4 ms·

How do you acquire knowledge without memorization? What technology do you anticipate using? Johnny Mnemonic neural implantation?

Ericson2314 8y ago
All learning requires some memorization. That doesn't mean all memorization is equally good. Memorize that which is hard to look up. And compress what you need to memorize as much as possible; the compression process itself is intimical to understanding and generalizing. Medical school today would be like learning programming by memorizing the x86 ISA spec.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  The x86 ISA spec is a doddle compared to organic chemistry. Which is a pre-med subject. There is a minimum amount of material in any subject that needs to be available for rapid recall in order to be an expert in that subject. A wide variety of different areas have been studied to relate performance to level of learned information. Linguistic fluency requires easy recall of vocabulary. High rankings in chess depend on the recognition of thousands of distinct patterns. Musical improvisation requires thousands of hours of tedious repetition and practice. Effective programming requires a body of knowledge encompassing a variety of topics, a lot of which will be memorised as a side-effect of repeated exposure. But if you think you can be a better doctor than a doctor by scanning the indices of medical textbooks -- realising a little late that you are unfamiliar with a lot of the terms and also unsure in what order the concepts need to be assimilated before you can apply them -- then at least make sure your will is up to date.
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    Orgo is exactly what I'm talking about. Whether or not it's harder or easier is besides the point: it's simply too low a level to be useful. I'm all for a liberal arts approach of understanding other layers of abstraction for more context, but empirically this is not how the vast majority of premeds experience the orgo requirement. And if liberal arts was really the goal, then corresponding amounts of public health classes would also be required (layers of abstraction above and below at equal distance). But that's not the case. Clearly then it's not about a broader perspective but instead about weeding people out arbitrarily for sake of some combination of wages and egos. I'm not a doctor or on that track. But I am a musician and programmer, at say 1000+ hours for the former, and 10,000s of hours for the latter. Not once have I engaged in flash-card-style rote memorization for either, especially not for any written test. I am certainly full of random facts by now, but the knowledge I hold most valuable is not that which I could also get from API docs or stack overflow. No doctor, med student, or premed I have ever met studdied their field remotely like the ways I've studdied mine. Is being a doctor inherently that different? I can't see why not, and if I look at economics and public health research the arguments I give leap out at me. (I also studdied Chinese for a few years when I was younger and definitely did not do enough flash cards. Now that is a field (language learning) where rote memorization is inherent to the problem at hand.)

Ericson2314 8y ago

All learning requires some memorization. That doesn't mean all memorization is equally good. Memorize that which is hard to look up. And compress what you need to memorize as much as possible; the compression process itself is intimical to understanding and generalizing. Medical school today would be like learning programming by memorizing the x86 ISA spec.

jacques_chester 8y ago
The x86 ISA spec is a doddle compared to organic chemistry. Which is a pre-med subject. There is a minimum amount of material in any subject that needs to be available for rapid recall in order to be an expert in that subject. A wide variety of different areas have been studied to relate performance to level of learned information. Linguistic fluency requires easy recall of vocabulary. High rankings in chess depend on the recognition of thousands of distinct patterns. Musical improvisation requires thousands of hours of tedious repetition and practice. Effective programming requires a body of knowledge encompassing a variety of topics, a lot of which will be memorised as a side-effect of repeated exposure. But if you think you can be a better doctor than a doctor by scanning the indices of medical textbooks -- realising a little late that you are unfamiliar with a lot of the terms and also unsure in what order the concepts need to be assimilated before you can apply them -- then at least make sure your will is up to date.
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  Orgo is exactly what I'm talking about. Whether or not it's harder or easier is besides the point: it's simply too low a level to be useful. I'm all for a liberal arts approach of understanding other layers of abstraction for more context, but empirically this is not how the vast majority of premeds experience the orgo requirement. And if liberal arts was really the goal, then corresponding amounts of public health classes would also be required (layers of abstraction above and below at equal distance). But that's not the case. Clearly then it's not about a broader perspective but instead about weeding people out arbitrarily for sake of some combination of wages and egos. I'm not a doctor or on that track. But I am a musician and programmer, at say 1000+ hours for the former, and 10,000s of hours for the latter. Not once have I engaged in flash-card-style rote memorization for either, especially not for any written test. I am certainly full of random facts by now, but the knowledge I hold most valuable is not that which I could also get from API docs or stack overflow. No doctor, med student, or premed I have ever met studdied their field remotely like the ways I've studdied mine. Is being a doctor inherently that different? I can't see why not, and if I look at economics and public health research the arguments I give leap out at me. (I also studdied Chinese for a few years when I was younger and definitely did not do enough flash cards. Now that is a field (language learning) where rote memorization is inherent to the problem at hand.)