The author started losing me pretty early in the post, starting from where he implies that IQ is an "innate, biological trait." Notably, he (intentionally?) com

The author started losing me pretty early in the post, starting from where he implies that IQ is an "innate, biological trait." Notably, he (intentionally?) completely misses the point of a memory palace: "Using a mnemonic device (such as a ‘memory palace’) still requires one memorize the mnemonic. If I ask you to memorize ten historical dates, a trick may be to associate these dates with a mental visualization, but you must still remember ten associations, which is still not easy." It sounds like the author has not even once run a self-experiment to test the efficacy of mnemonic devices. It's patently easier to memorize these "associations" that he criticizes than it is to directly memorize an equal number of bland, meaningless digits, for example. Memorizing the mnemonic is a one-time, up-front investment of effort. Once you've written the mnemonic (encoder-decoder machinery) into long-term memory and become fluent in its use, you can fire it up at any time and encode meaningless sequences into highly meaningful and memorable equivalents.