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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

    V = I * R
    I = V / R
    R = V / I

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.

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.

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.

In certain combat situations, or when smuggling coke across South and Central America, you certainly do.

But you don't want CIVILIAN pilots to get too creative, though. Running out of runway with a 747 is no joke.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Otherwise we're arguing semantics.

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).

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand, not merely memorize.

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).

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

“To me” is not what defines what something is.

Never listen to the grownups, everything they say is a lie.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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?

Sorry, but this is memoization.

But that's just my interpretation of the terms. I don't know what the "official" meanings are.

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?

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.

"Rote memorization"

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!)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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." ..."

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)

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.

Have never heard of this book but adding to my list now!

I don't disagree with Einstein, but I wonder what he would say with the modern internet at his disposal. Maybe the same?

Also, would you consider a subconscious habit "memory"? What's the difference between the two?

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

This doesn't appear to be reflected in PISA scores (489 UK, 441 Ukraine)

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.

Doesn't help that in the American economy, good mathematicians can earn 10x more than a math teacher's salary.

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)

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The trick is not so much which software or settings one uses, but writing high-quality prompts.

Practice is an oft suggested solution to developing mastery, but I did like how the article framed it: creating subconscious heuristics and memory.

But imo acknowledging this unlocks greater speeds and gets us to the "fun part" quicker

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

My creative writing professor, of all people, used to repeat this three times before every class. He was my favorite teacher at any level.

Not the most flattering of proverbs, but it stuck with me.

Shame about the national stereotypes as well. There is plenty of creativity in Asian countries. Just bizarre assertions all around.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is true understanding. He won't need to remember the theorem, because in his mind, it automatically follows from the raw data.

However, in the modern context, this has been transformed into memorizing arcane lists/tables, on which one is graded without any further manana.

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.

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

[1] Do you think that ChatGPT can reason? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1WnHpedi2A

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.

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

I love his pragmatic and rational approach.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

But that creativity can come from many places and in many forms!

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)

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?

> 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. :)

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