can learn that adults generally cannot is native pronounciation. If that is included in language proficiency, then adults take an infinite amount of time to learn!
True, but I really dislike the amount of focus people put on that. With the right techniques, it's not particularly difficult for an adult to develop decently good pronunciation that allows them to be comfortably understood. And placing the bar for having learned a language to a high level of proficiency at "able to hide evidence of where they were born from native speakers" smacks of internalized xenophobia.
I also read in a second language acquisition textbook a while back (so, decent chance of being out of date, also decent chance of my memory of what I read being less-than-perfect) that the strongest predictor of how native-like an accent someone develops isn't actually the age at which they started learning the language, it's the lag between when they started learning it and when they started socially integrating into a community of native speakers. And it happens to be the case that, for all sorts of practical reasons, there's a strong correlation between this lag period and age. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to the critical period hypothesis - there is - but when we're talking about children it's difficult-to-impossible to root out selection bias effectively enough to permit even a convincing stab at partial identification of causal effects. Which creates a risky situation for the purposes of drawing firm conclusions, because our prejudices love to helpfully answer the questions that science won't.
In grad school I had a social science textbook that dubbed these kind of questions "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions" in the first chapter, and in subsequent chapters simply described them as "FUQ'd".
> 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.
Understanding coming from years of exposure leading to memorizing the whole low hanging words of a language and their meaning.
They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they also remember the word sounds attached to the associated concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those words as well). All the while commiting to memory all kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name and the ABC.
Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a generalized concept -- then again nobody said understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective in being able to use and think with not just the concepts but also the relevant facts related to them).
> and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.
Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write.
> You can’t be serious advocating “just go read stuff”
True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it.
> even native speakers learn them by repetition
No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger.
> life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult
True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating.
> An adult has much less time for that
I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies.
There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.
Vocabulary flashcards are not all that efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak. They teach you translation rather then meaning directly, you don't get context or the "context" is super repetitive sentence and so on.
And plus, general recommendation is to learn words elsewhere and just put them into anki to not forget.
Some people like it, but it is not the only or the most recommended way to learn speak and write.
> Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers learn them by repetition.
I've tried this for years with Japanese kanji and never really got very far. Just didn't work well, they largely were just a big blob of lines.
Then I found an Android app (Kanji Study) that mixes this in with informational screens that break down kanji into radicals and puts them alongside a bunch of multi-kanji words and uses them in sentences so we can see them in context, and it's actually been working.
Learning to read Chinese is done by learning to write Chinese. The strict (but structured) stroke order while writing becomes part of muscle memory, and in turn, becomes a kind of kinesthetic mnemonic device while reading.
The app I mentioned has that too, but stepping back and giving context helps me more.
For example, 語 being composed of 言, 五, and 口 reduces it down to 3 things instead of 14 strokes. This is an easy one since the parts are distinct, but plenty aren't nearly as obvious, like the left side of 教
You are changing the definition of memory we have had for like 25 centuries in the West. That is your choice but there is no stretching on the other side.
> 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.
I reject you rejection. You need to provide a reason something learned via pain is fundamentally different from something learned without pain. We used to beat school children for not learning their lesson.
Drilling vocabulary flashcards is very helpful in learning a language. As is reading, listening, or talking to someone. To learn a language well, you need to do both. Although children ultimately reach the level of being a native speaker, they do not do this very quickly considering that they say their first words when they are about 1 year old.
haha, no man, the "creativity" cargo cult should be entirely ignored. You shouldn't even consider what mechanistic formula they've invented. If you do you might buy into it and your creativity will be less your own.
Never listen to the grownups, everything they say is a lie.
I am not commenting on or agreeing with the OP, but your response is false. LLMs aren't given just a dictionary, and they do not know how to speak. Speech implies grasp of semantics. There is zero semantics in a block of text, only, according to some interpretation, various textual correlations.
> It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
You need the 'flashcards' before you can read, listen or talk. Go try reading a book where you don't know most of the words. Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first. Try reading a text where you haven't learned the writing system.
> Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.
Because they can't read.
> They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.”
Obviously you aren't a parent. You think a child magically decides one day to say mama? Or do you think it's the mother constantly saying 'mama' to the child until the child 'remembers it' and repeats it?
> They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body.
What? Complex statistical inferences about the world?
> Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first.
I've a toddler who can read 3 paragraphs of 3 sentences each, and then tell you the details of the story he read[1]. He is 4y6m, right now. He has never learned the alphabet or the names of the letters (A,B, C, D, etc). He has only learned the sounds a letter or sequence of letters make for certain patterns.
You most definitely do not need to memorise the alphabet in order to learn to read!
Teaching children the alphabet before teaching them reading makes it a lot harder for them to learn actual reading.
[1] I've seen kids as old as 7 get confused by a book with no pictures, and he sails right on through because I taught him to read (using the DISTAR alphabet), and made sure none of our daily lessons had even a single picture in it.
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.
Perhaps I worded it too emotionally. I mean that experts struggle to remember what it was like before they understood something. It’s very common for experts to ask novices to make leaps that they aren’t capable of making, because they seem natural or obvious from an expert POV.
I’m all for hard work; learning is usually very hard work. I also think we need expert guidance.
But let’s make the difficulty useful/effective rather than counterproductive.
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.
"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 with any sort of tacit knowledge, not just taste. I just figure taste is especially important in creative endeavors. That's definitely the case for programming! Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
For what it's worth, I do think that it is useful and important to have a good mental model of what expertise is and how you can develop it. Memorization might be a component of this, but it's going to be a small component at most. I expect that realistic practice with fast feedback and expert mentorship matters far more. (If you're curious, I found the book Sources of Power by Gary Klein gave me a good way to think about how expertise works.)
At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time and it's frightfully dull. For me, at least, trying to memorize something without context is not just ineffective but also totally kills any intrinsic motivation I have for whatever I'm learning. Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but I've found that to be relatively rare. Otherwise, my time is generally better spent on some sort of practice in context.
One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization.
I understand the connotation of "memorization" evokes an image of blindly memorizing without connecting, but isn't the tastefully developed expertise just memorization of a better heuristic?
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, or to come up with an infinite array of permutations, extrapolations, etc which is where the real ideas come from.
Further, ideas crucially revolve not around just the information itself, but the "feel" for what role they play in the whole, how well they do it, in what way they're notable, etc.
In fact I'd straight up claim that memorization is antithetical to creativity - a perfect ML autoencoder or GAN would just regurgitate the training data. Creativity comes from generalisation while memorisation is analogous to overfitting.
A million times this.. I also am extremely creative and in fact I think the MOST creative people are really bad at intentional memoration, but are good at seeing patterns.
I feel like often the reason a creative person is hyper creative is they haven't memorized things so they are trying to rebuild information all the time in their heads from very sparse details.
This creates the transformative and relational combinations of information that a person memorizing can't see because it is created from a lack of organized specific information rather than a bounty of it.
I think we have a problem of semantics here. Your notion of "the brain internalizes insights" is very close to what the author means as memorizing patterns. They even gäbe a few examples where they started with rote memorizations, which were not that useful at first, but eventually a pattern, an insight if you will, emerged.
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 memorisation in analytical work.
Strictly speaking, someone like you does not need to memorise things because you can always derive them from more fundamental principles. But being able to do that, while a blessing, is also a crutch.
Reasoning from first principles every time is slow compared to pulling out the right relationship for the problem at hand right away.
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)
I forgot to reply to this and don't want to write a long answer now in case you won't see it. If you're still interested, shoot an email to hn@xkqr.org and I'll give more details. Sorry for taking so long!
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. “Try-hards use spreadsheets to be funnier” is…sad?
"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"
I feel like every reply making a point against memorisation would benefit from having their definition of what is memorization, because every single one of those replies sound like they're still implicitly describing some sort of memorization as the better way
I feel like this is about the difference between rote/explicit memorization and organic/implicit/tacit memorization, for a lack of better words. I suspect the former could narrow/restrict your understanding because it may be constrained/limited by the vocabulary/definition itself.
I think perhaps there's a confusion of "memorization" with "rote memorization". The word "rote" connotes flashcards and dull drills, but memorization by itself, to me at least, is more like "a focused attempt at internalizing information", in whatever way that means to a person, as opposed to just ingesting it or letting it wash over you/osmosis.
But that's just my interpretation of the terms. I don't know what the "official" meanings are.
What do you call it when you remember things so you can repeat them but you can't generalize? E.g. if you learn a poem or phrase in a foreign language, but can't reuse the words in different contexts? Or being able to recite a rule, but not automatically applying it?
Is there a word for this?
Similarly, we should have a word for knowing how to reuse something in a different context, but not recall its origin or its canonical portrayal. Being able to apply a rule, without being able to recite it.
Do you think there's one word which means both of these things, which are opposites, as I've stated them?
> What do you call it when you remember things so you can repeat them but you can't generalize? E.g. if you learn a poem or phrase in a foreign language, but can't reuse the words in different contexts? Or being able to recite a rule, but not automatically applying it?
And "rote memorization" is a compound term that means what you were asking for. It's one of those things you can't get the exact meaning of by just looking at the components.
Transferring skills from one context to another is surprisingly hard to do, but not impossible. AFAIK, contexts must be similar to each other for transfer to take place.
I think I would call it internalization instead of memorization. People memorize equations not knowing what the variables are, others internalize the concepts of what is trying to be calculated.
If I cannot recall the information or even that I've come across it unprompted, is it really? Because that's my norm, and I still retain insights from that, that are then applicable across topics.
That's true if you broaden the definition of "memorization" to cover all learning, but "learning is necessary for creativity" would not be a particularly interesting thesis.
Expertise is the result of learning from past experience, both in developing an internal intuition for what you're doing and in having past patterns to draw upon. To the extent that experts have simple easily verbalizable heuristics, these are largely post-hoc attempts at explaining their intuition rather than an accurate reflection of how they make decisions.
And, in fact, experts can't even always do that: it is perfectly possible for experts to make good decisions without being consciously aware of why they are making them, and explaining how to make good decisions is a separate skill from being able to make them in the first place. The book I mentioned has a memorable story about a firefighter who thought he had precognition after pulling his team out of a dangerous situation without any specific indicator of the danger, but I figure a more common example is experts saying they did something because it was the "obvious" or "clean" or "better" way to do it and getting a bit flustered when pushed further.
We can see this in action pretty clearly if we look at advice for, say, writing. There is a lot of advice from good writers but just memorizing and blindly following this advice is actively counterproductive. Advice you can memorize fundamentally must lack nuance and context. We can see this clearly because so many different pieces of writing advice contradict each other and because good writers do not follow any of those suggestions with any consistency.
The same definitely applies to programming, which is why we have both "don't repeat yourself" and "you ain't going to need it", and why new programmers trying to apply either rule (or both!) to a codebase inevitably create a mess. What I've found with programming advice is that most suggestions are either actively wrong or too vague to be useful. (By the time you've learned enough about programming to be able to follow the vague advice, you don't need it very much!)
This happened about 20 years ago when they were trying to automate recognizing cancer cells. They showed photos to experienced diagnosticians and asked 'What features do you look for?' They couldn't articulate what they were seeing.
Why are you attached to the word "memorization" here? Certainly taste comes from experience and learning. Maybe you could argue that all learning is an oblique and imperfect form of memorization—but why argue that at all?
The only reason I can see is if you think memorization could be a shortcut to good taste, which it can't. Acquiring good taste requires broad experience—more information than you can possibly remember—such that you retain a suite of sophisticated intuitions. Cutting that information down to something that can be memorized would require you to (1) already have the intuitions you're seeking to acquire, and (2) be able to express them all in plain English, which, as far as I know, cannot be done. No painter has ever expressed their aesthetic in such a way that a student could memorize that expression and then have the same creative sensibilities as the original painter.
Ultimately, there's no substitute for the process of simply consuming lots of art while paying close attention to what you like about it.
>One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization.
seems to me there is a relatively big inductive gap there, you believe that there is an internalized heuristic and at its core is memorization, you may even have some evidence that this internalized heuristic has strongly informed your development of taste, but it is pretty difficult to make an argument that is the case for all people.
Aside from that I would say that "internalized heuristic with memorization as the core" puts everything on nurture and no input of nature - which I am pretty much in the camp of combinations of nature and nurture creating the person - of which taste must surely be a big component.
not the parent poster but I think I agree with your perspective here. The alternative is that some individuals' taste or sense of aesthetics is somehow innate and unmoored from the statistics of the things they experience. There may be something to this, but for most practical purposes I would agree with your point.
Another alternative is that taste is something you can only learn through experience and mentorship, where memorizing simple rules and heuristics is not sufficient. Taste is an example of tacit knowledge[1].
There’s another argument though that some taste is genetically programmed, like our affinity for campfires or sweeping views. Those don’t seem to be learned as they seem to be entirely cross cultural and innate. Those aren’t examples of art of course but make the point that some sense of aesthetics may not be learned.
also a question - if you have better long term or short term memory how does that affect taste? How does it affect creativity, if all of these things are essentially memorization you would have to assume that people were more creative and had better taste the greater their ability to memorize things, which in the case of taste especially seems slightly absurd.
In the case of creativity it may be easier to make an argument - but surely you can find people who seem more creative with less ability to memorize.
> Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
Elegance is probably orthogonal to creativity, and likely follows from some kind of minimization principle, like minimum program length. You are effectively distilling the "essence" of something from all of the noise.
Creativity seems different, more like novelty, and creativity following some kind of remix of memorized elements + some randomization seems very plausible.
You can create something novel but not elegant, and something elegant but not novel, and you can distill an elegant version of something novel that your or someone else created and that's the best of all creations.
I completely disagree with your assertion that "...rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts."
I would recommend reading the book Moonwalking with Einstein. There is a lot of discussion there on how memory is linked directly to creativity, and to understanding concepts deeply.
---
A choice passage:
"...If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.
The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root 'inventio' is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.
This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. "The realization that composing depended on a wellfurnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity," writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one's memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. "As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middles Ages with composition, not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them---as all crafts are used---to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems." ..."
Great book, motivated me to then read The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.
Although I'd say traditional mnemonic devices like memory palaces are basically linear information storage and recall devices. This can create issues in building a flexible web of information, because loci or the order of the path can become dependencies and you can run out of unique spots in a given space, leading to memory interference.
Even spaced repetition methods (e.g. Anki) tend towards fragmentation of micro-ideas. Its perfect for terms, languages, and simple one question -> one answer ideas.
I've found a hybrid method of images, nested loci and spaced repetition to be most useful, because its flexible over time, and preserves relationships of ideas.
(Context: I co-founded a SaaS in this space: www.sticky.study)
You are very correct in my experience since mnemonics backfired on me that way. It was like my brain constricted on those but recall was good in limited situation.
Thanks for sharing your alternative. I like that you’ve included your references for each component of your method. That might help as many people as your product. I’ll look into it sometime.
The internet has so much information we often can't actually find what we're looking for once we get past a certain surface level understanding. Or people don't want to pay to host it anymore. Our people disagree with it and it's taken down.
I don't disagree with Einstein, but I wonder what he would say with the modern internet at his disposal. Maybe the same?
The book Make it Stick taught me that this Don’t Cramp My Style With Your Boring Rote Learning (Man) attitude is prevalent in teaching. At least American. They argue that it is wrong for the same reason that the author does.
But saying this to a programming crowd must be the most futile thing. At least instrumentalists have to rote train their muscle memory. That lowest bar has to be passed, even if it’s just three chords.
But the article isn’t about programming creativity though. It is a general concept. But if honing in on the mythical lone-genius activity (geniuses never practice in a structured way) helps you win an argument then so be it.
I think it is more of becoming fluent with primitives that can be composed in versatile ways. I can see how that can be poorly understood as memorization.
The main implication is that if what you are “memorizing” is not easily composable, then you won’t be able to apply them broadly or creatively.
However, I disagree with the author on what creativity is, although his definition is one experience of a creative inspiration.
Interesting perspective. I do agree that there are people out there who develop a distinct "taste", but I can't tell if this refers to a "style", an emergent property of multiple "habits", etc? I've always wondered how one develops their "taste".
Also, would you consider a subconscious habit "memory"? What's the difference between the two?
> 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 White. After all, great artists steal.
There's a big difference between "artist who didn't have a deep knowledge of their art-form" and "artist who didn't follow an explicit system to memorize a bunch of rules to make their art".
Wait, why do you think Picasso didn't have deep knowledge? He studied both at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona & the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, for ~5 years before moving to Paris.
Borges was incredibly talented, but it's worth keeping in mind his dad was a writer too.
Good art very much relies on being exposed to lots of other good art first. I don't know that rote memorization is the best way to achieve that, but you definitely need that exposure.
Sorry, I must have expressed myself badly. I'm picking examples of people I think did/do have deep knowledge of their chosen mediums.
I don't think it's possible to have "good taste" without exposure to lots of examples, because I believe taste it culturally bound. Whether you do it explicity via a system, or on a more ad hoc basis, I think most artists need it.
It might be interesting to look at film, where the process is compressed into a couple of generations. I don't know it it will support my argument or not.
I don't think film will look very different here - early film work was very much informed by theatrical tastes at the time, and then started to diverge as people figured out what else they could say in the language of film.
Fundamentally, all art exists in a cultural context. If you've ever taken an art history course, you've been hit over the head with that info a few times ;) And that means furthering/changing taste in a given field means being aware enough of the existing rules to deliberately choose which ones you're breaking, and why.
There are some (very few) artists who didn't have a formal grounding, but I'd argue that even they were steeped enough in cultural context to be informed by it. Even famous autodidacts like Grandma Moses did develop a love for art based on being exposed to a bunch of it.
(Fully recognizing that it's a somewhat tautological argument because it's kind of impossible to grow up in a society without being somewhat exposed to its predominant art forms)
I think that argument is that these artists did not memorized rules or previous pictures and then applied them. They did put a lot of effort into learning, but that is different claim. If you define "memorization" as "any learning of anything", then the word is kind of useless.
Pollock was obsessed with creating an art style that had no basis in any other style, something truly "original." He felt the abstract style he created fit that aim.
That being said, in some ways you could say that the splatter paintings he's known so well for are in fact influenced by all the art he studied and discarded along the way. They were definitely influenced by the principles of artistic design he learned, even if they looked different from what people were used to.
In my opinion, your hypothesis is supported, though maybe in a bit of a roundabout way.
> Well, okay, but rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts.
Of course it is. It's how every human child learns initially. By rote memorization. How does a toddler learn how to say mama? By constantly hearing and repeating it. How does a kid learn their ABCs? Rote memorization is the basis of all memory.
> Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
Dumbest thing I've ever read. You write programs well by doing and remembering. Same with writing. Memorization is the necessary component to programming well. In other words, you program well by remembering elegant code.
> For me, at least, trying to memorize something without context
After the basics, most memorization is contextual.
> At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time and it's frightfully dull.
Oh dear. Something isn't fun all the time. What a childish worldview. It's more fun to eat candy and drink soda than eating 'dull'. It's more fun to sit and watch youtube than to workout.
> Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but I've found that to be relatively rare.
Relatively rare? In order to be competent in anything, you have to memorize lots. You can't write a good essay without having memorized much of the material. Trying reading a book where you have to constantly look up definitions of words because you lack the vocabulary. Try having a conversation with someone who has to constantly look up words because he lacks the vocabulary. Try having code review with someone who doesn't remember anything about their code.
> Otherwise, my time is generally better spent on some sort of practice in context.
Why? Because it helps you remember?
To the idiot ( probably OP ) who downvoted, try coding without having 'memorized' the keyboard. The anti-intellectual, anti-hard work, anti-memorization agenda pushed by some 'people' online bears looking into.
> Growing up with Indian parents in California, I was exposed to both. My mom would write daily Kumon sheets out by hand for me to do, and teach me from Indian textbooks from the same grade (which were much more advanced than the US equivalents). The result was me breezing through the US school system without much thought.
Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the UK school system, where the maths is much less advanced. Philippines schools, meanwhile, have better discipline and more motivated students.
I conclude that Western public education is in a bad state, and this is a source of chronic social weakness.
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 with a copy of Bronshtein & Semendyayev)
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.
There are plenty of south/East Asian counties that have just as much if not more restrictions in textbooks. So I don’t think that alone accounts for the discrepancy
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.
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.
Maybe because UK education system knows about this PISA and Ukraine and other countries don't even care?
For example one thing that puzzles me in western education is this reading comprehension. What exactly is this for? I studied in Russian school/university and we had nothing like that.
Reading means you should understand what you are reading, reading without comprehension is just nonsense for me.
So what exactly is it supposed to teach/train? If I understand meaning of individual words in the text I just put them together and I understand it. If its relatively complex topic I would sit and think about it.
First of all I must say that I can only speak about Russian schooling, Ukranian is probably similar but I can't be sure about it.
> resources for text construction
Not sure I understand this, there are words in a given language, you put them together and you have your text.
> The different meanings of a word relative to its semantic enviroment.
I agree that some words may have multiple meanings, but this again sounds to me like a language skill, be able to understand what exactly each word means in a context. Not sure how this is different for reading or speaking.
> When, how, and why to use all the different time vebrs.
This is an interesting one, I guess in Russian (I assume its similar in Ukranian) we don't have many complex time forms, I know in English and Spanish there are like 10 or more.
Somehow we only studied language and literature and did some exercises related to reading and understanding text, but it is not a whole separate subject.
In each school class kids are supposed to read books and learn from them, just like that.
Also, this problem is a vicious cycle. Bad math students become bad math teachers. I believe that one has to be significantly good at a subject in order to teach the basics well. In school I got a feeling that many math teachers did not know a chapter of math beyond what was in the textbook.
Doesn't help that in the American economy, good mathematicians can earn 10x more than a math teacher's salary.
Indian math system is not memorisation based either.
Math anywhere in the world is all about how many patterns you know/seen. And inventing new math is all about changing one small thing about the stuff you already know and see if it remains logically consistent.
Knowing what to change largely depends on the stuff you already know. To that end even if you don't memorize facts, you still need to memorize patterns.
You have to memorize something. Nobody invents the Apple pie from scratch.
You don't "memorize" when learning math. You solve problems and then you happen to learn to recognize patterns and start to remember some things. Those are not the same learning activities.
Memorization is something else. I have seen students trying to memorize math and these were all bad students. Completely lost when the exercise changed slightly.
If we start to use "memorization" for "any time something is remembered" then the word will loose its meaning.
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 have some level of knowledge already. This has happened to Kubernetes troubleshooting, statistics, PowerShell windows programming, and traffic engineering just in recent history.
I have yet to publish some of these, but I have examples from statistics:
I'm similar. This from your top link stood out to me:
"It’s a little like building with lego bricks or something – spaced repetition helps ensure all the tiny pieces are in the right place, so that the big castle can happen without structural integrity issues."
The book Make it Stick (by Henry L. Roediger III) had a similar idea they called 'Structure Building'. Very similar to what you described, more experienced and effective learners were creating mental schemas of how the little, but crucial parts of a subject fit together, and successfully cut through the noise.
Structure Building was associated with interleaved practice (shuffling of problem types) and spaced retrieval practice.
I really enjoyed both blog posts, thank you for sharing! And I have to say, your explanation of the subexponential distribution property was remarkably clear for someone without a background in statistics :)
Would you mind sharing the flashcards you generated to build this intuition? I've been using Anki for a while and really trying to focus now on improving my prompt writing; would love to see how you managed it for this problem.
As much as I would like to, I think getting to that understanding required at least 500 flashcards on general statistical and probability concepts, ranging from fundamentals to extreme value theory. Most of those are only barely relevant at face value, but still contribute to understanding.
It's not that I set out to understand this specific thing but that I had studied statistics with flashcard support for a year and that happened to work after a few attempts.
I've long wanted to write about this but never been able to think of anything original to say, but your question forced me to face this with effort. Thanks!
When making flashcards I draw a lot from the softer type of theory-building they do in social sciences. I ask questions like
- What are the properties of this?
- What variants of this exist? I.e. how would I recognise this in the wild, or in other shapes?
- What subcomponents can this be deconstructed into?
- Into which bigger picture does this fit?
- What are the consequences of this? What are its antecedents?
- What is this a special case of? What would a generalisation of this look like?
- Which are other related things? What are their similarities and differences?
- In what context might I need to know this?
Whenever I encounter what seems like a significant thing I loosely ask some of these questions, and try to construct atomic, focused flashcards from the answers.
I say loosely because it would take forever to to through all questions for all flashcards I make, so there's some bit of intuition that attracts me to which I think are the most significant questions for any given thing.
-----
One trick to make flashcards more specific that I use (maybe even abuse) is putting part of the answer into the prompt. Instead of prompting "What is the property of subexponential distributions I found meaningful in this book?" I might prompt "What behaviour do subexponential distributions have around high barriers that others don't?" -- I'm giving away part of the answer by including "high barrier" in the prompt, but I'm okay with that.
If I'm concerned about that, I might create a second flashcard prompting something like "What can a subexponential distribution do in one step that a more well-behaved distribution needs many steps to do?" with the answer "clear a high barrier". That captures both sides of the property without making too general a prompt.
I also do this a lot with "why" questions. Instead of prompting "what is the definition of y?" I might prompt "why is the definition of y=f(x)?" That gives away essentially the entire answer but focuses on the why instead.
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.
Math proof and derivations are a bit like remembering a walking route. You've seen the start and end, and the main turns taken, and there's also a general "walking" skill you need.
My argument is that it is worth memorising also the derivations, rather than re-deriving from scratch each time.
Meorising the derivation makes it easier to derive a second-order derivation, and so on. At some level of abstraction, going from first principles becomes prohibitively expensive and caching intermediary results, or so to speak, unlocks that again.
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 subconscious heuristics and memory.
Absolutely, especially in real world application. If you don't have the ability to pull on fundamental ideas anywhere, anytime, then have you really mastered the learning material?
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.
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 want to wax philosophical, by all means, but I think anyone taking “thoughtful insight” away from this article or thread is fooling themselves.
Whatever the epistemic quality of the article is, it's triggered some interesting discussion here which I think is valuable. No need to denigrate talking about human experience with other humans, I think?
You'll experience the creativity outlined in the article directly when you start doing deliberate memorization, i.e spaced repetition. No qualification needed.
I think semi-obvious would be a better criticism than unprovable.
You can't make connections unless you have things to connect to.
You can't recognize (your own discovered/inspired) novelty unless you have memorized normality.
If you are creative in the absence of knowledge of what already exists then that's considered as reinventing the wheel, and not very useful, even it it's Ramanujan reinventing much of established mathematics.
One might talk about it from the perspective of birdsong, which is used by mates to judge sexual fitness. First a tutee bird learns from a tutor bird, and then eventually applies variability to the original song.
It's strongly suspected that anterior forebrain pathway (AFP) may be a source of behavioral variability. We naturally age over time, including our vocal musculature, so in some sense we must constantly relearn how to use our muscles to deliver a song.
When a bird is deafened its birdsong will naturally drift, but when we precisely damage the AFP along with deafening we find that birdsong remains stable for a longer period of time, until of course inevitably it must drift due to aging vocal musculature.
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 homework on the subject.
> 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
Except that commenter had construed my sarcastic point and made it about academia. It is an irrelevant reading of the remark. They had a reading comprehension problem.
Without sarcasm, my point was/is not that you need to know all the theories or engage with academia or write a formal paper.
Rather, my point is that if you're going to write on a topic, at least know what the basic science has to say on it. You wouldn't write about mask wearing, or recycling plastic, etc., based purely on anecdotal evidence. You would include information from scientific sources and consensus.
Doing that raises the level of discourse and forces you, the author, to be responsible for not propagating misinformatiom and pseudoscience. Especially so in the area of self-help and learning psychology.
So again, my original comment while making a sarcastic remark about memorizing scientific literature was really about communicating your ideas in a scientifically literate way just as any lay person has a personal responsibility when discussing a topic, be it about technology or psychology or sociology, etc.
I disagree, I think writing purely based off anecdotal evidence is fine as long as you're not making scientific claims (which I'm not).
Simply sharing what works for me and why I think it does for something as personal as creativity is not the same as contesting mask wearing or recycling.
Is there some specific point in my piece that disagrees with consensus that's not just contesting the definition of "memorization" (as seems to be common in this thread)?
There absolutely is a need for fact checking and basic scientific literacy and you're helping foment the opposite by suddenly making this about academia and scientific journals. What's the harm of that? Snake oil promotion and creation of filter bubbles.
There's absolutely an expectation of not rejecting science just as with discussing global warming or Covid.
But explain, why do you pervert an expectation of scientific literacy into an expectation of professional scientific expertise?
Just as there are scientifically informed books and articles on a e.g. health and fitness and dieting, there is a ton of material on education psychology. Why do you allow the author to not do due diligence and at least read the basics which are very much accessible to nonexperts? Why make an exception when in every other STEM topic this would be incredibly ignorant?
If it were a Time magazine article or a newspaper article they would surely include scientific sources in an effort to be truthful. Surely any high-school student knows the steps to write a well-researched essay, so why are you making this about the irrelevant standards of professional academia here? Could it be due to a misunderstanding of the role of science in public education? Are you some kind of Covid vaccine denier or anti-science on some other topic?
In summary, you have wrongly conflated scientific literacy, being scientifically informed, public scientific awareness on a topic, etc., with professional academic scientific expertise. That is irrelevant and absurd. It also offends me that you made a bad faith construal of my statement.
As to your remark about HN, my criticism applies to ANY scientifically informed public discourse, even as HN is a STEM website.
Finally: I'm a reader giving my time and attention to a badly written essay because it got posted on a forum. It is not my job to fix their essay if it is antiscience in the way an antivaxxer makes up pseudoscience reasons why their idea is right. I'm not going to patiently explain to the nth antivaxxer why they are spouting pseudoscience, I'm just going to say that bluntly. This endless handwringing that HN people have over self help and rote memorization is just more of that, it's on them to have read a few simple books and articles on the topic before choosing to write about it for the public.
PS. In "real life", people express sarcasm and maybe your 'disorder' (completely out of line of you to say that, BTW, and against site guidelines to use personal attacks of that sort at fellow users) was failing to detect a sarcastic comment if you actually, literally, thought I meant "the author needs to memorize scientific literature" in context of their argument about memorization. That would have nothing to do with the actual accusation of pseudoscience, where being scientifically informed on a topic is just a basic standard of discourse to avoid misinformation and snake oil promotion.
Alphazero was very creative, yet it didn't memorize a single move, it just self played. Deep blue was not creative at all, but it was the chess engine that memorized the most moves, todays chess engines are much better at chess and they don't memorize many moves at all, if you dig through their internals you wont find a lot of board states there.
So no, creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, memorization is neither sufficient to become creative nor is it a requirement. You don't memorize concepts you build models around the concepts. You wont be able to reproduce the exact descriptions of concepts but you will be able to produce something similar that means basically the same thing.
All very nice and handwavey, but then you see the user’s current venture is scammy deepfakes as a service, which is about as creatively bankrupt as it gets.
Shame about the national stereotypes as well. There is plenty of creativity in Asian countries. Just bizarre assertions all around.
Historically eastern Asian cultures have placed duty to a whole host of things before oneself, and in many cases the old aphorism "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" applies as well. Plus Japan and Korea have well established cultures of adherence to tradition and mastering simple, time tested things to a ridiculous degree rather than trying to innovate.
Not true of everyone, but if you compare a culture that values conformity and tradition to a country that values the freedom for the individual and trying new things, of course it's not going to measure up by western standards of creativity.
Have you seen their art and entertainment? I assure you there is whole lot of creativity in there. And it has a whole lot MORE variety then western tend to have.
Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions and critiques from mainstream norms. The funny thing is that if you have a rigid conformist society, the rejects are going to double down on the "weird" much more than a well adjusted creative would.
>Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions and critiques from mainstream norms
No, that's just the art that Western readers notice because that's the only thing they recognize as art in the first place. Calligraphy (in China traditionally considered the most important form of visual art) for example has an astonishing tradition in East Asia, also notably related to the topic of the thread, memorization and repetition and practice and has very little to do with critiques of norms.
I found asian genres to be way more diverse and creative then western entertainment even when they dont criticize anything.
Western entertainment tend to produce the same story, in like, two genres, again and again and again and again. Most of the time you can predict the movie storyline down to minute - and people will argue that it is the only correct way.
The people arguing that is the only correct way are the capitalists putting their money on the line, and that comes from a perspective of being risk averse, which is why "corporate art" in America is in such a shambles. Independent video and music are in a great state though.
Are you seriously going to hold up calligraphy as an example of extreme Asian creativity? The art of writing letters with subtle flourish? It's literally an art of understatement, and embodies all the characteristics that I stated are reasons east Asians are culturally biased towards being less innovative.
Yes. Understatement, subtlety and an eye for detail aren't opposites of creativity, it's actually sad that this even needs to be stated. There's no indicator at all that Asian societies are, in any way, biased against being innovative. I recommend reading Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, it's a fantastic read on the indirect and minimal ways in which Asian societies express creativity and aesthetics.
Just because you're loud and brash and write your inventions on your forehead doesn't mean you actually are more innovative or creative than anyone else. I know we've had bad comedians in the West who have made careers out of thinking that being loud equals being funny but you seem to have made an entire worldview out of that idea.
Tell you what. You can use the word "creativity" to mean "creates things" and keep that separate from "innovation" which means to create new things. Sure, east asians are "creative" but 2000 years of evolution in calligraphy pales compared to 500 years of stylistic evolution in western art. In general, westerners like to take chances for personal glory while asians seek to elevate the things their culture already values and has done for generations.
As for your comments about my taste, it's a good thing taste is entirely subjective, you can think I'm boorish and I can think you're boring and lack vision, and we're both entitled to our opinions.
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.
you guys might be interested in the latest Machine Learning Street Talk podcast [1] which right from the start is all about how LLMs are great for creativity, as in novel combinations of trained data (from memorization) -- but are not capable of the reasoning skill needed to verify if any idea is actually plausible given a set of constraints.
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.
This seems to resonate with my experience, although I feel myself bristling due to the baggage of the word memorization.
Although sometimes “memorization” doesn’t happen because you sit down to do it but rather that you keep using the same things over and over when solving problems that they become internalized. I find that to be a more fruitful path towards understanding that I don’t want to call memorization but it is.
Maybe you should first try to separate the negative feelings you have towards the word "memorization" and the word itself "memorization". There's nothing bad about memorization. This sort of negative bias about inconsequential things is something that can easily hold us back from things that could help us further ourselves.
And agreed -- it's this exact realization that led me to both this method and title
Imo this negative connotation has made many people refrain from calling internalization what it is
But acknowledging that it's memorization has actually made me more efficient at learning, since I can now consciously look for the heuristic, codify it, and try to commit it to memory
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.
A fellow CS student didn't understand a theorem, because he didn't understand any of the three definitions used to state it. We went
through the definitions together and suddenly the theorem was "trivial"
That is true understanding. He won't need to remember the theorem, because in his mind, it automatically follows from the raw data.
> 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.
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.
I think if you've ever been exposed to music your mind could come up with different melodies, and who hasn't been exposed to some sort of music in their life. Even if they were the only human on the planet, they'd probably still encounter songbirds, at least.
I disagree that you have to be exposed to a lot of music to even have a chance at coming up with something. Maybe coming up with something good, sure, but not having that spark of inspiration. People can have flash inspiration for garbage ideas too, it happens all the time in startups :P
That being said, the spark might happen more often the more you practice doing something about it, to your point.
Reiner Knizia is the most prolific board game designer of all time. He has 742 games credited to him on BoardGameGeek (some of those are rethemes of older games of his, but he still has probably at least 500 different games released).
About half of my prototypes are about on the level of cleverness and completeness as the lower rated half of the games he has published, at least, and maybe even a couple might slip into the top half somewhere (at his most brilliant his games are way, way better than mine though). But his name carries a lot of weight so he doesn't struggle to find publishers for a good chunk of the games he comes up with.
Meanwhile I've mostly switched back to video game development because at least that way I can easily publish the game myself when it's ready (game development is super hard in other ways, though). I tried for six years and got one signed board game that still hasn't been released after four years. Meanwhile there was a time where I was releasing 1-2 Flash games a year. If I had just made video game versions of my game prototypes instead I probably could have some basic playable version of it out on a website somewhere.
Although I do still submit some board game designs to unpublished game design competitions (I was a finalist in one of the biggest ones, for a design which still hasn't found a publisher) and go to conventions and set up meetings with publishers when I can afford to do so (I couldn't afford to this year, my spouse took a break from work and our income cut almost in half).
What's more is that memories are just a replaying of neuron connections activating in the brain - and when we are prompted by the world around us those connections will fire in response to the stimulus. Quite similar to how AI neural networks function - which is why I believe that AI can indeed be creative and create "new" ideas
I actually made a video diving deeper into this and comparing responses from people and ChatGPT for a creative thinking problem - https://youtu.be/l-9EUBbktqw
I think your hypothesis here (and probably the entire article as well) is strongly challenged by the 'progenitor argument.' Take humans at the dawn of humanity. Language did not even exist beyond what may have been crude sounds or gesturing and collective knowledge did not fall that far beyond 'poke him with the pointy side.' Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon in what was essentially the blink of an eye.
Training an LLM on the entirety of knowledge at this dawn of humanity and, even if you give it literally infinite training time, it's never going to go anywhere. It's going to just continue making relatively simple recombinations of its training set until somebody gives it a new training set to remix. This remix-only nature is no different with modern knowledge, but simply extremely obfuscated because there's such a massive base of information, and nobody is aware of anything more than a minuscule fraction of it all.
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As for the 'secret' of LLMs, I think it's largely that most language is extremely redundant. One thought or point naturally flows.... why do I complete the rest of this statement? You already know exactly what I'm going to say, right? And from that statement the rest of my argument will also mostly write itself. Yet we do write out the rest, which is kind of weird if you think about it. Anyhow the point is that by looking at language 'flow correlations' over huge samples, LLMs can reconstruct and remix arbitrarily long dialogue from even the shortest of initial inputs. And it usually sounds at least reasonable, except when it doesn't and we call it a hallucination, but it's quite a misnomer because the entire process is a hallucination.
Interesting point - thanks for sharing! I think one big missing piece we have with AIs today is the ability for them to learn on the fly and reconfigure the weights. We are constantly bombarded with input and our neurons adjust accordingly. Current LLMs just use a snapshot. I would be really curious to see how online-first AI models could work, focusing on a constant input stream and iterating on weights. Also I wonder how much knowledge is baked into our DNA through evolution. I have a hunch that this is somewhat analogous to model architectures.
Btw - although I see evidence of LLMs creating "new ideas" through combinations of ideas, I am a bit mystified by their apparent reasoning issues. I wonder how that is different in nature from the memory-based approach. ARC-AGI benchmark has had me thinking about this for sure.
I agree with the author, at least in my own creative experiences. However, it's more likely the case that 'creativity' is arrived at differently for everyone. I find memorization to be a comforting foundational activity that builds knowledge & confidence, which I can later express creatively.
There is deliberate practice for skill-building. There is exploratory "making" that fuels originality. There is inspiration hunting and incremental tweaking to get to creative mutation. There is high productivity that triggers eventual ingenuity. I find the article hyperbolic in its thesis and execution especially when it comes to the final hand-wavy bit about how there is more per-capita creativity in non-rote learning.
While its hard to prove or disprove without a long study to prove or disprove the author's claim, I'm willing to die on the following hills:
1. Kumon sheets are the antithesis to creativity
2. Understanding is not a form of memorization (not the rote variety anyway)
I've thought a lot about education, and my personal take is that in the US we way undervalue drilling (by which I mainly mean building up familiarity and muscle memory) and way overvalue understanding.
I've been collecting quotes about these topics for a few years. One relevant to creativity and drilling is Bob Dylan's
> If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me.... you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
There is definitely a lot of value in practice and repetition. I don't think rote memorization / drilling are the only means of getting that practice and repetition. Ironically, with a bit of creativity, we can provide both. Lot of practice, lot of repetition, paired with understanding, play and making things.
Creativity is actually defined by this transformation of finding connections between raw data that you already have to know.
Consider use cases for a rock.
Boring would be using it as a paperweight or throwing it through a window.
Novel but uncreative would be throwing it at the sun, or painting it red. Novel, but kind of useless.
But what about using a rock to play rock paper scissors? Planting it in the soil and watching it grow? That's kind of novel, by way of subverting rock's rules (it doesn't grow, unlike plants) or transforming the concept of 'rock' itself — a real rock isn't needed for rock paper scissors.
So only connections between known concepts are creative. Others might be novel, but useless.
Being forced to do rote exercises sometimes makes you creative. Solve a thousand trivial multiplication problems and you will spontaneously discover lots of shortcuts, patterns, intuitions that can warn you when you make a mistake and so on.
A common issue I notice when people discuss the terrible state of math education in the US is that teachers demand that you solve a problem a specific way, such as multiplying two-digit numbers by drawing base-ten blocks and applying the distributive property.
People who are good at doing multiplication in their head think the method makes perfect sense and don't know what all the fuss is about. But I believe that those people learned how to apply the distributive property "by themselves". That is, by adults forcing them to multiply two-digit numbers over and over until they developed an intuition of the distributive property by necessity.
When people who didn't go through countless drills are taught the base-ten method directly, they have a harder time understanding it. So ironically it is the students who "mindlessly" drill trivial computations over and over that are more prepared to have a "true" understanding of the distributive property, while the ones whose teachers believe drilling is for chumps and try to just explicitly show them the true distributive right away, they end up memorizing the words of the distributive property without understanding it.
I think this analysis as a bit guilty of over-fitting -- it is quite easy to rote memorize a bunch of things while having little to no understanding of what they are or how they work. Trivial examples include training a room of people to memorize a series of facts written in a language they don't speak (the fact that they have memorized doesn't at all mean they have any understanding of the content). So I would say it's not memorization per say, but meaningful exposure to a thing, the more chances you have to meaningfully interact with a thing, the higher the chance is you will learn how to manipulate it and do things with it. This is the difference between understanding and mere memorization, and the more exposure you have, the greater the chance you will start to see the patterns and understand, versus focusing your efforts on memorizing which will just lead to over-fitting and not understanding. As with NNs, so with humans.
On the other hand, episodic memory (insofar as that is distinct from "3*9=27" memorization) is built on top of creativity.
The vast majority of what we consider "memories" are the creative brain doing an on-the-fly story generation, massaged until it "seems right" and serviced plus a big dollop of emotional confidence.
I hear with llm/chatGPT people don't have to blog anymore, but rather the generated plausible-sounding well-structured nonsense flows like an open sewer onto the web.
1. Creativity in a commercial context once stolen/cloned through back-channels accrues value, and manifests as several competitive campaigns
2. New disruptive ideas are usually shelved until the IP/patents expire. No one wants to go through the sometimes impossible licensing process
3. Emerging technology is usually degraded in the rush for IP assets by established firms i.e. large firms dump billions on ridiculous concepts out of fear of market fragmentation
4. Startups do not usually have cash to burn on speculative IP. Thus, real cutting-edge experimental technology is sometimes never made public for numerous reasons.
I disagree with elements of this article, but enjoyed reading it. True creatives do not subvert norms consciously or with an acute awareness as part of this article suggests, I agree they need to be exposed to the norms to generate their own interpretation, but I don’t believe that true creativity is a conscious exercise.
Well said - what's funny is that many creative ideas (from an outside perspective) are often very simple connections of two existing ideas for the person that actually did something creative! It's just that other people don't have the same context/knowledge as the creator, so an idea can seem extremely original to them
You have to know things to be reasonably creative but there is a point where memorizing more stifles creativity. Memorization is often very passive and is fundamentally different from searching for new ways of doing things. It's hard to make sweeping statements like this because there are different modes of memory and different modes of creativity.
There is a lot of memory involved in being creative, but I think setting out to memorize things is a bad way to be creative. You have to practice being creative. In doing so, you will naturally remember a lot of stuff like what works, what doesn't, and most importantly which types of things you ought to memorize. For example if you're programming you will find it useful to remember the syntax of your languages. If you're writing you'll find it useful to remember styles and vocabulary. And so on...
Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.
Regarding Asian cultures and memorization, there is a recent change that has to be pointed out. The role of memorization classically was to aid manana/contemplation after shravana/hearing-the-teaching. The stage of manana is a kind of inquiry where you raise questions and clarify them or see how the teaching applies to various situations in your life(Like learning a principle in physics and solving problems based on the principle). In the case of poetic works the inner-feeling/bhaava sinks into you allowing one to access blissful states.
However, in the modern context, this has been transformed into memorizing arcane lists/tables, on which one is graded without any further manana.
That thesis is way, too oversimplified and a bit misleading. It could lead you to think the real source of creativity is how much you store, facts or patterns. Put Wikipedia on a computer with a pile of heuristics (eg How to Solve It). Then, it will be more creative than humans in no time. Yet, humans with virtually no knowledge are more creative.
My first study of creativity was Cracking Creativity by Michalko. Skimming its tools, I noticed all of them were about changing how one looks at a problem or connects its pieces. Another work told me geniuses are defined by what they forget or ignore more than what they memorize. The two ideas combined into my working approach.
When I did CompSci research, I would look through the papers for the concepts they reported on. High level ones, core prerequisites, and techniques in how they are combined. From there, I could enumerate variations on each. Then, just keep combining them in straight-forward or random ways. Eventually, something emerges.
Likewise, prior work on creativity and A.I. showed reasoning by analogy was huge in humans. We find patterns in one domain that we generalize to look for patterns in another domain. Then, there’s some process of knowing when to try one or not.
These processes so far are extracting a tiny amount of information, filtering most of it, identifying heuristics in a domain, and heuristics across domains. Also, letting the mind just soak on things to do whatever it does in the middle of the night. These are collectively creativity.
Memorization is a building block of, but different from, creativity. The proof is how we’ve long had memory and reasoning in systems but they sucked at creativity. Recently, systems are extrapolating enough to be more creative but are hallucinating nonsense they definitely didn’t remember. So, they’re orthogonal.
“Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art -- they can see the connection or novelty because it's all in their head.”
Edit: I’ll also add that, for planning and creativity, many of us use a deliberate, trial-and-error process that takes time. We don’t just “see” it from something we internalized. We work toward it using the creative process. We usually do see it when it’s finished, though.
The acts of the mind, where in it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three:
1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made.
2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations.
3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
It’s not memorizing, it’s actually knowing and understanding the utility of different concepts. When you learn of a problem in a new field, you go through your bucket of tools and modify one to fit the new problem.
Probably you would have had more agreement, if you would have used a different word (though I’m not able to suggest that different word that captures the meaning I think you intended)
I'm not in anyway an expert, so I googled what some research says. Here's an interesting meta-analysis (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-023-02303-4). Memory and creativity are a lot more complex than I realized. There are different types of each, and it seems like they interact in complex ways. Here's the findings from the abstract:
> We found a small but significant (r = .19) correlation between memory and creative cognition. Among semantic, episodic, working, and short-term memory, all correlations were significant, but semantic memory – particularly verbal fluency, the ability to strategically retrieve information from long-term memory – was found to drive this relationship. Further, working memory capacity was found to be more strongly related to convergent than divergent creative thinking. We also found that within visual creativity, the relationship with visual memory was greater than that of verbal memory, but within verbal creativity, the relationship with verbal memory was greater than that of visual memory. Finally, the memory- creativity correlation was larger for children compared to young adults despite no impact of age on the overall effect size. These results yield three key conclusions: (1) semantic memory supports both verbal and nonverbal creative thinking, (2) working memory supports convergent creative thinking, and (3) the cognitive control of memory is central to performance on creative thinking tasks.
So some memory seems to be correlated with convergent creativity, which according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking) is "the ability to give the 'correct' answer to questions that do not require novel ideas, for instance on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence." It sounds like there's less correlation with divergent creativity, which (again from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking)) is "a thought process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions."
But my real takeaway is that people here seem to have strong (emotional?) opinions on "memorization vs creativity: which is better", but few people seemed to bother reading page 1 google results on the topic. So I like to think that bothering to do some cursory research beats both. :)
I see it like this: after I have seen some colors and a ball I can then imagine a ball in any of those colors.
In other words, everything I have experienced and memorized becomes this pool of resources I can imagine from. More I have seen, more combinations I can imagine.
Then I understand how traveling actually broadens my view. It’s not just some nice phrase but hard reality.
Also this means maybe anything we can imagine we can also create. Because whatever I can imagine I can also plot a path from here to there, imagine all the steps in-between.
You may as well say that creativity comes from writing. Because obviously all of the most creative writers write. And the writings of creative non-writers are entirely absent.
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?
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." - Steve Jobs
If you are transforming the knowledge, i dont think that is the same as memorizing it. In fact, i think most people would describe that as the opposite of memorization.
Using your definition, everything would be memorization. For example, you could describe picasso as simply pattern matching on other paintings to make something new, but i think it would be crazy to describe his work as an act of memorization (then again, the way AI generated art works... maybe its not so crazy)
> But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in this new context?
That question has a false precondition baked in. If you know how, it's not creative.
> It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization
No. Sensing and matching patterns does not imply memorization. Everything you're saying is completely loaded.
Did you just discover memorization? Because the pattern I see in your words is similar to anyone who's just learned a new tool or technique - they overapply it everywhere as they learn to use it.
But you must have knowledge of the basic units of your chosen art to apply that to the new situation right?
E.g. if you're an artist, at the very least you need the knowledge of how to draw a line
From other comments here it seems the definition of "memorization" seems to be where disagreements are
Maybe this is a better explanation: once I started trying to make whatI just learned is called "tacit knowledge" more explicit and then committing it to memory, I was able to cut learning times down significantly
To me, “memorization” implies an active process focused on learning a particular set of “matches” (to adopt the term you’re using here). But it seems to me that tacit knowledge (and other products of less concentrated/deliberate learning) often plays a substantial role in creativity.
That is, creativity fundamentally comes from internalized knowledge (as the article says) but internalized knowledge doesn’t necessarily come from memorization.
I think I see -- in your view "memorization" only refers to conscious learning
While internalized knowledge comes from "subconscious" (for lack of a better word) learning?
I guess I'm equating the two here and just using memorization as "committing to memory", with the belief being that you can construct the heuristic you'd normally acquire subconsciously and cut down time to mastery
I think memorization can play a role in internalizing knowledge, but it isn’t a “fundamental” as in necessary. Internalized knowledge can also come from other sources.
I think this is right, and one implication is that 99.9% of the self-help content you passively consume on the internet will have no impact on your life, because (barring deliberate learning / repetition), you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference.
> you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference
But how would you learn to remember the right advice in the right context? The act of remembering something when you need it requires you to do more than just memorize it, you have to properly learn when the thing is actually useful and train your mind to recall this advice in those situations.
It is much better to know that an advice exist and learn when to look it up than to memorize the advice without the ability to realize when you would need it.
This brings up an interesting point -- while I think many people read and forget self-help books without ever improving their lives, the way they can mostly help people (imo) is by:
1) identifying a heuristic
2) making memorization easier through stories
The stories, analogies, acronyms they teach all just make memorizing/remembering/learning their heuristic easier
This claim makes little sense because it fails to distinguish between memory and memorization. I memorize almost nothing, but I remember the broad strokes of a lot of things. This allows me to be creative.
In a way, memorization is a severe risk: if you memorized something before it changed, for example, your creativity may not mean much.
What I was trying to convey is that fundamentally learning is memorization, whether conscious "rote memorization" or more less-intentional committing to memory from doing an activity
And that recognizing this allows us to speed up the process of learning fundamentals
Which in turn enables creativity as most people see it
Conscious memorization and rote memorization are two different things. I can intentionally put things into memory without doing rote memorization - or even intentionally avoiding rote memorization. The techniques you use also give you different results in terms of whether or how you use the memorized concept or word in foreign language. (For example getting the effect where you can translate a word between foreign and your language, but can not use it foreign language sentence and do not understand it in context without translating.)
You state that "learning is memorization" but I don't think that is true. Of course learning involves something being persisted in one's brain, but stating that memorization and brain persistence persisting are synonyms seems like an incorrect description.
You’re right. The OP is mistaken as to the distinction between memory and memorization. I am able to be creative because, for example, I remember that a woman’s hair smelled like flowers and secrets. It would not be possible to memorize such a thing.
This is like saying that programming competence comes from breathing air.
Creativity (measured by Openness in the Big Five) is a fundamental personality component that cannot be altered, in the same way that your working memory and IQ cant be altered (unsurprisingly they are closely related)
I heard this idea recently: creativity needs shallow knowledge over a vast range of concepts. It’s probably not “just” that, but I can see how the vast range helps.
Did this author read a single book on creativity? Or did he just make everything up?
Being creative is simply knowing what you want, knowing where you are and is the process of making choices along the way to get there. The point at which your creation comes to life is fuzzy, but this is the underlying process. As for what rules/patterns/etc that you follow to arrive where you want to go: the whole point is not presubscribe to any of these. Sometimes you draw from a known way. Sometimes you come up with an entirely knew way to take a step. The point is simply to make choices that bring you closer to what you want to make.
> 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 time, live, in front of a crowd. Simply because I enjoyed the creative process of ‘making it work’.
Creativity for me isn’t “writing down heuristics on best DJ transitions” — I haven’t once considered that. It sounds, to me, to be the exact opposite approach to fostering creativity. Creativity for me comes out of play. It grows over time. It’s feeling and emotion, not memory.
I stopped reading after that. Especially as I am someone with a terrible memory but am also very creative in a number of fields.
I hadn't got that far, but went to have a look and yeah, as a fellow pianist I concur. Then I saw the following paragraph:
"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!
The "it" in "before you can violate it" is referring to music theory not the drop (maybe bad writing on my part).
I also grew up as a classical pianist.
Not saying creativity is memory, just saying creativity is enabled by memory (which I think agrees with you said about difficulties getting into that state if you haven't practised enough)
Creativity is also enabled by having bones, being an amorphous blob on the floor doesn’t help creativity. Creativity is also enabled by drinking water, being dust doesn’t help creativity.
Saying creativity is enabled by memory doest’t say anything interesting about creativity. It’s simply a prerequisite.
Except for some reason rather than saying this is obvious, many claim it's not true.
I agree that the biggest criticism of this is that it's obvious, but the amount of cultural pushback is what makes it semi-interesting to say in the first place.
Someone linked this article to me on Twitter with similar ideas:
Some minds get a lot done with a lot of memorization and some minds get a lot done with seeing commonalities and creating simplifying abstraction. We need all sorts of minds.
Wow, what a load of rubbish. I hate this kind of reductive, formulaic view of creativity. I think true creativity expands what is possible – so some kind of awareness of the current state of things is important, but rote memorisation has no real part in it.
The idea that memorisation leads to creativity is actually very misleading - especially the assumption that what you are learning is 'true'. It just means you are more aware of the restrictions and existing work in a field - often the most exciting work comes from the excitement and slight naivety of exploring something new - 'beginner's mind'. Kids are very creative, partly because their model of the world is not fully established.
Huh, muscle memory implies motor programs that are subconscious and stored in the cerebellum - this is very different to creativity. It may enable you to make something new, but that is not a prerequisite. The value of spaghetti drawings is subjective, and actually to be able to make such disinhibited drawings with similar qualities as an adult is very difficult and requires unlearning. Picasso knew this very well.
The safe and very systematic approaches the author describes are defensive, too rigid and avoid what creativity really is - a leap into the unknown.
We recently described this to a parent of one of our students as:
Understanding -> Remembering -> Applying
If you don't understand the basics of a concept, and you're talking about memory, its probably just rote memorization. Students generally find this tedious, and since it's shallow its very hard to retain and connect to disparate but parallel ideas from other fields (roots of creativity).
But, most schools and students stop there. They hear 'memory' or 'memorizing' as only rote memory. Step 2 is critical if you want to get to higher levels of learning. As you said in the essay - "Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art". At www.sticky.study this is what we focus on. It's fast 2D memory palaces + spaced repetition.
Only if you have understanding + remembering can you get to step 3 - applying what you learn reliably at relevant moments in your life. This is the gold standard that schools claim they desire - analysis, synthesis, application, broad transfer, and creativity. You can't reach master efficiently if you lose 80% of all you read or learn.
I don’t think that’s true. People with memory problems more seem to retread the same foundational ideas repeatedly, whereas those with good memories recognize this repetition and then seek something novel.
A lot of debate in the comments about the definition of "memorization"; this is just semantics and misses the point. Creativity is aided by 1) exposure to a wide variety of existing ideas, 2) deep understanding and integration of those ideas, 3) recombination of those ideas.
Superficial exposure to existing ideas alone won't get you there, and neither will isolated deep reflection. You need both.
so imagine from playing a guitar and you get famous and people ask you "who were your influences ?"
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.
I would argue that creativity is a tendency and fundamental property of an individual’s brain, rather than a skill that can be taught or learned.
Creativity does require a context, such as creating a piece of art, music or solving a problem, and then in order to make any meaningful contribution to that problem or piece of art, one needs to have enough knowledge to draw from.
This knowledge can be 1) exact, such as specific rendering techniques in the context of building a 3D renderer or scales for improvisation on piano.
Or it can be 2) informal, increasingly rich mental models.
For example, I have been improvising on piano for a long time, and I have a largely informal mental model of music theory that I draw from during improvisation of what would sound good and interesting and what wouldn’t.
In another instance, I’m building software, and I have a growing mental model of how computers work, from the hardware (CPU, GPU, instruction sets) to the software (drivers, operating systems, networking), and how specific programs have been written (web browsers, game engines, databases, certain libraries).
The same goes for specific domains I wish to build software for (e.g. AEC / architecture industry), for which I am also forming a well of knowledge of what kind of companies, organizations and individuals collaborate and how information flows between them, e.g. via specific file formats, standards or protocols.
These mental models and exact knowledge, are a prerequisite for creativity.
But the creativity itself is the tendency of my brain to then, in a specific context, associate and draw from these different mental models and this breadth of knowledge to come up with a piece of output.
This can be building a specific feature in software, or coming up with a novel chord progression and melody.
So creativity is not about knowledge, but about creating.
Creating is inherently hard to formalize, as one has to have a mental model far larger and deeper than what can be written down or communicated via text.
In addition, by attempting to formalize the mental model, one loses the impreciseness, fluidity and depth that enables venturing beyond reproduction.
This mental model of how to create is what comes from practicing. By playing the piano year in year out and trying out different things, one learns to create good music.
By programming for years, one learns to write beautiful software.
What defines good or beautiful, and how one achieves that is what creativity is. It is a taste. It is exactly that what goes beyond memorization and mere knowledge. It is not taught, it is learned by doing. It is the application of knowledge, and the internalization of years of practice.
TLDR:
Creativity is a tendency of an individual. Knowledge is a prerequisite, but creativity is about applying it. This requires a mental model that comes from years of practice.
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 drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself.
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.
It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1. They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.” They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body. Mostly subconsciously.
Yes, there are specific areas where drilling can help us accelerate or catch up. Many kids seem to need explicit phonetics instruction in order to make the leap to reading words. Phonological speech interventions are often drill-like. Practicing musical scales does make you more fluent in improvisation. Drilling the mechanics of a repertoire piece frees your mind to focus on higher-order expression and interpretation. They’re valuable, they have a place.
But this is just a small slice of learning. It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!), which to me is the crux of the issue.
If I had to reformulate OP’s argument to something I can get behind, it would be more about deliberate practice or “putting in the reps.” This is also often boring, and differentiates highly successful people from average performers. But it’s a broader and more purposeful set of activities than “memorization” would imply.
> 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 how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest. But it’s all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of it. If that’s the case, we can’t explain it in words.
Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My students would ask things like “what’s the best way to structure this program?” And I would say “I don’t know. Let’s brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try writing it like that. Figure it out in code.” I think you become great at programming by licking all the programs you can find. Same with music and art and languages (go have conversations with native speakers).
There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.
> There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.
There's being taught and then there's exploring and practice. It's the exploring and practice that is often missing today, IMO because we all want everything to happen so quickly.
In my sport of choice, jiujitsu, there's been a shift happening in teaching. Traditionally the teacher would show a move or two then have the class drill the move. The shift now is more conceptual where the teacher might say the goal is get chest to chest and then have the students operate at 20% figuring it out on their own. While there are some pretty vocal camps on both sides, I think having both methods is the best to learn from. Being taught a solution to a problem a student discovered on their own during discovery is when learning really takes hold IMO.
Finally, the best way to really learn that I have found is to teach something.
I appreciate the martial arts context. I share it, albeit in a different art. For our part, we spend varying amounts of time talking about concept/principle pieces of the puzzle, and demoing/drilling very specific techniques. We need (we think) both.
Over time, the regular drilling makes recognition of context a great deal faster, and the conceptual pieces make improv at that point start to look creative or magical, but it's not - it's just all that drilling, and familiarity, and interconnected understanding in gestalt that enables "creativity".
Show me wax on wax off. Show me long stroke up and down. You come tomorrow same time.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22show+me+wax+on+wax+off%22&iax=v...
> 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 going to learn very much. Your job as a teacher is to facilitate a growth curve of increasingly more difficult and unwieldy problems to solve.
> 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.
> there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice
Well, they're now only offered through unions, too. I suspect there's a great demand for such opportunities.
> Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
This is such a weird and amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing it! I don't know if I've ever heard this concept explained in quite this way before.
> [H]ow would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
Actually, I don't agree with that. If I look around the room I'm in now, there are a LOT of different objects, and I can imagine what they'd feel like on my tongue, even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects. To give a couple of examples: a partly used candle, the "lighting" side of a matchbox, guitar strings, lightbulbs, new bike inner tube. The reason I can imagine how they would feel, despite never having actually licked them, is that in our early years we're just exploring the world and building a mental model. We stop licking everything quite early when we figure out the class of things that's generally food, but by that point we've learned how to correlate the sense of feelings we get from our tongue with the sense of feelings we get from our fingers, because we also touch all those items a lot with our fingers. With enough examples, we become pretty good at pattern matching across senses, so e.g. I can look at an object, from the shadows see that it's bumpy, and have a pretty good idea what it'd feel like if I rubbed it with my fingertips or even licked it, or if it's glass, plastic, metal, fabric, I'd know it'd produce different feelings ranging from differences in friction, thermal conductivity, etc.
That's quite a lot of text, but the TLDR is that we don't need to lick everything to have a pretty good idea of how it'd feel on the tongue, just enough to have a general idea of the properties of different classes of materials. Given that most babies stop licking/chewing everything before they've reached nursery age, it's clear that for objects we encounter in later life it's not the licking per-se that matters for this "skill", but whether we've learned to associate the senses.
I guess taste is a bit different, but my default would just be to assume that most objects are tasteless unless they also have an odour.
> even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects
Are you sure you never licked those materials as a child?
I'm not sure when my earliest memories date from any more — some of what I thought were memories turned out to be dreams of things that never happened, others have mutated with each re-recollection — but one thing I can be sure of is that I don't remember any of the "stick random things in mouth" stage of my life.
When I look around my room, I find there are indeed things I cannot imagine what it would be like to lick them, but they're all made of materials I didn't have access to as a kid: soft touch rubber.
You're right that there's a problem with recollection. I can't remember going through such a phase either, but I know I did because there are photos of me as a baby sticking things in my mouth (although in the photos these are things designed for babies, like plastic cubes big enough to not be swallowed, but small enough to be easily handled by a kid, etc). In fact, I had no idea of the ages involved, so I searched online and found that most babies start this phase around 6 months and usually stop by 12 months, although some kids continue on until 3 or 4 years old.
But yeah, materials like the rubber in my inner tube... I'm pretty sure my parents wouldn't have allowed such stuff near me as a baby, likewise I wouldn't have been allowed near boxes of matches etc. I also can't imagine I'd ever have decided as an older child that I should try licking a bike tube or the striking surface of a matchbox. And so, I'm about as confident as I can be that I'd never have licked an inner tube in my life, but I can make a good guess from feeling it with my fingers what it'd likely feel like on my tongue.
There's very little where I'd go as far as to say "I cannot imagine what it'd be like", except maybe for things that would involve a chemical reaction, and where I might have some idea from extrapolation with foods - e.g. fizzing, an exothermic reaction, etc., but wouldn't necessarily be able to guess from looking or feeling with my fingers what the result might be. Most of the interesting ones are turned into food anyway, e.g. sherbert dip or sour sweets.
I definitely have had some surprises in later life - I remember first having ox-tongue when I was in my 20s and finding the texture quite uncomfortable, and since high single-digit ages, I've never been able to correlate the texture of liver with something that's edible.
I guess another example is with unfamiliar "exotic" fruits - there are some that would surprise everyone with their taste, but you can guess most of the texture characteristics of a fruit just by looking at it and cutting it into pieces, and you might be able to have a guess at taste from its smell.
I feel like you totally missed the point and then reiterated exactly what they said in another way.
Not really. Their point was that you need to lick a lot of objects. My point is that it doesn't need to be a lot, just enough to be able to form generalisations based on other observable characteristics. It's about the degree of "a lot".
> My point is that it doesn't need to be a lot
I’m learning piano at the moment, and it is taking me a lot of playing to build up those generalisations you’re talking about. I’ve only been at it for 2 years at this point and I still feel like a beginner.
How much programming do you need to do to build an intuitive sense of all the programs? I’ve been programming for 30 years and I’d say I started to have a usable intuition around 10 years in.
I’m not sure what “a lot” means to you, but a decade of practice seems like a lot to me. It’s a lot more effort than most people are willing to invest in their hobbies and, in many cases, their careers.
I don't think they were being serious about licking. After all, you cannot "lick" a computer program.
And I actually disagree with you. My son went through a period where he put nearly everything in his mouth, bugs, bottle caps, spices, food, phones, credit cards, toys, rocks. Pretty sure we all did that at some point.
I quite liked your licking metaphor/symbolism. In fact, if I find out that something tastes good after licking it, I'll go even further. I swallow it. Ha ha.
My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts. How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore.
So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on.
Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?
Kinesthetic learners know exactly what you are talking about. Others may have no clue. Just a moment ago I identified which pill bottle I needed to open by shaking it. The sound prompted an image of the pill shape and density. This interconnectedness of sign systems and our human ability to read them can truly emerge in brilliant every day ways. I agree nothing replaces experience, especially for kinesthetic learners.
Yes. Tacit knowledge is hard to teach.
Right. And, I think, real expertise in any subject is choc full of tacit knowledge. Even - and especially - in areas where we have good symbolic representations. (Like music, math, programming and languages.)
The problem with English is I don't actually know the rules. Something just feels "off" sometimes when someone makes grammatical mistakes.
I doubt I will ever gain this feeling (for lack of a better word) with another language. I mean how could I? Everything sounds weird and "off" when you're a beginner, right? For example: el bano, el agua, la naranja, la sillas. You're constantly suppressing warning signs flashing in your head.
For example, I remember being forced to memorize the multiplication tables. I doubt we do that in schools anymore. I feel like all that time could have been better spent learning something else.
I think this is a function of hours of practice. I remember the point when I started hearing the silent "h" in Spanish and also when I stopped understanding what native speakers were saying after 3 months because I'd progressed beyond the level where they felt they had to slow their speech down for me. Lots of plateaus in the learning curve.
Schools still teach multiplication tables to this day. They remain useful in a myriad of everyday situations.
All those really learning a foreign language get to the point, where they "chug it" and jump into the deep end, surrounding themselves with native speakers and going to that learning by context mode. Its the toughest phase, but works.
Love this metaphor. To truly learn we must have a lick for ourselves, pun not intended.
The EEs I have known that carried around a card with:
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 engineer.
BTW, one of the tests fighter pilots go through is they are blindfolded, and then have to put their hand on each control the instructor calls out.
I also have some written tests for certifying pilots. 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.
> 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 don't want a pilot who is creative when it comes to max takeoff weight.
In certain combat situations, or when smuggling coke across South and Central America, you certainly do.
Not to mention that in combat, you need to understand the limitations not only of your own plane but also of both the allied and enemy planes in your airspace.
But you don't want CIVILIAN pilots to get too creative, though. Running out of runway with a 747 is no joke.
Gravity works just as well if you're in combat or smuggling coke. They don't suddenly give you the ability to takeoff under too much load
The max takeoff weight in the book isn't the actual maximum. It's the "certified" maximum. Anything beyond that may cause structural issues during takeoff, but probably won't be that big of a problem until you land. You'll need to be especially creative on getting very low on fuel, so you don't crash through your landing gear.
Sure, there are hard laws of physics.
Until you get to those, you'd be surprised how far some creativity with weight distribution, getting rid of unneeded cargo or even plane parts, using stuff to your advantage, and a little daring to push the plane to its limits, goes...
Way beyond what the "by the book" pilot who isn't creative can achieve in times of need.
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.
How are any of those examples of "needing to remember the facts to be creative"?
Both are examples of going way off the reservation of known emergency procedures. First, knowing enough to override the fact that lowering the gear at such speeds can be catastrophic, the second knowing the fact that the pitchup is a violent maneuver and how to induce it.
> I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer.
But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers. When people talk about memorization they talk about remembering the words without understanding the concepts, such a person is no better off than the person carrying around a text note with the concept written down.
When you understand these concepts you will remember those formulas, but memorizing the formula doesn't make you understand it. Therefore creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, there is something else there.
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 pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level compared to that.
But of course such an engineer can be useful to solve constrained problems, but I wouldn't call them good since they don't really connect to the larger picture so they need a lot of oversight.
> 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.
The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things. You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board.
The ability to memorize opening moves may lead you into a stronger mid game, but it's not creativity. Creativity is searching for patterns where they can mate in three, or spotting positions where the bishop can attack two pieces at once in two moves.
> The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things
No it doesn't, understanding a concept doesn't come from memorizing N facts, if it did we could easily make everyone understand math in school but we can't.
Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula.
> You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board.
That is just a theory, there is little behind that. Much more likely you become a chess master by training a board state evaluator in your hand that is really good at evaluating board states, not by memorizing lots of board states. Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it.
That board state evaluator allows you to also remember board states easily, but you don't build that by memorizing board state patterns.
Memorizing is clearly a necessary, but not sufficient part of learning. If you are to become an expert in any subject whatsoever, from math to football fandom, you will need to develop an ability for remembering huge amounts of raw facts. One of the first hurdles in a math education is memorizing the multiplication tables. In biology or medicine you have to learn literally hundreds of systems that happen to exist in a certain way, and from all of the raw facts, could very well be a different way.
> Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula.
Sure, you can wing it at a primary or high school level if your teachers are impressed by your understanding. But you will never become a math expert if you don't remember the specific formulae, and many other more complex things. Even if you are fully able to deduce the theorems from scratch, you won't be able to function if you have to invent and then prove every single theorem you want to use.
> Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it.
No, it is precisely the other way around. DeepBlue is deducing how good a board state is by trying to calculate all possible follow-up moves up to a depth of 13 or something. In contrast, AlphaGo has memorized patterns occuring in billions of games (in a lossy archive format, of course) and basically can recall games that are close enough to the current game and what you need to do to win from the current position. And this is exactly how chess masters mostly work as well, to the extent that it has been studied, and based on their own reporting. They just recognize positions or certain aspects of a position, and can recall how the game works from that position.
I think memorization is a tool to deep understanding
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 the formula for that, because I don't remember which symbol represents what, but I understand the concept as good as any expert and I never need to look that up because my intuition instantly solves any related problem.
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 how many objects you memorized.
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 how many objects you memorized.
If you mean by rote learning and just remembering information in an arbitrary manner, then that's memorization. I doubt that such a person have even acquired the knowledge, except maybe for the simplest case such as multiplication tables.
I know how multiplication works actually, but I never used them. Instead I go for the memorized answer.
But all knowledge a person have is based on memory. How you acquire it is up to you, preferably in the most efficient way possible so that we actually retain the information and don't have to "study" as often.
> 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 information you can later recall. If there is nothing to recall such as with tacit skills then you don't learn it by memorizing, you learn it by practice and thinking and theorizing until it "clicks".
A computer can remember everything trivially, but it hasn't built any models based on the information so all that information is useful. The same happens in our head, the value isn't in the memory it is in the structures you built as an answer to that memory. The memory itself is a red herring, don't chase it, chase the understanding.
So for example, I have made a model in my head that parses electronic circuit problems for me, with that I don't need any formulas as it does the work. There is no memory tied to that model, it just solves things, there is nothing to recall, nothing to write down etc, it isn't a piece of information it is an active skill I have built. Saying otherwise is like saying that you memorize how to move your arm, no that is you building up intuition and reflexes, that isn't what we call memorizing.
You can call that a pattern matcher, you can't recall one of your heads pattern matchers. Pattern matchers can be tied to recall, but pattern matchers can also solve problems for you by themselves without ever invoking any memory. Pattern matchers are much more powerful than memories since they can solve a whole slew of similar problems while memories just solves one thing, so there is no need to go memory -> pattern matcher, you can go instantly to pattern matcher without ever commiting anything to memory.
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.
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.
Creativity comes from a deep understanding of concepts
> 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 work beside you, but they don't tell you about their past performance on tests because you have a chip on your shoulder and they don't want you to look down on them.
I failed a lot of tests in college and now I'm a great software engineer.
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.
Some times the brain is wired to intuit the concept. That's something that fascinates me. You grasp the idea before any articulate explanation. Somebody shows you a problem and rapidly you start discussing solutions with the other person and even go further.
Most of the time memorization is a key role for creativity, the easier you can jump between ideas the more combinations you can explore (seems like the brain is constrained by some cache bottleneck in a way).
> If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are you going to remember the concept?
This is not mere memorization. The GP's point that not everything that makes you remember this is simply "memorization", and certainly all of those things contribute differently to creativity.
> I also have some written tests for certifying pilots.
Yes, piloting is one of the tasks where you absolutely need lots of random information memorized. You should also not do a lot of "creativity" in it.
A lot of pilots have saved their lives by being creative when the checklist solution didn't work. They were successful being creative because they knew the airplane's systems inside and out.
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.
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.
Whichever mnemonic works best for you. A triangle or pyramid for multiplicative relationships is near-universal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/mv19kv/my_teach...
Also, [Mechanical] Work = Force * distance [through which the force acts], [Electrical] Power = Voltage * Current, etc. etc.
This is different memories? the one for the formula and the one for the concept. So you can remember the meaning of the word but don't remember how to write it. So can reproduce the formula from your deep understanding, but it is quicker to check it out instead of apply the first principle every time.
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.
> 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?
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.
> your knowledge is still not adequate
I never said it was. I said that being competent required that knowledge, not that that knowledge was sufficient.
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 EE degree and needing a card. Signal processing classes required math 100x more difficult than that. I had to know quaternions by my second dsp class.
> 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.
I'm pretty skeptical that cheating to that level is plausible. Ohm's law is so fundamental that finishing an EE degree without knowing it would be akin to writing a paper on Gravity's Rainbow without knowing the basic rules of grammar.
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.
I’d say that’s the definition of “remember” rather than “memorize.”
To most people I’d wager “memorize” has a strong connotation for the synthetic version only, with an emphasis on a stripping-out of context.
I recognize that stripping away context can be valuable—-drilling a tennis serve over and over outside the real-time context of a game is extremely helpful.
Flashcards are rarely valuable in the same way. For semantically oriented tasks, an impoverished context is usually not very helpful. Receptive skills like letter and character recognition might be an exception. But even then you’ve got to make the leap to reading at some point.
> no one adds or multiplies enough in daily life for natural memory formation
To the contrary, there’s a fascinating study of children in South America who had very fluent mental math skills for making change because they sold fruit on the side of the road. They couldn’t solve the exact same problem in story problem format in a classroom, though. Synthetic contexts usually don’t transfer well to real life.
Actually, my understanding is that contexts in general are hard to transfer.
By far the best way to learn arithmetic facts is to ‘naturally’ use them in service of solving more interesting or relevant problems. Someone who spends the same amount of time doing nontrivial word problems, pattern-discovery projects, playing a game or solving a puzzle involving embedded arithmetic, or just talking about numbers in a group will come out vastly better prepared both for recalling or figuring out arithmetic solutions per se and for mathematical fluency in general than someone who does narrow practice drills. Arithmetic drills are not only a total motivation killer for most people, but also just suck at aiding retention. Time spent on arithmetic drills in school is somewhere between a waste of time and an actively harmful punishment.
If anyone wants some primary school appropriate word problems, let me recommend the collections by Lenchner, e.g. https://archive.org/details/mathematicalolym0000lenc
Also try Kordemsky’s Moscow Puzzles https://archive.org/details/boris-a.-kordemsky-the-moscow-pu...
> 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.
I think in common usage the word "memorize" very strongly implies that it's the lossless storage and retrieval of some highly specified sequence of information. No amount of studying American Civil War history would be referred to as "memorizing the Gettysburg Address" unless you could recite the speech word for word.
> 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.
Isn't that kind of the point for the other side?
Nobody memorizes the answer to 212+457. There are no flash cards for every possible addition up to infinity.
In my experience, the more people think that math is something to memorize, the worse they are at math.
Kumon students will be able to get 669 faster than the average non-Kumon student simply due to a large amount of practice though. Students don't memorizate of all the possible combinations, but imo that practice helps tune the mind to be sharp in that particular direction. very useful in some jobs.
it is to be noted that math isn't numeracy though. I have dyscalclia which hurt me with numbers but at the college level there are fewer numbers and more conceptual thinking. ended up with a math minor, though that's due to the CS degree requiring so many classes.
>OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.”
They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?
>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
It still is a kind of memorization, just not a voluntary one. And such learning is still is a very important function of mental development and evolutionary fitness, that shouldn't just be shunned "because trauma".
>Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself
Well, I see your cargo cult and I raise you tried-and-true.
"Absorbing the concept itself" might take more effort (including personal, for logistical reasons, not everything can be tailored to the individual learner, who might not even care enough for learning compared to all kinds of diversions, and have zero passion for the subjects, even if a clone with the teaching skills of Feynman with the presentation skills of Tonny Robbins, and the passionate conviction of Jean D' Arc was to present it to them.
But absorbing the concept is not enough, there needs to be instant recall, or at least fast enough recall) of all kinds of facts and factoids and tables, and also this "absorbing" also needs to encompass boring concepts, that are nonetheless crucial, if one is to be succesful in anything technical or scientific, or generally creative in any sort of organized way that combines concepts and information (not just Jackson Pollocking away).
> They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?
To memorize means to commit to memory. It is an action. But memories are created by not just actions, but experiences. Experiences can create memories without you having committed them; without you having memorized anything.
>To memorize means to commit to memory. It is an action.
There is no action of "commiting to memory". It's not an action we do, it's a process that results in that.
The actual action we do (when we consciously try to remember something) is e.g. to study (read, repeat, and so on).
> There is no action of "commiting to memory".
Mental notes are a pretty commonly known concept; not that I'm claiming everyone can make them easily, or at all, but they don't typically require focused studying. I'd consider them an example of committing something to memory intentionally. Sure, studying is another way of committing things to memory. You can read something repeatedly and completely ignore it just as much as you can read something repeatedly with the intention of remembering it. You can also make mental remarks without them becoming mental notes. But it is certainly possible to create a memory on purpose. It's just that studying an entire subject requires you to train your understanding quite a bit in order to build a good memory of it, as opposed to memorizing a single simple idea or lesson that you already intuitively understand.
Please teach me to this magical "commit to memory" skill. Up till now memorizing has always been a side effect of some other process like studying for me. I would love to be able to skip all of that.
You can't create a memory of something you don't already have in your head. Studying puts stuff into your head for you to remember. Memory usually comes naturally after that happens, but it usually cannot come before, unless you happen to have perfect recall and memorize the image of whatever you are reading.
A good example of committing something to memory on demand is making a mental note. I don't know if everyone has this ability, but it's a pretty commonly known concept. You don't have to study the subject of the note in order to remember it; it's often something simple like "do this tomorrow" that you already understand, so it's easy to memorize.
> They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama
They actually are, thou. Small kids are repeated the same things over and over, hundreds of times. They watch the same Bluey episodes dozens of times, get them read the same books dozens of times, listen to the same songs dozens of times.
They drill in their own ways, but they drill.
> It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
Those are not opposite activities. Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak; and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.
Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers learn them by repetition. You can't be serious advocating "just go read stuff" as a way to learn a language. Some foundation, acquired by explicit learning, is required to even start reading.
> Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.
That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what's going around him (including language) at least 16 hours per day, every day. An adult has much less time for that.
> Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak
This isn't actually a settled matter. I did a literature dive a while back and found that drilling vocabulary flashcards shows the highest benefit on artificial recall tasks (like multiple choice tests), and over relatively short time scales (days to weeks). Studies that looked at longer time scales (months to years) and more organic tasks generally showed mixed results. Which I generally interpret as a sign that the literature in question is highly susceptible to the file drawer effect.
And that in turn suggests that the magnitude of flashcarding's value for this kind of thing has a lot to do with your goals. In a nutshell, are you more interested on the science on how to develop communicative proficiency over the long run, or are you more interested on the science on how to get a good grade in class?
I'm studying Chinese right now, and I do use flashcards, but it's not because I believe it's the best way, per se. It's because it's a convenient option for reviewing characters and words that don't appear often in the reading material I have. When they do appear often in my reading material, I find (anecdotally) that it takes a lot fewer organic repetitions to get the character or word to stick in my head than it does with flashcard repetitions.
It's also worth mentioning there's no particular reason to assume Chinese and Japanese schools are any less likely than schools elsewhere in the world to cling to inefficient pedagogical techniques out of a sense of tradition. So one can't necessarily assume that the way they are doing it is the way they ought to be doing it.
> 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 tongue. My oldest rarely contributes individual words to this dictionary anymore, but he still improvises expressions and idioms.
An anecdote I once heard provided in support of this point in a lecture: there are aspects of Spanish grammar that native speakers typically don't grasp until their teenage years.
I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure selection bias.
The one thing children can learn that adults generally cannot is native pronounciation. If that is included in language proficiency, then adults take an infinite amount of time to learn!
True, but I really dislike the amount of focus people put on that. With the right techniques, it's not particularly difficult for an adult to develop decently good pronunciation that allows them to be comfortably understood. And placing the bar for having learned a language to a high level of proficiency at "able to hide evidence of where they were born from native speakers" smacks of internalized xenophobia.
I also read in a second language acquisition textbook a while back (so, decent chance of being out of date, also decent chance of my memory of what I read being less-than-perfect) that the strongest predictor of how native-like an accent someone develops isn't actually the age at which they started learning the language, it's the lag between when they started learning it and when they started socially integrating into a community of native speakers. And it happens to be the case that, for all sorts of practical reasons, there's a strong correlation between this lag period and age. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to the critical period hypothesis - there is - but when we're talking about children it's difficult-to-impossible to root out selection bias effectively enough to permit even a convincing stab at partial identification of causal effects. Which creates a risky situation for the purposes of drawing firm conclusions, because our prejudices love to helpfully answer the questions that science won't.
In grad school I had a social science textbook that dubbed these kind of questions "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions" in the first chapter, and in subsequent chapters simply described them as "FUQ'd".
> 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.
Understanding coming from years of exposure leading to memorizing the whole low hanging words of a language and their meaning.
They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they also remember the word sounds attached to the associated concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those words as well). All the while commiting to memory all kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name and the ABC.
Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a generalized concept -- then again nobody said understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective in being able to use and think with not just the concepts but also the relevant facts related to them).
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.
I remember one where the kid was asked, "do you want some half-and-half?"
"No, I want whole and whole!"
> A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what's going around him
Right—not simply memorizing what's happening around them. Those are fundamentally different activies. That is the gist of the parent comment's point.
They've also acknowledged expressly that rote memorization techniques are "valuable" and "have a place."
> and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.
Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write.
> You can’t be serious advocating “just go read stuff”
True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it.
> even native speakers learn them by repetition
No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger.
> life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult
True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating.
> An adult has much less time for that
I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies.
There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.
Vocabulary flashcards are not all that efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak. They teach you translation rather then meaning directly, you don't get context or the "context" is super repetitive sentence and so on.
And plus, general recommendation is to learn words elsewhere and just put them into anki to not forget.
Some people like it, but it is not the only or the most recommended way to learn speak and write.
> Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers learn them by repetition.
I've tried this for years with Japanese kanji and never really got very far. Just didn't work well, they largely were just a big blob of lines.
Then I found an Android app (Kanji Study) that mixes this in with informational screens that break down kanji into radicals and puts them alongside a bunch of multi-kanji words and uses them in sentences so we can see them in context, and it's actually been working.
Learning to read Chinese is done by learning to write Chinese. The strict (but structured) stroke order while writing becomes part of muscle memory, and in turn, becomes a kind of kinesthetic mnemonic device while reading.
The app I mentioned has that too, but stepping back and giving context helps me more.
For example, 語 being composed of 言, 五, and 口 reduces it down to 3 things instead of 14 strokes. This is an easy one since the parts are distinct, but plenty aren't nearly as obvious, like the left side of 教
You are changing the definition of memory we have had for like 25 centuries in the West. That is your choice but there is no stretching on the other side.
“To me” is not what defines what something is.
> 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.
I reject you rejection. You need to provide a reason something learned via pain is fundamentally different from something learned without pain. We used to beat school children for not learning their lesson.
Drilling vocabulary flashcards is very helpful in learning a language. As is reading, listening, or talking to someone. To learn a language well, you need to do both. Although children ultimately reach the level of being a native speaker, they do not do this very quickly considering that they say their first words when they are about 1 year old.
haha, no man, the "creativity" cargo cult should be entirely ignored. You shouldn't even consider what mechanistic formula they've invented. If you do you might buy into it and your creativity will be less your own.
Never listen to the grownups, everything they say is a lie.
Makes total sense. Kinda like how we can't train an LLM how to speak by just giving it a dictionary.
I am not commenting on or agreeing with the OP, but your response is false. LLMs aren't given just a dictionary, and they do not know how to speak. Speech implies grasp of semantics. There is zero semantics in a block of text, only, according to some interpretation, various textual correlations.
> It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
You need the 'flashcards' before you can read, listen or talk. Go try reading a book where you don't know most of the words. Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first. Try reading a text where you haven't learned the writing system.
> Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.
Because they can't read.
> They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.”
Obviously you aren't a parent. You think a child magically decides one day to say mama? Or do you think it's the mother constantly saying 'mama' to the child until the child 'remembers it' and repeats it?
> They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body.
What? Complex statistical inferences about the world?
> Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first.
I've a toddler who can read 3 paragraphs of 3 sentences each, and then tell you the details of the story he read[1]. He is 4y6m, right now. He has never learned the alphabet or the names of the letters (A,B, C, D, etc). He has only learned the sounds a letter or sequence of letters make for certain patterns.
You most definitely do not need to memorise the alphabet in order to learn to read!
Teaching children the alphabet before teaching them reading makes it a lot harder for them to learn actual reading.
[1] I've seen kids as old as 7 get confused by a book with no pictures, and he sails right on through because I taught him to read (using the DISTAR alphabet), and made sure none of our daily lessons had even a single picture in it.
You should be aware that people are able to become fluent without ever using flashcards.
Kids say mama almost universally and regardless of their local language because it's an easy sound to make.
How are you defining a "flashcard"?
> ...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.
Perhaps I worded it too emotionally. I mean that experts struggle to remember what it was like before they understood something. It’s very common for experts to ask novices to make leaps that they aren’t capable of making, because they seem natural or obvious from an expert POV.
I’m all for hard work; learning is usually very hard work. I also think we need expert guidance.
But let’s make the difficulty useful/effective rather than counterproductive.
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.
Parent is saying there's a big difference between being an expert in a field and being a good teacher.
"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 with any sort of tacit knowledge, not just taste. I just figure taste is especially important in creative endeavors. That's definitely the case for programming! Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
For what it's worth, I do think that it is useful and important to have a good mental model of what expertise is and how you can develop it. Memorization might be a component of this, but it's going to be a small component at most. I expect that realistic practice with fast feedback and expert mentorship matters far more. (If you're curious, I found the book Sources of Power by Gary Klein gave me a good way to think about how expertise works.)
At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time and it's frightfully dull. For me, at least, trying to memorize something without context is not just ineffective but also totally kills any intrinsic motivation I have for whatever I'm learning. Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but I've found that to be relatively rare. Otherwise, my time is generally better spent on some sort of practice in context.
Thanks for reading and the response!
One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization.
I understand the connotation of "memorization" evokes an image of blindly memorizing without connecting, but isn't the tastefully developed expertise just memorization of a better heuristic?
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, or to come up with an infinite array of permutations, extrapolations, etc which is where the real ideas come from.
Further, ideas crucially revolve not around just the information itself, but the "feel" for what role they play in the whole, how well they do it, in what way they're notable, etc.
In fact I'd straight up claim that memorization is antithetical to creativity - a perfect ML autoencoder or GAN would just regurgitate the training data. Creativity comes from generalisation while memorisation is analogous to overfitting.
A million times this.. I also am extremely creative and in fact I think the MOST creative people are really bad at intentional memoration, but are good at seeing patterns.
I feel like often the reason a creative person is hyper creative is they haven't memorized things so they are trying to rebuild information all the time in their heads from very sparse details.
This creates the transformative and relational combinations of information that a person memorizing can't see because it is created from a lack of organized specific information rather than a bounty of it.
I think we have a problem of semantics here. Your notion of "the brain internalizes insights" is very close to what the author means as memorizing patterns. They even gäbe a few examples where they started with rote memorizations, which were not that useful at first, but eventually a pattern, an insight if you will, emerged.
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 memorisation in analytical work.
Strictly speaking, someone like you does not need to memorise things because you can always derive them from more fundamental principles. But being able to do that, while a blessing, is also a crutch.
Reasoning from first principles every time is slow compared to pulling out the right relationship for the problem at hand right away.
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)
I forgot to reply to this and don't want to write a long answer now in case you won't see it. If you're still interested, shoot an email to hn@xkqr.org and I'll give more details. Sorry for taking so long!
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. “Try-hards use spreadsheets to be funnier” is…sad?
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Yes! Creativity often happens when you try to reconstruct something you failed to memorize, but succeed at making something else.
"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"
Sorry, but this is memoization.
I feel like every reply making a point against memorisation would benefit from having their definition of what is memorization, because every single one of those replies sound like they're still implicitly describing some sort of memorization as the better way
I feel like this is about the difference between rote/explicit memorization and organic/implicit/tacit memorization, for a lack of better words. I suspect the former could narrow/restrict your understanding because it may be constrained/limited by the vocabulary/definition itself.
Exactly, everyone here is just describing different forms of memorization
I think perhaps there's a confusion of "memorization" with "rote memorization". The word "rote" connotes flashcards and dull drills, but memorization by itself, to me at least, is more like "a focused attempt at internalizing information", in whatever way that means to a person, as opposed to just ingesting it or letting it wash over you/osmosis.
But that's just my interpretation of the terms. I don't know what the "official" meanings are.
What do you call it when you remember things so you can repeat them but you can't generalize? E.g. if you learn a poem or phrase in a foreign language, but can't reuse the words in different contexts? Or being able to recite a rule, but not automatically applying it?
Is there a word for this?
Similarly, we should have a word for knowing how to reuse something in a different context, but not recall its origin or its canonical portrayal. Being able to apply a rule, without being able to recite it.
Do you think there's one word which means both of these things, which are opposites, as I've stated them?
> What do you call it when you remember things so you can repeat them but you can't generalize? E.g. if you learn a poem or phrase in a foreign language, but can't reuse the words in different contexts? Or being able to recite a rule, but not automatically applying it?
"Rote memorization"
Rote means learning by repetition.
And "rote memorization" is a compound term that means what you were asking for. It's one of those things you can't get the exact meaning of by just looking at the components.
Transfer learning.
Transferring skills from one context to another is surprisingly hard to do, but not impossible. AFAIK, contexts must be similar to each other for transfer to take place.
Is it? If I don't remember any of the detail, but just the general "feel" of the concept.. is that memorization?
https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-basics/memory/types-memory
I think I would call it internalization instead of memorization. People memorize equations not knowing what the variables are, others internalize the concepts of what is trying to be calculated.
Modeling is not memorization. It's more generic and can't allow you to reproduce the memorized information, only describe its underlying structure.
If I cannot recall the information or even that I've come across it unprompted, is it really? Because that's my norm, and I still retain insights from that, that are then applicable across topics.
> > and builds model
> memoization
Was this intentional and no one caught on? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization
Or just a typo?
Typo. Funny typo given we're on hn.
That's true if you broaden the definition of "memorization" to cover all learning, but "learning is necessary for creativity" would not be a particularly interesting thesis.
Expertise is the result of learning from past experience, both in developing an internal intuition for what you're doing and in having past patterns to draw upon. To the extent that experts have simple easily verbalizable heuristics, these are largely post-hoc attempts at explaining their intuition rather than an accurate reflection of how they make decisions.
And, in fact, experts can't even always do that: it is perfectly possible for experts to make good decisions without being consciously aware of why they are making them, and explaining how to make good decisions is a separate skill from being able to make them in the first place. The book I mentioned has a memorable story about a firefighter who thought he had precognition after pulling his team out of a dangerous situation without any specific indicator of the danger, but I figure a more common example is experts saying they did something because it was the "obvious" or "clean" or "better" way to do it and getting a bit flustered when pushed further.
We can see this in action pretty clearly if we look at advice for, say, writing. There is a lot of advice from good writers but just memorizing and blindly following this advice is actively counterproductive. Advice you can memorize fundamentally must lack nuance and context. We can see this clearly because so many different pieces of writing advice contradict each other and because good writers do not follow any of those suggestions with any consistency.
The same definitely applies to programming, which is why we have both "don't repeat yourself" and "you ain't going to need it", and why new programmers trying to apply either rule (or both!) to a codebase inevitably create a mess. What I've found with programming advice is that most suggestions are either actively wrong or too vague to be useful. (By the time you've learned enough about programming to be able to follow the vague advice, you don't need it very much!)
This happened about 20 years ago when they were trying to automate recognizing cancer cells. They showed photos to experienced diagnosticians and asked 'What features do you look for?' They couldn't articulate what they were seeing.
The concept is called 'tacit knowledge'.
Why are you attached to the word "memorization" here? Certainly taste comes from experience and learning. Maybe you could argue that all learning is an oblique and imperfect form of memorization—but why argue that at all?
The only reason I can see is if you think memorization could be a shortcut to good taste, which it can't. Acquiring good taste requires broad experience—more information than you can possibly remember—such that you retain a suite of sophisticated intuitions. Cutting that information down to something that can be memorized would require you to (1) already have the intuitions you're seeking to acquire, and (2) be able to express them all in plain English, which, as far as I know, cannot be done. No painter has ever expressed their aesthetic in such a way that a student could memorize that expression and then have the same creative sensibilities as the original painter.
Ultimately, there's no substitute for the process of simply consuming lots of art while paying close attention to what you like about it.
>One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization.
seems to me there is a relatively big inductive gap there, you believe that there is an internalized heuristic and at its core is memorization, you may even have some evidence that this internalized heuristic has strongly informed your development of taste, but it is pretty difficult to make an argument that is the case for all people.
Aside from that I would say that "internalized heuristic with memorization as the core" puts everything on nurture and no input of nature - which I am pretty much in the camp of combinations of nature and nurture creating the person - of which taste must surely be a big component.
Schmidhuber reached your conclusions first.
Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes
https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360
not the parent poster but I think I agree with your perspective here. The alternative is that some individuals' taste or sense of aesthetics is somehow innate and unmoored from the statistics of the things they experience. There may be something to this, but for most practical purposes I would agree with your point.
Another alternative is that taste is something you can only learn through experience and mentorship, where memorizing simple rules and heuristics is not sufficient. Taste is an example of tacit knowledge[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
Perhaps this is where I disagree -- I believe while difficult, all tacit knowledge can be made explicit, but is just hard to do so
This may be because I'm not good at picking up on social cues, so had to learn things more consciously
But ofc I could also be wrong and maybe there are things the subconscious can learn that the conscious cannot
There’s another argument though that some taste is genetically programmed, like our affinity for campfires or sweeping views. Those don’t seem to be learned as they seem to be entirely cross cultural and innate. Those aren’t examples of art of course but make the point that some sense of aesthetics may not be learned.
also a question - if you have better long term or short term memory how does that affect taste? How does it affect creativity, if all of these things are essentially memorization you would have to assume that people were more creative and had better taste the greater their ability to memorize things, which in the case of taste especially seems slightly absurd.
In the case of creativity it may be easier to make an argument - but surely you can find people who seem more creative with less ability to memorize.
> Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
Elegance is probably orthogonal to creativity, and likely follows from some kind of minimization principle, like minimum program length. You are effectively distilling the "essence" of something from all of the noise.
Creativity seems different, more like novelty, and creativity following some kind of remix of memorized elements + some randomization seems very plausible.
You can create something novel but not elegant, and something elegant but not novel, and you can distill an elegant version of something novel that your or someone else created and that's the best of all creations.
I completely disagree with your assertion that "...rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts."
I would recommend reading the book Moonwalking with Einstein. There is a lot of discussion there on how memory is linked directly to creativity, and to understanding concepts deeply.
---
A choice passage:
"...If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.
The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root 'inventio' is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.
This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. "The realization that composing depended on a wellfurnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity," writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one's memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. "As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middles Ages with composition, not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them---as all crafts are used---to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems." ..."
Great book, motivated me to then read The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.
Although I'd say traditional mnemonic devices like memory palaces are basically linear information storage and recall devices. This can create issues in building a flexible web of information, because loci or the order of the path can become dependencies and you can run out of unique spots in a given space, leading to memory interference.
Even spaced repetition methods (e.g. Anki) tend towards fragmentation of micro-ideas. Its perfect for terms, languages, and simple one question -> one answer ideas.
I've found a hybrid method of images, nested loci and spaced repetition to be most useful, because its flexible over time, and preserves relationships of ideas.
(Context: I co-founded a SaaS in this space: www.sticky.study)
You are very correct in my experience since mnemonics backfired on me that way. It was like my brain constricted on those but recall was good in limited situation.
Thanks for sharing your alternative. I like that you’ve included your references for each component of your method. That might help as many people as your product. I’ll look into it sometime.
Great passage -- this is exactly what I was trying to get at, though they've described it with much more eloquence and historical backing.
Have never heard of this book but adding to my list now!
Didn't Einstein say that don't memorise what you can look up? E.g. nothing nowadays since we have the Internet.
The internet has so much information we often can't actually find what we're looking for once we get past a certain surface level understanding. Or people don't want to pay to host it anymore. Our people disagree with it and it's taken down.
I don't disagree with Einstein, but I wonder what he would say with the modern internet at his disposal. Maybe the same?
All of us over here memorizing words to speak instead of looking up each word each time...
The book Make it Stick taught me that this Don’t Cramp My Style With Your Boring Rote Learning (Man) attitude is prevalent in teaching. At least American. They argue that it is wrong for the same reason that the author does.
But saying this to a programming crowd must be the most futile thing. At least instrumentalists have to rote train their muscle memory. That lowest bar has to be passed, even if it’s just three chords.
But the article isn’t about programming creativity though. It is a general concept. But if honing in on the mythical lone-genius activity (geniuses never practice in a structured way) helps you win an argument then so be it.
I think it is more of becoming fluent with primitives that can be composed in versatile ways. I can see how that can be poorly understood as memorization.
The main implication is that if what you are “memorizing” is not easily composable, then you won’t be able to apply them broadly or creatively.
However, I disagree with the author on what creativity is, although his definition is one experience of a creative inspiration.
Interesting perspective. I do agree that there are people out there who develop a distinct "taste", but I can't tell if this refers to a "style", an emergent property of multiple "habits", etc? I've always wondered how one develops their "taste".
Also, would you consider a subconscious habit "memory"? What's the difference between the two?
Counterargument: the alphabet.
> 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 White. After all, great artists steal.
There's a big difference between "artist who didn't have a deep knowledge of their art-form" and "artist who didn't follow an explicit system to memorize a bunch of rules to make their art".
Wait, why do you think Picasso didn't have deep knowledge? He studied both at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona & the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, for ~5 years before moving to Paris.
Borges was incredibly talented, but it's worth keeping in mind his dad was a writer too.
Good art very much relies on being exposed to lots of other good art first. I don't know that rote memorization is the best way to achieve that, but you definitely need that exposure.
Sorry, I must have expressed myself badly. I'm picking examples of people I think did/do have deep knowledge of their chosen mediums.
I don't think it's possible to have "good taste" without exposure to lots of examples, because I believe taste it culturally bound. Whether you do it explicity via a system, or on a more ad hoc basis, I think most artists need it.
It might be interesting to look at film, where the process is compressed into a couple of generations. I don't know it it will support my argument or not.
Ah, misread you then, thanks for clarifying.
I don't think film will look very different here - early film work was very much informed by theatrical tastes at the time, and then started to diverge as people figured out what else they could say in the language of film.
Fundamentally, all art exists in a cultural context. If you've ever taken an art history course, you've been hit over the head with that info a few times ;) And that means furthering/changing taste in a given field means being aware enough of the existing rules to deliberately choose which ones you're breaking, and why.
There are some (very few) artists who didn't have a formal grounding, but I'd argue that even they were steeped enough in cultural context to be informed by it. Even famous autodidacts like Grandma Moses did develop a love for art based on being exposed to a bunch of it.
(Fully recognizing that it's a somewhat tautological argument because it's kind of impossible to grow up in a society without being somewhat exposed to its predominant art forms)
Picasso was a hack. People often cite his "early masterpieces", but those pieces are pretty mid in the context of 19th c. painting.
I think that argument is that these artists did not memorized rules or previous pictures and then applied them. They did put a lot of effort into learning, but that is different claim. If you define "memorization" as "any learning of anything", then the word is kind of useless.
Pollock is often regarded as pushing painting forward, for example
Thanks, I don't know enough about him - does that support my hypothesis or tear it down?
Pollock was obsessed with creating an art style that had no basis in any other style, something truly "original." He felt the abstract style he created fit that aim.
That being said, in some ways you could say that the splatter paintings he's known so well for are in fact influenced by all the art he studied and discarded along the way. They were definitely influenced by the principles of artistic design he learned, even if they looked different from what people were used to.
In my opinion, your hypothesis is supported, though maybe in a bit of a roundabout way.
> Well, okay, but rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts.
Of course it is. It's how every human child learns initially. By rote memorization. How does a toddler learn how to say mama? By constantly hearing and repeating it. How does a kid learn their ABCs? Rote memorization is the basis of all memory.
> Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
Dumbest thing I've ever read. You write programs well by doing and remembering. Same with writing. Memorization is the necessary component to programming well. In other words, you program well by remembering elegant code.
> For me, at least, trying to memorize something without context
After the basics, most memorization is contextual.
> At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time and it's frightfully dull.
Oh dear. Something isn't fun all the time. What a childish worldview. It's more fun to eat candy and drink soda than eating 'dull'. It's more fun to sit and watch youtube than to workout.
> Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but I've found that to be relatively rare.
Relatively rare? In order to be competent in anything, you have to memorize lots. You can't write a good essay without having memorized much of the material. Trying reading a book where you have to constantly look up definitions of words because you lack the vocabulary. Try having a conversation with someone who has to constantly look up words because he lacks the vocabulary. Try having code review with someone who doesn't remember anything about their code.
> Otherwise, my time is generally better spent on some sort of practice in context.
Why? Because it helps you remember?
To the idiot ( probably OP ) who downvoted, try coding without having 'memorized' the keyboard. The anti-intellectual, anti-hard work, anti-memorization agenda pushed by some 'people' online bears looking into.
Strong points, but insults and emotion aren't how we do it on HN.
My personal motto: "Be the Change You Wish To See on HN".
The most striking comment was this:
> Growing up with Indian parents in California, I was exposed to both. My mom would write daily Kumon sheets out by hand for me to do, and teach me from Indian textbooks from the same grade (which were much more advanced than the US equivalents). The result was me breezing through the US school system without much thought.
Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the UK school system, where the maths is much less advanced. Philippines schools, meanwhile, have better discipline and more motivated students.
I conclude that Western public education is in a bad state, and this is a source of chronic social weakness.
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 with a copy of Bronshtein & Semendyayev)
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.
There are plenty of south/East Asian counties that have just as much if not more restrictions in textbooks. So I don’t think that alone accounts for the discrepancy
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.
That story wouldn’t work in deeply secular England, & it seems unlikely to explain underperformance in maths.
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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?
> Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the UK school system, where the maths is much less advanced.
This doesn't appear to be reflected in PISA scores (489 UK, 441 Ukraine)
Maybe because UK education system knows about this PISA and Ukraine and other countries don't even care?
For example one thing that puzzles me in western education is this reading comprehension. What exactly is this for? I studied in Russian school/university and we had nothing like that.
Reading means you should understand what you are reading, reading without comprehension is just nonsense for me.
I am Spanish. We call it text analysis and it is quit common at all levels in school and university.
So what exactly is it supposed to teach/train? If I understand meaning of individual words in the text I just put them together and I understand it. If its relatively complex topic I would sit and think about it.
It teach you resources for text construction.
The different meanings of a word relative to its semantic enviroment.
When, how, and why to use all the different time vebrs.
How to understand and use figures of speech.
And it gives you tools to analyze all of that.
People dont do that in Ukranian?
First of all I must say that I can only speak about Russian schooling, Ukranian is probably similar but I can't be sure about it.
> resources for text construction Not sure I understand this, there are words in a given language, you put them together and you have your text.
> The different meanings of a word relative to its semantic enviroment. I agree that some words may have multiple meanings, but this again sounds to me like a language skill, be able to understand what exactly each word means in a context. Not sure how this is different for reading or speaking.
> When, how, and why to use all the different time vebrs. This is an interesting one, I guess in Russian (I assume its similar in Ukranian) we don't have many complex time forms, I know in English and Spanish there are like 10 or more.
Somehow we only studied language and literature and did some exercises related to reading and understanding text, but it is not a whole separate subject.
In each school class kids are supposed to read books and learn from them, just like that.
Also, this problem is a vicious cycle. Bad math students become bad math teachers. I believe that one has to be significantly good at a subject in order to teach the basics well. In school I got a feeling that many math teachers did not know a chapter of math beyond what was in the textbook.
Doesn't help that in the American economy, good mathematicians can earn 10x more than a math teacher's salary.
Why do you assume Ukrainian math is memorization based? They actually do a lot of problem solving, they are not doing rote memorization.
Indian math system is not memorisation based either.
Math anywhere in the world is all about how many patterns you know/seen. And inventing new math is all about changing one small thing about the stuff you already know and see if it remains logically consistent.
Knowing what to change largely depends on the stuff you already know. To that end even if you don't memorize facts, you still need to memorize patterns.
You have to memorize something. Nobody invents the Apple pie from scratch.
You don't "memorize" when learning math. You solve problems and then you happen to learn to recognize patterns and start to remember some things. Those are not the same learning activities.
Memorization is something else. I have seen students trying to memorize math and these were all bad students. Completely lost when the exercise changed slightly.
If we start to use "memorization" for "any time something is remembered" then the word will loose its meaning.
"Drilling" is perhaps the better word. The point is it benefits from repetitive practice.
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 have some level of knowledge already. This has happened to Kubernetes troubleshooting, statistics, PowerShell windows programming, and traffic engineering just in recent history.
I have yet to publish some of these, but I have examples from statistics:
https://two-wrongs.com/intuition-and-spaced-repetition.html
https://two-wrongs.com/inventing-fishers-exact-test.html
The latter is certainly creative in my book, although it does imply creativity within strict bounds.
I'm similar. This from your top link stood out to me:
"It’s a little like building with lego bricks or something – spaced repetition helps ensure all the tiny pieces are in the right place, so that the big castle can happen without structural integrity issues."
The book Make it Stick (by Henry L. Roediger III) had a similar idea they called 'Structure Building'. Very similar to what you described, more experienced and effective learners were creating mental schemas of how the little, but crucial parts of a subject fit together, and successfully cut through the noise.
Structure Building was associated with interleaved practice (shuffling of problem types) and spaced retrieval practice.
I really enjoyed both blog posts, thank you for sharing! And I have to say, your explanation of the subexponential distribution property was remarkably clear for someone without a background in statistics :)
Would you mind sharing the flashcards you generated to build this intuition? I've been using Anki for a while and really trying to focus now on improving my prompt writing; would love to see how you managed it for this problem.
As much as I would like to, I think getting to that understanding required at least 500 flashcards on general statistical and probability concepts, ranging from fundamentals to extreme value theory. Most of those are only barely relevant at face value, but still contribute to understanding.
It's not that I set out to understand this specific thing but that I had studied statistics with flashcard support for a year and that happened to work after a few attempts.
Completely makes sense, appreciate the thoughtful reply. Any tips for writing flashcards when studying a textbook?
I've long wanted to write about this but never been able to think of anything original to say, but your question forced me to face this with effort. Thanks!
When making flashcards I draw a lot from the softer type of theory-building they do in social sciences. I ask questions like
- What are the properties of this?
- What variants of this exist? I.e. how would I recognise this in the wild, or in other shapes?
- What subcomponents can this be deconstructed into?
- Into which bigger picture does this fit?
- What are the consequences of this? What are its antecedents?
- What is this a special case of? What would a generalisation of this look like?
- Which are other related things? What are their similarities and differences?
- In what context might I need to know this?
Whenever I encounter what seems like a significant thing I loosely ask some of these questions, and try to construct atomic, focused flashcards from the answers.
I say loosely because it would take forever to to through all questions for all flashcards I make, so there's some bit of intuition that attracts me to which I think are the most significant questions for any given thing.
-----
One trick to make flashcards more specific that I use (maybe even abuse) is putting part of the answer into the prompt. Instead of prompting "What is the property of subexponential distributions I found meaningful in this book?" I might prompt "What behaviour do subexponential distributions have around high barriers that others don't?" -- I'm giving away part of the answer by including "high barrier" in the prompt, but I'm okay with that.
If I'm concerned about that, I might create a second flashcard prompting something like "What can a subexponential distribution do in one step that a more well-behaved distribution needs many steps to do?" with the answer "clear a high barrier". That captures both sides of the property without making too general a prompt.
I also do this a lot with "why" questions. Instead of prompting "what is the definition of y?" I might prompt "why is the definition of y=f(x)?" That gives away essentially the entire answer but focuses on the why instead.
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.
Math proof and derivations are a bit like remembering a walking route. You've seen the start and end, and the main turns taken, and there's also a general "walking" skill you need.
My argument is that it is worth memorising also the derivations, rather than re-deriving from scratch each time.
Meorising the derivation makes it easier to derive a second-order derivation, and so on. At some level of abstraction, going from first principles becomes prohibitively expensive and caching intermediary results, or so to speak, unlocks that again.
Sometimes yes, just like jargon is sometimes useful. Why use long-winded terms or descriptions when shorthand works between professionals.
Anki flash cards?
I use org-drill in Emacs but it's the same idea, yes.
The trick is not so much which software or settings one uses, but writing high-quality prompts.
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 subconscious heuristics and memory.
Absolutely, especially in real world application. If you don't have the ability to pull on fundamental ideas anywhere, anytime, then have you really mastered the learning material?
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.
Couldn't have said it better, exactly -- the negative connotations of the word prevent us from recognizing what powers learning at its core
But imo acknowledging this unlocks greater speeds and gets us to the "fun part" quicker
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 want to wax philosophical, by all means, but I think anyone taking “thoughtful insight” away from this article or thread is fooling themselves.
Whatever the epistemic quality of the article is, it's triggered some interesting discussion here which I think is valuable. No need to denigrate talking about human experience with other humans, I think?
You'll experience the creativity outlined in the article directly when you start doing deliberate memorization, i.e spaced repetition. No qualification needed.
I think semi-obvious would be a better criticism than unprovable.
You can't make connections unless you have things to connect to.
You can't recognize (your own discovered/inspired) novelty unless you have memorized normality.
If you are creative in the absence of knowledge of what already exists then that's considered as reinventing the wheel, and not very useful, even it it's Ramanujan reinventing much of established mathematics.
One might talk about it from the perspective of birdsong, which is used by mates to judge sexual fitness. First a tutee bird learns from a tutor bird, and then eventually applies variability to the original song.
It's strongly suspected that anterior forebrain pathway (AFP) may be a source of behavioral variability. We naturally age over time, including our vocal musculature, so in some sense we must constantly relearn how to use our muscles to deliver a song.
When a bird is deafened its birdsong will naturally drift, but when we precisely damage the AFP along with deafening we find that birdsong remains stable for a longer period of time, until of course inevitably it must drift due to aging vocal musculature.
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 homework on the subject.
> 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
Appreciate this, that's exactly it -- not challenging any existing theories or academia.
Not even saying I'm right or novel.
Just sharing a framework born from my observations that is actively working for me.
Honestly didn't even think this was that controversial, imo the best criticism on here is that my essay was "semi-obvious"
Except that commenter had construed my sarcastic point and made it about academia. It is an irrelevant reading of the remark. They had a reading comprehension problem.
Without sarcasm, my point was/is not that you need to know all the theories or engage with academia or write a formal paper.
Rather, my point is that if you're going to write on a topic, at least know what the basic science has to say on it. You wouldn't write about mask wearing, or recycling plastic, etc., based purely on anecdotal evidence. You would include information from scientific sources and consensus.
Doing that raises the level of discourse and forces you, the author, to be responsible for not propagating misinformatiom and pseudoscience. Especially so in the area of self-help and learning psychology.
So again, my original comment while making a sarcastic remark about memorizing scientific literature was really about communicating your ideas in a scientifically literate way just as any lay person has a personal responsibility when discussing a topic, be it about technology or psychology or sociology, etc.
I disagree, I think writing purely based off anecdotal evidence is fine as long as you're not making scientific claims (which I'm not).
Simply sharing what works for me and why I think it does for something as personal as creativity is not the same as contesting mask wearing or recycling.
Is there some specific point in my piece that disagrees with consensus that's not just contesting the definition of "memorization" (as seems to be common in this thread)?
There absolutely is a need for fact checking and basic scientific literacy and you're helping foment the opposite by suddenly making this about academia and scientific journals. What's the harm of that? Snake oil promotion and creation of filter bubbles.
There's absolutely an expectation of not rejecting science just as with discussing global warming or Covid.
But explain, why do you pervert an expectation of scientific literacy into an expectation of professional scientific expertise?
Just as there are scientifically informed books and articles on a e.g. health and fitness and dieting, there is a ton of material on education psychology. Why do you allow the author to not do due diligence and at least read the basics which are very much accessible to nonexperts? Why make an exception when in every other STEM topic this would be incredibly ignorant?
If it were a Time magazine article or a newspaper article they would surely include scientific sources in an effort to be truthful. Surely any high-school student knows the steps to write a well-researched essay, so why are you making this about the irrelevant standards of professional academia here? Could it be due to a misunderstanding of the role of science in public education? Are you some kind of Covid vaccine denier or anti-science on some other topic?
In summary, you have wrongly conflated scientific literacy, being scientifically informed, public scientific awareness on a topic, etc., with professional academic scientific expertise. That is irrelevant and absurd. It also offends me that you made a bad faith construal of my statement.
As to your remark about HN, my criticism applies to ANY scientifically informed public discourse, even as HN is a STEM website.
Finally: I'm a reader giving my time and attention to a badly written essay because it got posted on a forum. It is not my job to fix their essay if it is antiscience in the way an antivaxxer makes up pseudoscience reasons why their idea is right. I'm not going to patiently explain to the nth antivaxxer why they are spouting pseudoscience, I'm just going to say that bluntly. This endless handwringing that HN people have over self help and rote memorization is just more of that, it's on them to have read a few simple books and articles on the topic before choosing to write about it for the public.
PS. In "real life", people express sarcasm and maybe your 'disorder' (completely out of line of you to say that, BTW, and against site guidelines to use personal attacks of that sort at fellow users) was failing to detect a sarcastic comment if you actually, literally, thought I meant "the author needs to memorize scientific literature" in context of their argument about memorization. That would have nothing to do with the actual accusation of pseudoscience, where being scientifically informed on a topic is just a basic standard of discourse to avoid misinformation and snake oil promotion.
> Is there anything substantive here? There is plenty.
If you did not find anything interesting or anything that made you think, in the comments or the post itself. Then is your own failure.
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Alphazero was very creative, yet it didn't memorize a single move, it just self played. Deep blue was not creative at all, but it was the chess engine that memorized the most moves, todays chess engines are much better at chess and they don't memorize many moves at all, if you dig through their internals you wont find a lot of board states there.
So no, creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, memorization is neither sufficient to become creative nor is it a requirement. You don't memorize concepts you build models around the concepts. You wont be able to reproduce the exact descriptions of concepts but you will be able to produce something similar that means basically the same thing.
What happens when you forget the models?
All very nice and handwavey, but then you see the user’s current venture is scammy deepfakes as a service, which is about as creatively bankrupt as it gets.
Shame about the national stereotypes as well. There is plenty of creativity in Asian countries. Just bizarre assertions all around.
Historically eastern Asian cultures have placed duty to a whole host of things before oneself, and in many cases the old aphorism "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" applies as well. Plus Japan and Korea have well established cultures of adherence to tradition and mastering simple, time tested things to a ridiculous degree rather than trying to innovate.
Not true of everyone, but if you compare a culture that values conformity and tradition to a country that values the freedom for the individual and trying new things, of course it's not going to measure up by western standards of creativity.
Have you seen their art and entertainment? I assure you there is whole lot of creativity in there. And it has a whole lot MORE variety then western tend to have.
Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions and critiques from mainstream norms. The funny thing is that if you have a rigid conformist society, the rejects are going to double down on the "weird" much more than a well adjusted creative would.
>Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions and critiques from mainstream norms
No, that's just the art that Western readers notice because that's the only thing they recognize as art in the first place. Calligraphy (in China traditionally considered the most important form of visual art) for example has an astonishing tradition in East Asia, also notably related to the topic of the thread, memorization and repetition and practice and has very little to do with critiques of norms.
I found asian genres to be way more diverse and creative then western entertainment even when they dont criticize anything.
Western entertainment tend to produce the same story, in like, two genres, again and again and again and again. Most of the time you can predict the movie storyline down to minute - and people will argue that it is the only correct way.
The people arguing that is the only correct way are the capitalists putting their money on the line, and that comes from a perspective of being risk averse, which is why "corporate art" in America is in such a shambles. Independent video and music are in a great state though.
Are you seriously going to hold up calligraphy as an example of extreme Asian creativity? The art of writing letters with subtle flourish? It's literally an art of understatement, and embodies all the characteristics that I stated are reasons east Asians are culturally biased towards being less innovative.
Yes. Understatement, subtlety and an eye for detail aren't opposites of creativity, it's actually sad that this even needs to be stated. There's no indicator at all that Asian societies are, in any way, biased against being innovative. I recommend reading Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, it's a fantastic read on the indirect and minimal ways in which Asian societies express creativity and aesthetics.
Just because you're loud and brash and write your inventions on your forehead doesn't mean you actually are more innovative or creative than anyone else. I know we've had bad comedians in the West who have made careers out of thinking that being loud equals being funny but you seem to have made an entire worldview out of that idea.
Tell you what. You can use the word "creativity" to mean "creates things" and keep that separate from "innovation" which means to create new things. Sure, east asians are "creative" but 2000 years of evolution in calligraphy pales compared to 500 years of stylistic evolution in western art. In general, westerners like to take chances for personal glory while asians seek to elevate the things their culture already values and has done for generations.
As for your comments about my taste, it's a good thing taste is entirely subjective, you can think I'm boorish and I can think you're boring and lack vision, and we're both entitled to our opinions.
I mean you could say that of most art and entertainment. That’s kind of the _point_; to a large extent it’s how you make new stuff.
"Repetitio est mater studiorum" - repetition is the mother of learning.
My creative writing professor, of all people, used to repeat this three times before every class. He was my favorite teacher at any level.
Ah, I knew that phrase but never connected it to the title "mother of learning" (web novel). Thanks for that tiny epiphany
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee
My Arabic teacher liked to say "التكرار يعلّم الحمار" which rhymes and says "Repetition teaches the donkey"
Not the most flattering of proverbs, but it stuck with me.
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.
I'm glad you said this -- I felt the same way after making this discovery through my method outlined in this post
It similarly took the magic out of creativity and learning a bit, and made it all seem like work
The main way I've found around it is the joy in being creative once basic autonomy is achieved in new skills
Consciously discovering the heuristic is another fun part
you guys might be interested in the latest Machine Learning Street Talk podcast [1] which right from the start is all about how LLMs are great for creativity, as in novel combinations of trained data (from memorization) -- but are not capable of the reasoning skill needed to verify if any idea is actually plausible given a set of constraints.
[1] Do you think that ChatGPT can reason? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1WnHpedi2A
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.
This seems to resonate with my experience, although I feel myself bristling due to the baggage of the word memorization.
Although sometimes “memorization” doesn’t happen because you sit down to do it but rather that you keep using the same things over and over when solving problems that they become internalized. I find that to be a more fruitful path towards understanding that I don’t want to call memorization but it is.
Maybe you should first try to separate the negative feelings you have towards the word "memorization" and the word itself "memorization". There's nothing bad about memorization. This sort of negative bias about inconsequential things is something that can easily hold us back from things that could help us further ourselves.
Tell me about it. Trying to get better every day.
Thanks for reading!
And agreed -- it's this exact realization that led me to both this method and title
Imo this negative connotation has made many people refrain from calling internalization what it is
But acknowledging that it's memorization has actually made me more efficient at learning, since I can now consciously look for the heuristic, codify it, and try to commit it to memory
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.
A fellow CS student didn't understand a theorem, because he didn't understand any of the three definitions used to state it. We went through the definitions together and suddenly the theorem was "trivial"
That is true understanding. He won't need to remember the theorem, because in his mind, it automatically follows from the raw data.
> 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.
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.
I think if you've ever been exposed to music your mind could come up with different melodies, and who hasn't been exposed to some sort of music in their life. Even if they were the only human on the planet, they'd probably still encounter songbirds, at least.
I disagree that you have to be exposed to a lot of music to even have a chance at coming up with something. Maybe coming up with something good, sure, but not having that spark of inspiration. People can have flash inspiration for garbage ideas too, it happens all the time in startups :P
That being said, the spark might happen more often the more you practice doing something about it, to your point.
Reiner Knizia is the most prolific board game designer of all time. He has 742 games credited to him on BoardGameGeek (some of those are rethemes of older games of his, but he still has probably at least 500 different games released).
About half of my prototypes are about on the level of cleverness and completeness as the lower rated half of the games he has published, at least, and maybe even a couple might slip into the top half somewhere (at his most brilliant his games are way, way better than mine though). But his name carries a lot of weight so he doesn't struggle to find publishers for a good chunk of the games he comes up with.
Meanwhile I've mostly switched back to video game development because at least that way I can easily publish the game myself when it's ready (game development is super hard in other ways, though). I tried for six years and got one signed board game that still hasn't been released after four years. Meanwhile there was a time where I was releasing 1-2 Flash games a year. If I had just made video game versions of my game prototypes instead I probably could have some basic playable version of it out on a website somewhere.
Although I do still submit some board game designs to unpublished game design competitions (I was a finalist in one of the biggest ones, for a design which still hasn't found a publisher) and go to conventions and set up meetings with publishers when I can afford to do so (I couldn't afford to this year, my spouse took a break from work and our income cut almost in half).
Umberto Eco had already discussed this extensively in his paper “the combinatorics of creativity”.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find the English version, but it should be very easy to translate, it's only 16 pages.
http://www.umbertoeco.it/CV/Combinatoria%20della%20creativit...
Thanks for the link. Didn't know the text.
I found an English translation here:
- https://w4nderlu.st/media/pages/publications/combinatorics-o...
Translated by Piero Molino at https://w4nderlu.st/publications
Oh wonderful. I hope you can find time to read it! Umberto Eco was one of the most important modern Italian philosophers.
I love his pragmatic and rational approach.
A Columbia b-school professor has written a lot about this and developed a very compelling framework based on this. Bill Dugan - https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/7325584.William_Duggan.
The first two books are fantastic.
What's more is that memories are just a replaying of neuron connections activating in the brain - and when we are prompted by the world around us those connections will fire in response to the stimulus. Quite similar to how AI neural networks function - which is why I believe that AI can indeed be creative and create "new" ideas
I actually made a video diving deeper into this and comparing responses from people and ChatGPT for a creative thinking problem - https://youtu.be/l-9EUBbktqw
I think your hypothesis here (and probably the entire article as well) is strongly challenged by the 'progenitor argument.' Take humans at the dawn of humanity. Language did not even exist beyond what may have been crude sounds or gesturing and collective knowledge did not fall that far beyond 'poke him with the pointy side.' Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon in what was essentially the blink of an eye.
Training an LLM on the entirety of knowledge at this dawn of humanity and, even if you give it literally infinite training time, it's never going to go anywhere. It's going to just continue making relatively simple recombinations of its training set until somebody gives it a new training set to remix. This remix-only nature is no different with modern knowledge, but simply extremely obfuscated because there's such a massive base of information, and nobody is aware of anything more than a minuscule fraction of it all.
---
As for the 'secret' of LLMs, I think it's largely that most language is extremely redundant. One thought or point naturally flows.... why do I complete the rest of this statement? You already know exactly what I'm going to say, right? And from that statement the rest of my argument will also mostly write itself. Yet we do write out the rest, which is kind of weird if you think about it. Anyhow the point is that by looking at language 'flow correlations' over huge samples, LLMs can reconstruct and remix arbitrarily long dialogue from even the shortest of initial inputs. And it usually sounds at least reasonable, except when it doesn't and we call it a hallucination, but it's quite a misnomer because the entire process is a hallucination.
Interesting point - thanks for sharing! I think one big missing piece we have with AIs today is the ability for them to learn on the fly and reconfigure the weights. We are constantly bombarded with input and our neurons adjust accordingly. Current LLMs just use a snapshot. I would be really curious to see how online-first AI models could work, focusing on a constant input stream and iterating on weights. Also I wonder how much knowledge is baked into our DNA through evolution. I have a hunch that this is somewhat analogous to model architectures.
Btw - although I see evidence of LLMs creating "new ideas" through combinations of ideas, I am a bit mystified by their apparent reasoning issues. I wonder how that is different in nature from the memory-based approach. ARC-AGI benchmark has had me thinking about this for sure.
I agree with the author, at least in my own creative experiences. However, it's more likely the case that 'creativity' is arrived at differently for everyone. I find memorization to be a comforting foundational activity that builds knowledge & confidence, which I can later express creatively.
Exactly -- memorization provides the base for creativity to take place upon
But that creativity can come from many places and in many forms!
There is deliberate practice for skill-building. There is exploratory "making" that fuels originality. There is inspiration hunting and incremental tweaking to get to creative mutation. There is high productivity that triggers eventual ingenuity. I find the article hyperbolic in its thesis and execution especially when it comes to the final hand-wavy bit about how there is more per-capita creativity in non-rote learning.
While its hard to prove or disprove without a long study to prove or disprove the author's claim, I'm willing to die on the following hills:
1. Kumon sheets are the antithesis to creativity 2. Understanding is not a form of memorization (not the rote variety anyway)
I've thought a lot about education, and my personal take is that in the US we way undervalue drilling (by which I mainly mean building up familiarity and muscle memory) and way overvalue understanding.
I've been collecting quotes about these topics for a few years. One relevant to creativity and drilling is Bob Dylan's
> If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me.... you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
There is definitely a lot of value in practice and repetition. I don't think rote memorization / drilling are the only means of getting that practice and repetition. Ironically, with a bit of creativity, we can provide both. Lot of practice, lot of repetition, paired with understanding, play and making things.
Creativity is actually defined by this transformation of finding connections between raw data that you already have to know.
Consider use cases for a rock.
Boring would be using it as a paperweight or throwing it through a window.
Novel but uncreative would be throwing it at the sun, or painting it red. Novel, but kind of useless.
But what about using a rock to play rock paper scissors? Planting it in the soil and watching it grow? That's kind of novel, by way of subverting rock's rules (it doesn't grow, unlike plants) or transforming the concept of 'rock' itself — a real rock isn't needed for rock paper scissors.
So only connections between known concepts are creative. Others might be novel, but useless.
Developing heuristics to categorize patterns and internalize concepts != memorization. If anything, it is the opposite of memorization.
Completely -- it's sort of glanced over in my post as an intermediary step to get the next "thing to be memorized" for two reasons:
1) I've often found these heuristics from books/online/mentors and just had to memorize instead of create them
2) In my own experience heuristic creation has been less of a bottleneck than committing to memory
But it is certainly a key piece of info to have
Being forced to do rote exercises sometimes makes you creative. Solve a thousand trivial multiplication problems and you will spontaneously discover lots of shortcuts, patterns, intuitions that can warn you when you make a mistake and so on.
A common issue I notice when people discuss the terrible state of math education in the US is that teachers demand that you solve a problem a specific way, such as multiplying two-digit numbers by drawing base-ten blocks and applying the distributive property.
People who are good at doing multiplication in their head think the method makes perfect sense and don't know what all the fuss is about. But I believe that those people learned how to apply the distributive property "by themselves". That is, by adults forcing them to multiply two-digit numbers over and over until they developed an intuition of the distributive property by necessity.
When people who didn't go through countless drills are taught the base-ten method directly, they have a harder time understanding it. So ironically it is the students who "mindlessly" drill trivial computations over and over that are more prepared to have a "true" understanding of the distributive property, while the ones whose teachers believe drilling is for chumps and try to just explicitly show them the true distributive right away, they end up memorizing the words of the distributive property without understanding it.
I think this analysis as a bit guilty of over-fitting -- it is quite easy to rote memorize a bunch of things while having little to no understanding of what they are or how they work. Trivial examples include training a room of people to memorize a series of facts written in a language they don't speak (the fact that they have memorized doesn't at all mean they have any understanding of the content). So I would say it's not memorization per say, but meaningful exposure to a thing, the more chances you have to meaningfully interact with a thing, the higher the chance is you will learn how to manipulate it and do things with it. This is the difference between understanding and mere memorization, and the more exposure you have, the greater the chance you will start to see the patterns and understand, versus focusing your efforts on memorizing which will just lead to over-fitting and not understanding. As with NNs, so with humans.
On the other hand, episodic memory (insofar as that is distinct from "3*9=27" memorization) is built on top of creativity.
The vast majority of what we consider "memories" are the creative brain doing an on-the-fly story generation, massaged until it "seems right" and serviced plus a big dollop of emotional confidence.
I hear with llm/chatGPT people don't have to blog anymore, but rather the generated plausible-sounding well-structured nonsense flows like an open sewer onto the web.
1. Creativity in a commercial context once stolen/cloned through back-channels accrues value, and manifests as several competitive campaigns
2. New disruptive ideas are usually shelved until the IP/patents expire. No one wants to go through the sometimes impossible licensing process
3. Emerging technology is usually degraded in the rush for IP assets by established firms i.e. large firms dump billions on ridiculous concepts out of fear of market fragmentation
4. Startups do not usually have cash to burn on speculative IP. Thus, real cutting-edge experimental technology is sometimes never made public for numerous reasons.
Creativity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUVix0STUqo
Best of luck, =3
I disagree with elements of this article, but enjoyed reading it. True creatives do not subvert norms consciously or with an acute awareness as part of this article suggests, I agree they need to be exposed to the norms to generate their own interpretation, but I don’t believe that true creativity is a conscious exercise.
Completely agree -- but isn't internalization of their art (i.e. memorization) needed to achieve this subconscious creativity?
That's the point I'm trying to make at least -- that unintentional creativity stems from learning, which at it's core is memorization
Well said - what's funny is that many creative ideas (from an outside perspective) are often very simple connections of two existing ideas for the person that actually did something creative! It's just that other people don't have the same context/knowledge as the creator, so an idea can seem extremely original to them
I agree and feel likewise the author's comments on the above about memorization, but I realized - A higher framework
and is as below, https://rajivkapur.com/3-pillars-of-vedantic-practices/
You have to know things to be reasonably creative but there is a point where memorizing more stifles creativity. Memorization is often very passive and is fundamentally different from searching for new ways of doing things. It's hard to make sweeping statements like this because there are different modes of memory and different modes of creativity.
There is a lot of memory involved in being creative, but I think setting out to memorize things is a bad way to be creative. You have to practice being creative. In doing so, you will naturally remember a lot of stuff like what works, what doesn't, and most importantly which types of things you ought to memorize. For example if you're programming you will find it useful to remember the syntax of your languages. If you're writing you'll find it useful to remember styles and vocabulary. And so on...
Agreed -- I'm not trying to suggest that memory is a replacement for creativity
I'm suggesting that it enables it, as it's hard to be creative when you're still trying to remember the basics of your art
But once things become autonomous -- you can focus on those higher-level explorations
Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.
Regarding Asian cultures and memorization, there is a recent change that has to be pointed out. The role of memorization classically was to aid manana/contemplation after shravana/hearing-the-teaching. The stage of manana is a kind of inquiry where you raise questions and clarify them or see how the teaching applies to various situations in your life(Like learning a principle in physics and solving problems based on the principle). In the case of poetic works the inner-feeling/bhaava sinks into you allowing one to access blissful states.
However, in the modern context, this has been transformed into memorizing arcane lists/tables, on which one is graded without any further manana.
That thesis is way, too oversimplified and a bit misleading. It could lead you to think the real source of creativity is how much you store, facts or patterns. Put Wikipedia on a computer with a pile of heuristics (eg How to Solve It). Then, it will be more creative than humans in no time. Yet, humans with virtually no knowledge are more creative.
My first study of creativity was Cracking Creativity by Michalko. Skimming its tools, I noticed all of them were about changing how one looks at a problem or connects its pieces. Another work told me geniuses are defined by what they forget or ignore more than what they memorize. The two ideas combined into my working approach.
When I did CompSci research, I would look through the papers for the concepts they reported on. High level ones, core prerequisites, and techniques in how they are combined. From there, I could enumerate variations on each. Then, just keep combining them in straight-forward or random ways. Eventually, something emerges.
Likewise, prior work on creativity and A.I. showed reasoning by analogy was huge in humans. We find patterns in one domain that we generalize to look for patterns in another domain. Then, there’s some process of knowing when to try one or not.
These processes so far are extracting a tiny amount of information, filtering most of it, identifying heuristics in a domain, and heuristics across domains. Also, letting the mind just soak on things to do whatever it does in the middle of the night. These are collectively creativity.
Memorization is a building block of, but different from, creativity. The proof is how we’ve long had memory and reasoning in systems but they sucked at creativity. Recently, systems are extrapolating enough to be more creative but are hallucinating nonsense they definitely didn’t remember. So, they’re orthogonal.
“Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art -- they can see the connection or novelty because it's all in their head.”
Edit: I’ll also add that, for planning and creativity, many of us use a deliberate, trial-and-error process that takes time. We don’t just “see” it from something we internalized. We work toward it using the creative process. We usually do see it when it’s finished, though.
The acts of the mind, where in it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three:
1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made.
2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations.
3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
It’s not memorizing, it’s actually knowing and understanding the utility of different concepts. When you learn of a problem in a new field, you go through your bucket of tools and modify one to fit the new problem.
Exactly. And "synthesis" is the better word than "creativity". I wrote an essay about this very topic some years ago: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tbMTpkPWkkN8_KH2KSpteFsb.... (if you can't open Google docs, an older draft is here: https://rogerwagner.com/creativity.html)
Interesting -- hadn't heard of this synthesis vs creativity take before
I could see that -- agreed that "creativity" can be too blunt of a word to use for all situations
Thanks for reading!
Isn't learning which tools in the bucket fits the a problem best just memorizing a heuristic?
That's the point I'm attempting to make, that it's not blind memorization without context, but still memorization of a heuristic at its core
Probably you would have had more agreement, if you would have used a different word (though I’m not able to suggest that different word that captures the meaning I think you intended)
For me anyway, it's getting so familiar with something that your mind wanders and considers other possibilities.
I'm not in anyway an expert, so I googled what some research says. Here's an interesting meta-analysis (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-023-02303-4). Memory and creativity are a lot more complex than I realized. There are different types of each, and it seems like they interact in complex ways. Here's the findings from the abstract:
> We found a small but significant (r = .19) correlation between memory and creative cognition. Among semantic, episodic, working, and short-term memory, all correlations were significant, but semantic memory – particularly verbal fluency, the ability to strategically retrieve information from long-term memory – was found to drive this relationship. Further, working memory capacity was found to be more strongly related to convergent than divergent creative thinking. We also found that within visual creativity, the relationship with visual memory was greater than that of verbal memory, but within verbal creativity, the relationship with verbal memory was greater than that of visual memory. Finally, the memory- creativity correlation was larger for children compared to young adults despite no impact of age on the overall effect size. These results yield three key conclusions: (1) semantic memory supports both verbal and nonverbal creative thinking, (2) working memory supports convergent creative thinking, and (3) the cognitive control of memory is central to performance on creative thinking tasks.
So some memory seems to be correlated with convergent creativity, which according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking) is "the ability to give the 'correct' answer to questions that do not require novel ideas, for instance on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence." It sounds like there's less correlation with divergent creativity, which (again from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking)) is "a thought process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions."
But my real takeaway is that people here seem to have strong (emotional?) opinions on "memorization vs creativity: which is better", but few people seemed to bother reading page 1 google results on the topic. So I like to think that bothering to do some cursory research beats both. :)
I see it like this: after I have seen some colors and a ball I can then imagine a ball in any of those colors.
In other words, everything I have experienced and memorized becomes this pool of resources I can imagine from. More I have seen, more combinations I can imagine.
Then I understand how traveling actually broadens my view. It’s not just some nice phrase but hard reality.
Also this means maybe anything we can imagine we can also create. Because whatever I can imagine I can also plot a path from here to there, imagine all the steps in-between.
You may as well say that creativity comes from writing. Because obviously all of the most creative writers write. And the writings of creative non-writers are entirely absent.
I agree with the conclusions of the article. A concert pianist can only add his/her creativity to the piece if he/she totally internalized the piece.
The category is not the thing categorised.
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?
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." - Steve Jobs
Something I noticed from being raised by Indian parents while going through the US school system
And again after learning how to acquire new skills quickly
I will disagree. Creativity comes from applying acquired knowledge (that's where memorization comes into account) in new contexts.
Appreciate you reading!
But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in this new context?
It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization
i.e. you've memorized the match between inherent traits of the context with a specific application of that knowledge
> It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization
I don't think that meets the commonly accepted definition of memorization.
E.g. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/memoriza... Memorization: the act or process of learning something so that you will remember it exactly.
If you are transforming the knowledge, i dont think that is the same as memorizing it. In fact, i think most people would describe that as the opposite of memorization.
Using your definition, everything would be memorization. For example, you could describe picasso as simply pattern matching on other paintings to make something new, but i think it would be crazy to describe his work as an act of memorization (then again, the way AI generated art works... maybe its not so crazy)
> But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in this new context?
That question has a false precondition baked in. If you know how, it's not creative.
> It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a less obvious form of memorization
No. Sensing and matching patterns does not imply memorization. Everything you're saying is completely loaded.
Did you just discover memorization? Because the pattern I see in your words is similar to anyone who's just learned a new tool or technique - they overapply it everywhere as they learn to use it.
But you must have knowledge of the basic units of your chosen art to apply that to the new situation right?
E.g. if you're an artist, at the very least you need the knowledge of how to draw a line
From other comments here it seems the definition of "memorization" seems to be where disagreements are
Maybe this is a better explanation: once I started trying to make whatI just learned is called "tacit knowledge" more explicit and then committing it to memory, I was able to cut learning times down significantly
I think the disagreements are largely from this weird cultural bias against any form of explicit "memorization". It's very, very strange.
> E.g. if you're an artist, at the very least you need the knowledge of how to draw a line
But no artist memorize how to draw a line. They learn how to draw a line, but learning isn't the same thing as memorizing.
To me, “memorization” implies an active process focused on learning a particular set of “matches” (to adopt the term you’re using here). But it seems to me that tacit knowledge (and other products of less concentrated/deliberate learning) often plays a substantial role in creativity.
That is, creativity fundamentally comes from internalized knowledge (as the article says) but internalized knowledge doesn’t necessarily come from memorization.
I think I see -- in your view "memorization" only refers to conscious learning
While internalized knowledge comes from "subconscious" (for lack of a better word) learning?
I guess I'm equating the two here and just using memorization as "committing to memory", with the belief being that you can construct the heuristic you'd normally acquire subconsciously and cut down time to mastery
I think memorization can play a role in internalizing knowledge, but it isn’t a “fundamental” as in necessary. Internalized knowledge can also come from other sources.
I think this is right, and one implication is that 99.9% of the self-help content you passively consume on the internet will have no impact on your life, because (barring deliberate learning / repetition), you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference.
> you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference
But how would you learn to remember the right advice in the right context? The act of remembering something when you need it requires you to do more than just memorize it, you have to properly learn when the thing is actually useful and train your mind to recall this advice in those situations.
It is much better to know that an advice exist and learn when to look it up than to memorize the advice without the ability to realize when you would need it.
Thanks for reading!
This brings up an interesting point -- while I think many people read and forget self-help books without ever improving their lives, the way they can mostly help people (imo) is by:
1) identifying a heuristic 2) making memorization easier through stories
The stories, analogies, acronyms they teach all just make memorizing/remembering/learning their heuristic easier
This claim makes little sense because it fails to distinguish between memory and memorization. I memorize almost nothing, but I remember the broad strokes of a lot of things. This allows me to be creative.
In a way, memorization is a severe risk: if you memorized something before it changed, for example, your creativity may not mean much.
Hey thanks for reading!
What I was trying to convey is that fundamentally learning is memorization, whether conscious "rote memorization" or more less-intentional committing to memory from doing an activity
And that recognizing this allows us to speed up the process of learning fundamentals
Which in turn enables creativity as most people see it
Conscious memorization and rote memorization are two different things. I can intentionally put things into memory without doing rote memorization - or even intentionally avoiding rote memorization. The techniques you use also give you different results in terms of whether or how you use the memorized concept or word in foreign language. (For example getting the effect where you can translate a word between foreign and your language, but can not use it foreign language sentence and do not understand it in context without translating.)
repetitio mater studiorum est -- repetition is the mother of learning
"Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment."
You state that "learning is memorization" but I don't think that is true. Of course learning involves something being persisted in one's brain, but stating that memorization and brain persistence persisting are synonyms seems like an incorrect description.
You’re right. The OP is mistaken as to the distinction between memory and memorization. I am able to be creative because, for example, I remember that a woman’s hair smelled like flowers and secrets. It would not be possible to memorize such a thing.
This is like saying that programming competence comes from breathing air.
Creativity (measured by Openness in the Big Five) is a fundamental personality component that cannot be altered, in the same way that your working memory and IQ cant be altered (unsurprisingly they are closely related)
LSD famously increases openness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537171/
Also, openness is correlated but not equivalent to creativity.
Related discussion: Variability, not repetition, is the key to mastery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354355
Creativity is probably some combination of memorization + randomization.
I heard this idea recently: creativity needs shallow knowledge over a vast range of concepts. It’s probably not “just” that, but I can see how the vast range helps.
Did this author read a single book on creativity? Or did he just make everything up?
Being creative is simply knowing what you want, knowing where you are and is the process of making choices along the way to get there. The point at which your creation comes to life is fuzzy, but this is the underlying process. As for what rules/patterns/etc that you follow to arrive where you want to go: the whole point is not presubscribe to any of these. Sometimes you draw from a known way. Sometimes you come up with an entirely knew way to take a step. The point is simply to make choices that bring you closer to what you want to make.
> 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 time, live, in front of a crowd. Simply because I enjoyed the creative process of ‘making it work’.
Creativity for me isn’t “writing down heuristics on best DJ transitions” — I haven’t once considered that. It sounds, to me, to be the exact opposite approach to fostering creativity. Creativity for me comes out of play. It grows over time. It’s feeling and emotion, not memory.
I stopped reading after that. Especially as I am someone with a terrible memory but am also very creative in a number of fields.
[1] https://on.soundcloud.com/xZ28hvv5ieV9RnTU7
As a classical pianist their comment about scales memorization was highly problematic.
I hadn't got that far, but went to have a look and yeah, as a fellow pianist I concur. Then I saw the following paragraph:
"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!
Thanks for reading!
The "it" in "before you can violate it" is referring to music theory not the drop (maybe bad writing on my part).
I also grew up as a classical pianist.
Not saying creativity is memory, just saying creativity is enabled by memory (which I think agrees with you said about difficulties getting into that state if you haven't practised enough)
Creativity is also enabled by having bones, being an amorphous blob on the floor doesn’t help creativity. Creativity is also enabled by drinking water, being dust doesn’t help creativity.
Saying creativity is enabled by memory doest’t say anything interesting about creativity. It’s simply a prerequisite.
Except for some reason rather than saying this is obvious, many claim it's not true.
I agree that the biggest criticism of this is that it's obvious, but the amount of cultural pushback is what makes it semi-interesting to say in the first place.
Someone linked this article to me on Twitter with similar ideas:
https://nautil.us/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to-become-fluent-in...
Some minds get a lot done with a lot of memorization and some minds get a lot done with seeing commonalities and creating simplifying abstraction. We need all sorts of minds.
Wow, what a load of rubbish. I hate this kind of reductive, formulaic view of creativity. I think true creativity expands what is possible – so some kind of awareness of the current state of things is important, but rote memorisation has no real part in it.
The idea that memorisation leads to creativity is actually very misleading - especially the assumption that what you are learning is 'true'. It just means you are more aware of the restrictions and existing work in a field - often the most exciting work comes from the excitement and slight naivety of exploring something new - 'beginner's mind'. Kids are very creative, partly because their model of the world is not fully established.
Pure creativity without skill (i.e. kids) does not yield much. (Spaghetti drawing’s creative value is limited)
Skill requires practice, which is building “muscle memory” (which is approx. what is meant by “memorisation” by the author)
^ exactly
Huh, muscle memory implies motor programs that are subconscious and stored in the cerebellum - this is very different to creativity. It may enable you to make something new, but that is not a prerequisite. The value of spaghetti drawings is subjective, and actually to be able to make such disinhibited drawings with similar qualities as an adult is very difficult and requires unlearning. Picasso knew this very well.
The safe and very systematic approaches the author describes are defensive, too rigid and avoid what creativity really is - a leap into the unknown.
> breaking down the humor patterns of comedians and memes
This guy does sound funny but I doubt he can write a joke
"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."
- Paul Valery, famously quoted by Robert Irwin
When I want to come across as spontaneous I plan ahead what I'm going to say.
We recently described this to a parent of one of our students as:
Understanding -> Remembering -> Applying
If you don't understand the basics of a concept, and you're talking about memory, its probably just rote memorization. Students generally find this tedious, and since it's shallow its very hard to retain and connect to disparate but parallel ideas from other fields (roots of creativity).
But, most schools and students stop there. They hear 'memory' or 'memorizing' as only rote memory. Step 2 is critical if you want to get to higher levels of learning. As you said in the essay - "Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art". At www.sticky.study this is what we focus on. It's fast 2D memory palaces + spaced repetition.
Only if you have understanding + remembering can you get to step 3 - applying what you learn reliably at relevant moments in your life. This is the gold standard that schools claim they desire - analysis, synthesis, application, broad transfer, and creativity. You can't reach master efficiently if you lose 80% of all you read or learn.
This is better : https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/margaret-boden-creativ...
Then a hard drive without processing is very creative? False.
I think the more precise term used by educators is “fluency”
Friendly reminder: This blog post represents a software engineer's personal opinion on creativity, upvoted here by fellow software engineers.
No studies are cited. The assertions are corroborated by the author's personal experience.
Take its claims with a grain of salt.
^ 100x this, absolutely
I think we need some citations to know if what you are talking about is true /s
Disagree. Best technique is no technique.
My phone book is super creative.
One would argue it’s the opposite as people with memory problems have less imprint of old and more creative new ideas.
I don’t think that’s true. People with memory problems more seem to retread the same foundational ideas repeatedly, whereas those with good memories recognize this repetition and then seek something novel.
A lot of debate in the comments about the definition of "memorization"; this is just semantics and misses the point. Creativity is aided by 1) exposure to a wide variety of existing ideas, 2) deep understanding and integration of those ideas, 3) recombination of those ideas.
Superficial exposure to existing ideas alone won't get you there, and neither will isolated deep reflection. You need both.
so imagine from playing a guitar and you get famous and people ask you "who were your influences ?"
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.
When you don't understand, the teacher is the answer.
When you understand, everything is your teacher.
I don't believe the word 'memorize' can be replaced for the word 'understanding'
Does creativity involves understanding?
Perhaps.
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I would argue that creativity is a tendency and fundamental property of an individual’s brain, rather than a skill that can be taught or learned.
Creativity does require a context, such as creating a piece of art, music or solving a problem, and then in order to make any meaningful contribution to that problem or piece of art, one needs to have enough knowledge to draw from.
This knowledge can be 1) exact, such as specific rendering techniques in the context of building a 3D renderer or scales for improvisation on piano.
Or it can be 2) informal, increasingly rich mental models.
For example, I have been improvising on piano for a long time, and I have a largely informal mental model of music theory that I draw from during improvisation of what would sound good and interesting and what wouldn’t.
In another instance, I’m building software, and I have a growing mental model of how computers work, from the hardware (CPU, GPU, instruction sets) to the software (drivers, operating systems, networking), and how specific programs have been written (web browsers, game engines, databases, certain libraries).
The same goes for specific domains I wish to build software for (e.g. AEC / architecture industry), for which I am also forming a well of knowledge of what kind of companies, organizations and individuals collaborate and how information flows between them, e.g. via specific file formats, standards or protocols.
These mental models and exact knowledge, are a prerequisite for creativity.
But the creativity itself is the tendency of my brain to then, in a specific context, associate and draw from these different mental models and this breadth of knowledge to come up with a piece of output.
This can be building a specific feature in software, or coming up with a novel chord progression and melody.
So creativity is not about knowledge, but about creating.
Creating is inherently hard to formalize, as one has to have a mental model far larger and deeper than what can be written down or communicated via text.
In addition, by attempting to formalize the mental model, one loses the impreciseness, fluidity and depth that enables venturing beyond reproduction.
This mental model of how to create is what comes from practicing. By playing the piano year in year out and trying out different things, one learns to create good music.
By programming for years, one learns to write beautiful software.
What defines good or beautiful, and how one achieves that is what creativity is. It is a taste. It is exactly that what goes beyond memorization and mere knowledge. It is not taught, it is learned by doing. It is the application of knowledge, and the internalization of years of practice.
TLDR:
Creativity is a tendency of an individual. Knowledge is a prerequisite, but creativity is about applying it. This requires a mental model that comes from years of practice.