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I'm a bit surprised these systems still pay off for people. How many contexts require learning large bodies of unrelated facts, these days? Everything's just a

I'm a bit surprised these systems still pay off for people. How many contexts require learning large bodies of unrelated facts, these days? Everything's just a google away. Even in the past, the only context where I would have used a system like this is language acquisition, and it's pretty clear that machine translation is going to surpass me very soon, if it hasn't already. For me, most interesting work involves conceptually coherent bodies of knowledge. Learn the conceptual framework, and you'll remember the details by partial reconstruction as you need them. At least, that's how it usually works for me.

jszymborski 8y ago
Unfortunately, high schools and university courses can rely on this sort of memorization quite heavily as a proxy for "understanding". My biochemistry courses, particularly early on, were at least 60% memorization, 40% conceptual/logical reasoning.
nanofortnight 8y ago
Medicine is a field I'm in where learning large bodies of unrelated facts is helpful, since it's a field where having a generalist's shallow understanding of a wide variety of fields is useful. Take biochemistry, for example, wherein one can see it as a series of mechanisms and is mostly memory work. Anatomy is similarly mostly memory work; one doesn't simply "reproduce" an understanding of the course of the vagus nerve from scratch. Not every field is maths or physics.
roel_v 8y ago
Spaced repetition is a very useful tool when making it through law school; it was for me and many of my cohort. It's very useful to improve scores on many tests, from first aid to tests for a hunting license. Is it very useful to 'really' learn? Only a bit. But there is value in improving test scores in its own right.
ken 8y ago
All of them except programming, I'd say. That sounds like a 2000's-programmer-centric view of the world. Modern software is unique among all the fields I've worked in, in that it combines: - people routinely working on systems far too complex for them to ever understand fully, and which often change completely on the timescale of weeks or months - all the relevant data on the web in a format (like error messages or function names) that's easy for google to index, and easy for users to type - people sitting in front of internet-connected computers anyway, and sufficient time slop that the team doesn't need an instantaneous answer When I was knee-deep in water at an archaeological dig 15 years ago and my professor called out "What species of tree is that by your knee?", or when I was working on the catwalk last week and my lead called over "Check that the instrument in front of you is safe", googling it would have been completely infeasible, for several reasons. They'd just replace me with someone who knows what they're doing. > Learn the conceptual framework, and you'll remember the details by partial reconstruction as you need them. When I took organic chemistry, they taught the special cases of each reaction type first, and then generalized them at the end of the year. When I took engineering physics, they made us start with the generalized form first, and then we had to derive the specifics as needed. At the time, I was frustrated by the chemistry approach (why didn't you tell us there was a simpler form?!), but 20 years later, I remember a lot more chemistry than physics (even though my grades in physics were much better). I might be able to fumble through an SN2 reaction if I needed to, but I'm sure I couldn't do anything at all useful with Maxwell's Equations.
afarrell 8y ago
I find it useful to re-solidify the bits pf a conceptually coherent body of knowledge. I’m also going to soon need to work on a knarly php codebase for what are some fairly compelling business reasons. I’m planning on making flashcards for the body of unrelated facts that is the php developer experience.
deleted 8y ago
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jszymborski 8y ago

Unfortunately, high schools and university courses can rely on this sort of memorization quite heavily as a proxy for "understanding". My biochemistry courses, particularly early on, were at least 60% memorization, 40% conceptual/logical reasoning.

nanofortnight 8y ago

Medicine is a field I'm in where learning large bodies of unrelated facts is helpful, since it's a field where having a generalist's shallow understanding of a wide variety of fields is useful. Take biochemistry, for example, wherein one can see it as a series of mechanisms and is mostly memory work. Anatomy is similarly mostly memory work; one doesn't simply "reproduce" an understanding of the course of the vagus nerve from scratch. Not every field is maths or physics.

roel_v 8y ago

Spaced repetition is a very useful tool when making it through law school; it was for me and many of my cohort. It's very useful to improve scores on many tests, from first aid to tests for a hunting license. Is it very useful to 'really' learn? Only a bit. But there is value in improving test scores in its own right.

ken 8y ago

All of them except programming, I'd say. That sounds like a 2000's-programmer-centric view of the world. Modern software is unique among all the fields I've worked in, in that it combines: - people routinely working on systems far too complex for them to ever understand fully, and which often change completely on the timescale of weeks or months - all the relevant data on the web in a format (like error messages or function names) that's easy for google to index, and easy for users to type - people sitting in front of internet-connected computers anyway, and sufficient time slop that the team doesn't need an instantaneous answer When I was knee-deep in water at an archaeological dig 15 years ago and my professor called out "What species of tree is that by your knee?", or when I was working on the catwalk last week and my lead called over "Check that the instrument in front of you is safe", googling it would have been completely infeasible, for several reasons. They'd just replace me with someone who knows what they're doing. > Learn the conceptual framework, and you'll remember the details by partial reconstruction as you need them. When I took organic chemistry, they taught the special cases of each reaction type first, and then generalized them at the end of the year. When I took engineering physics, they made us start with the generalized form first, and then we had to derive the specifics as needed. At the time, I was frustrated by the chemistry approach (why didn't you tell us there was a simpler form?!), but 20 years later, I remember a lot more chemistry than physics (even though my grades in physics were much better). I might be able to fumble through an SN2 reaction if I needed to, but I'm sure I couldn't do anything at all useful with Maxwell's Equations.

afarrell 8y ago

I find it useful to re-solidify the bits pf a conceptually coherent body of knowledge. I’m also going to soon need to work on a knarly php codebase for what are some fairly compelling business reasons. I’m planning on making flashcards for the body of unrelated facts that is the php developer experience.

deleted 8y ago

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