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Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certai
by shantly 7y ago
Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion of mathematics sure appears to require having a huge mental mapping (memorized) of names of things to what they are and what they're used for, not to mention memorization of a large number of symbols.
On a more practical note, lots of memorized knowledge appears to be the primary thing the big tech companies want out of candidates, plus highish general intelligence (ability to quickly spot similarities between one problem and another so you can apply a memorized solution, chiefly).
- mywittyname 7y agoI realized the importance of memorization in math during college calculus. In high school, exam integrations were easy, so long as you knew the material covered over the past few weeks. In college though, exam integration questions were brutal, unless you remembered all of the trig identities and formulae. Our textbook had a list of 180 or so equations that were required knowledge to complete the sample questions at the end of each chapter. I just had to memorize a lot of them, as the derivation was not something I was capable of doing. Being able to quickly recall facts is really important for problem solving, even though we live in an era where you can search online for just about any fact known to humanity.
- whatshisface 7y agoBear in mind that memorizing trig identities was something you had to do for exams. If you want to get any use out of trig identities in "real life" you will need the kind of understanding that comes with being able to do the derivations yourself. In the time before computers there was a lot of value in being able to do the mechanistic kind of problem solving you're describing, but now that we have Mathematica, the only useful professional tasks that are left for humans to do involve the kind of knowledge it takes to do a derivation.
- mywittyname 7y agoI had a professor that loved to make simple substitutions to values in questions, where the original question would be incredibly difficult, but if you spotted the substitution, the amount of work you had to do was dramatically reduced. Think something like integrate cos x + i sin x dx, if you spot that cos x + i sin x = e^(ix), and perform substitution, the problem becomes trivial. Deriving information from facts is a vital skill. But recalling facts is also incredibly important as well. Having knowledge immediately available for use allows a person to apply that knowledge in real-time, which is important for problem solving and thinking on your feet.
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- 0xffff2 7y agoEvery college math class I took gave me a sheet with those kinds of identities on it. If I was doing the kind of work where I actually had to do calculus involving trig functions, you can bet I'd pull up a similar sheet while I was working. Sure having it memorized would be a bit faster, but that's true for far more things than I can actually memorize.
- yaccz 7y agoProblem is you need to remember the patterns first to be able to think "hey I know this pattern. Maybe if I look up what the identity is it will be usefull"
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- commandersaki 7y agoI think you might be confusing memorisation with intuition.