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>So much of what we call creativity and intelligence is just memory. This matches my experience very closely. In fact, I find that programmers (and STEM people

by tziki 6y ago

>So much of what we call creativity and intelligence is just memory. This matches my experience very closely. In fact, I find that programmers (and STEM people in general) tend to look down on remembering things since "you can just Google it". However, after working with some very smart people I have a newfound respect for memory. The problem with "I'll just Google it when I need it" is that often great ideas and solutions are based on information that you remember, but you won't get any of those ideas or come up with those solutions if the building blocks aren't there. It's like trying to build a house with half the foundation missing. Remembering things allows you to build new theories and solutions to problems that you could never come up with if you didn't remember those things.

ritchiea 6y ago
I disagree with this. You can just google syntax so I don’t bother memorizing syntax. Specific syntax is never going to be the thing I remember that puts all the pieces together. Remembering how things are done and having a good conceptual memory on the other hand is extremely valuable. You can’t google the long story your colleague told you about the incredibly hard to identify bug (well maybe if they have a blog, but you see what I’m getting at?). That stuff is worth remembering, the stuff you can’t just google. Or the vague notion of what to google to solve the problem. You need both good memory and a good sense of what’s worth remembering and what you can just look up.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  But just spending an insignificant amount of time learning to remember the syntax that you use constantly is even more efficient: why waste time looking up what you already know? Spend that time on the real thing you want to do, instead. Not remembering what you can look up is the beginner's shortcut, not looking up what you can just remember is the advanced tactic, and is what gets you to fluency in any subject.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    You're assuming anyone here seriously resists learning something they use all the time because they can google it, something I have a hard time believing yet you assert otherwise. In reality, the things you tend to google every time you need it are precisely things you don't actually use enough to memorize. When you do memorize them, enough time elapses each time to where you forget.
    - xur17 6y ago
      Exactly this. Googling to me is long term memory - I can access it, but it takes a tiny bit longer to retrieve. Stuff I use more frequently I do memorize.
    - sdht0 6y ago
      As with many other things, the extremes might be clearer but the interesting parts lay in the huge grey area in between. Sure, we might not need to deliberately memorize syntax, but what about memorizing the different ways of writing loops (for the lack of an better example atm)? My take is that there is value in putting in deliberate effort to remember the key takeaways from our readings or talks we've listened to (among other things), as the original comment pointed out. The blog post is then on how to go about doing it.
    - TheRealPomax 6y ago
      Don't ask me, ask the person I responded to. It sure sounded like that was their modus operandus and their counter-argument to the article's "remember the things you are enthusiastic about learning".
- allenu 6y ago
  +1 to your points. I think the thing to remember is the "patterns" that are novel. Remembering approaches to solving problems, ways of thinking, are the things that help with creativity. Remembering specific solutions to problems isn't as useful, unless they're things you do regularly. I think the trick is to take a problem and "see" the higher-level patterns in the solution rather than the specifics.
- EForEndeavour 6y ago
  > You can just google syntax so I don’t bother memorizing syntax. Specific syntax is never going to be the thing I remember that puts all the pieces together. As you continue programming in a given language, you automatically memorize low-level things like syntax and idioms. That's not something that everyone needs or wants to practice explicitly with flashcards or whatever (that's not how I learn, anyway). But memorization of syntax is absolutely critical to achieve "fluency" in the programming language, just as in human language. Imagine a monolingual English speaker learning German and scoffing at their classmates' attempts to internalize the grammar rules. You can Google or look all that stuff up in a few seconds! But having to pause and look up every conjugation or word ordering is exactly what prevents the learner from actually communicating clear ideas at a useful speed in their target language.
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    You don't have to internalise grammar to be fluent. If that's the case nobody would learn a language. You need practice, at the right level, and lots and lots of it. Rote memorization is what happens naturally.
  - yread 6y ago
    My biggest problem is remembering the things that are done similarly everywhere: is it .length, .len, .size or .count? Or are they methods? Or globals? Why do these things have to differ even between SQL dialects
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      IDE helps in those situations. Or cheat sheets.
    - carlmr 6y ago
      This is why I'm such a big fan of good code completion. I don't need it that much in my main language, but when I use other languages every once in a while it's much much quicker than googling these things.
      - 6y ago
- BeetleB 6y ago
  It's interesting that whenever memorization is mentioned, there will always be a response like "I don't need to memorize X", when the person never said you should. Your parent did not recommend memorizing syntax.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    Maybe they can't remember what the person said, so they argue against what they misremember.
  - ritchiea 6y ago
    I provided two specific examples. One area where memorization isn't valuable. And one where it is. That's the point of the comment.
mtgx 6y ago
I also figured out quite a while ago that those "from the guy" business decisions, are unconscious brain decisions that are basically made in an instant out of the information your brain already possesses. So I've been trying to feed my brain with as much business strategy and learning as possible, so I can make better "from the gut" decisions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
physicsyogi 6y ago
This is true for me also. It's much easier for me to make connections between things when I have information about them in my head already.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
I think most of us would agree that you don't have to remember trivia like how bubblesort is implemented or which timezone is Papua New Guinea or some specific syntax in a given language that you use thrice a year, but very few of us would fulfill your strawman that you literally don't have to know anything because you can just google it. The very meaning of this sort of trivia, like which element is #81 on the periodic table, is that it's not really a foundation for deeper general knowledge. I'd be surprised if I met someone who saw themself in your comment.
- zeroxfe 6y ago
  FWIW, I don't consider bubblesort as trivia -- it's literally the simplest and most obvious sorting algorithm. IMO, it's a lot harder to understand more complex algorithms unless you have at least these basics in your head.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Knowing the atomic number of all the elements on the periodic table is also very simple to memorize. The fact that you don't know them all isn't because it's hard nor complex. The same thing applies to bubblesort and every other thing you might not know off-hand without googling. Watch Jeopardy and ask yourself if any of the questions are particularly hard or complex to memorize. Perhaps that's not why you don't know them. I've implemented bubblesort at least 10 times in uni. I remember a few of the sorting algorithms I had to impl, but I forget which one is bubblesort. It would take me 10 seconds to go "oh right, that one" if I ever need to see it. I haven't had to in the 15 years since uni. Remembering that bubblesort is algo A vs algo B without googling it the one time I need to know is worthless. Knowing higher level concepts of sorting and perf trade-offs, on the other hand, is not. Having a set of trivia that you consider essential is itself trivia. As I could have my own arbitrary list of easily googleable essentials, like the wall socket voltage in every country in the world. No matter how handy I claim that knowledge is, it doesn't even pay its rent in the grey matter is takes up when you can just google it.
    - daxxa1 6y ago
Swizec 6y ago
You google details, you remember concepts. Creativity comes from knowing what’s possible. A good clear map is fantastic for creativity. Google is for implementation. What’s the syntax for strpos in JS vs PHP? How do I leftpad in this project? Stuff like that. You gain creativity points from knowing leftpad is a solved problem, not from memorizing its details for today’s particular case.
Arubis 6y ago
A lot of US-based STEMmers (at least of my era, so late Gen X/early Millenial) had the experience that the rote learning presented through the public education system was tiresome and pointless, and concluded—with some justification—that _all_ rote learning is tiresome and pointless. This is a really unfortunate outcome, as getting base facts and figures into your memory is actually hugely beneficial. There’s no other way to rapidly pick up a new spoken language, for example.
- redorb 6y ago
  Oh how I wish we could just use years like '84-'93 in lieu of obscure generational tags.. I agree with your general idea a lot of people were burnt out of rote memorization. It's okay to memorize things - but I think if you teach the 'why of the equations' instead of just memorization of them - the memory would lock in with 'forced memorization'
  - Izkata 6y ago
    > but I think if you teach the 'why of the equations' instead of just memorization of them - the memory would lock in with 'forced memorization' I have a simple but great example of that: A decade of schooling and I could never remember the formula for volume of a sphere. And then, one day when I was bored at my part-time job, I pulled out a piece of paper and used what I'd just learned in calculus to derive it. It's stuck with me since, now that all the parts of the equation have meaning.
- ritchiea 6y ago
  This is another good point, some things you can’t get around memorizing. I also grew up in an environment where I learned to loath rote memorization. But some things are impossible without a bunch of memorization work. I tried DJing for a bit and it’s just a fact the better you have songs memorized and lots of them the better you’ll be at it. The best DJs I’ve met have a memory of at least the structure of thousands of tracks.
  - cgriswald 6y ago
punnerud 6y ago
How can you ask question about something you don’t know that you don’t know?
- Cerium 6y ago
  Exactly, the unknown unknowns are your biggest weakness.
lambdaloop 6y ago
The greatest advantage of memory is that you can connect what you learned today to what you learned before and thus map out the structure of the world.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
This is the reason for taxonomies like Bloom's Taxonomy [0] and the DIKW Pyramid. [1] Deep understanding, and the ability to apply a concept, and the ability to draw deep comparisons between concepts, are not the equivalent of having instant recall of many facts. Early in the learning process you'll have to be able to remember the basic facts of a topic, as this is necessary to develop deep insight, but once learnt, deep insight doesn't depend on perfect recall of the particulars. It's reasonable for an exam on language theory to expect a student to know that deterministic finite automata are represented as 5-tuples, but students learn about DFAs in order to develop understanding; little is lost if they later forget that particular detail. The ability to apply the concept is what's really valuable. [0] https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  It seems like the education system is not set up to test deep understanding and rather exclusively focuses on instant recall, though. At university a lot of my friends would be able to regurgitate answers to questions, but if I tried to talk to them about the "why" behind a methodology they would basically respond with "uhh, I don't know I just do it like this".
  - Uehreka 6y ago
    I work in curriculum, and things like Bloom's Taxonomy are the bread and butter of how curriculum authors structure content. IMO, the problem isn't that teachers and authors aren't thinking from these angles (they have for decades) it's that in practice, it's really hard to teach and assess skills without ending up testing recall. The solutions that work well (lots of individual attention from human experts) don't scale and the things that scale (multiple choice tests) don't work well.
    - falcor84 6y ago
      > solutions that work well (lots of individual attention from human experts) don't scale I'm really interested in this. Could you please point me towards any reading about the efficacy of such individual attention and/or scaling it with tech?
User23 6y ago
That's actually completely incorrect. I say this as someone who was blessed with eidetic memory for the first few decades of my life. I could see or read something once and it stuck. I actually trained myself to not remember things that I found emotionally unpleasant and didn't want just popping up. I literally got tired of people telling me how smart I was, because I knew I wasn't. I was just capable of recalling what other actually smart people thought about the scenario in question or one analogous enough to more or less fit. It always felt incredibly empty. It's clear to me that the actually smart people don't need to recall someone else's clever solution, they just figure it out on their own from the observables.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > It's clear to me that the actually smart people don't need to recall someone else's clever solution, they just figure it out on their own from the observables. You gotta be able to make connections. If you have to figure out everything from observables, you're gonna be very slow at anything that isn't truly uncharted territory compared to others. If your memory is lacking, you won't be able to make the leap from "here's what I'm seeing right now, here's a vaguely similar pattern from that past, what does that suggest?" That's where "just google it" breaks down too because if you don't know that the symptoms you're seeing are characteristic of a race condition, say, you won't know to google for "race condition"!
- aaaxyz 6y ago
  "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Isaac Newton, some actually not smart guy
- BeetleB 6y ago
  The parent did not say memorizing will make you smart. He said it was something smart people tend to do. There's a big difference.
- brigandish 6y ago
  How did you learn to forget specific things? That skill seems just as interesting to me as learning to remember specific things but I've never heard of anyone doing it, probably because eidetic memory (in adults, at least) is rare.
alexpotato 6y ago
In the book Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin [0], she mentions that there was one member of the LIGO project who became the "go to" person for any technical discussions because they had memorized large parts of the infrastructure. Having memorized it, they could quickly "debug" issues and evaluate proposed changes. The implication was that asking the individual was faster than having to get together multiple people and then poll them for what they thought the answer might be. In my own career, I've spent the last 15 years working in finance technology. Many of the systems involved in this industry are legacy (with lots of patches), complex and distributed with all of the attached problems that come with them. Multiple times over that, I've seen people with excellent memories and understanding of the system be able to pinpoint problems just by taking a couple symptoms and deducing the root cause in a few minutes. It really can be a superpower. The one down side of course is that you build this great mental model for a system that only ever exists at one firm. This can lead the situation where you become more valuable to the firm over time as fewer people remain who understand the system. In turn, your opportunity cost of leaving goes up because you would have to start from zero at your next job. [0] - https://amzn.to/3lkSfmu https://amzn.to/3lkSfmu
- brianpan 6y ago
  I don't think that's a downside. If you have that superpower, you can build it at a different place. The downside I find is that some people who can do this assume everyone can do this. If complexity is not difficult for you then simplifying (code, architecture, etc.) is not a priority and it becomes harder for other people to understand and maintain.
  - mr_overalls 6y ago
    I'm the the go-to guy at a small government agency for the overall network/system architecture. There are some technical & memory-related prereqs (i.e. I have a CS degree, and I'm not a dummy), but mainly I know our systems so well because I've worked actively on them for more than a decade. It would probably take me a decade to build such a detailed mental model at another company or agency. And that's even assuming I could get hired. One consequence of working on an idiosyncratic, one-off architecture is that my mainstream tech skills have atrophied significantly. I definitely could not pass a leet-code interview at a FAANG anymore.
drieddust 6y ago
Personally this idea of "I will just Google it" or "I will just derive the formula when I need it" have costed me a lot. As the article says learning progresses from what to how and finally to why. Starting with why is just a way of deciving ourselves into feeling smart. I would say in areas like language learning asking why question isn't even possible generally.
nullsense 6y ago
I think of memory, and lookups in humans similar to L1/L2 cache, RAM, Network and Disk. Knowing stuff cold makes you incredibly fast. Doing a lookup of a problem you've solved in a personal project / elsewhere you have the code for is also very quick, but not as much. Having to perform lookups is akin to having to go out to RAM. Having to ask a coworker is slower still. And the slowest is having to learn something entirely from the ground up before you can process what you are seeing. It all makes a difference to your throughput, and as you say your creativity!
harshitaneja 6y ago
Mathematics is quite similar as well. I hated memorising formulae and theorems as I always thought if I can derive them then why bother. But the cognitive load when working on more complex problems and having to think about the problem at hand as well as the tools used to solve it just doesn't scale well enough and it limited me until I accepted that a large part of mathematical intuition involves having these as a part of my memory. Of course, this doesn't need to(and shouldn't need to) happen through rote-learning but rather through a large number of problems that it happens naturally.
pjmlp 6y ago
When I got into programming it took me about 10 years before I could search anything online, the best I could hope for was getting something out of the local library. Even BBS were available only to the selected few that could afford bloody expensive long distance calls.
dandanua 6y ago
If you don't remember something then your brain can't do pattern matching based on that information. And pattern matching is the basis of any thinking process. So, yes, Google won't help you with that. But, you can retrieve and memorize just patterns from the information and forget the details. This is my way of thinking, I believe. Still far from optimal, because you can miss important patterns before forgetting the details.
mordymoop 6y ago
All of the Very Successful People who I've had the privilege to work with have been disgustingly well-organized and disciplined, and had almost supernatural memories, including memory for fine detail like the specific values of relatively inconsequential numbers they saw six months ago in many cases. I can't help but wonder if these two things are related.

by tziki 6y ago

ritchiea 6y ago

I disagree with this. You can just google syntax so I don’t bother memorizing syntax. Specific syntax is never going to be the thing I remember that puts all the pieces together. Remembering how things are done and having a good conceptual memory on the other hand is extremely valuable. You can’t google the long story your colleague told you about the incredibly hard to identify bug (well maybe if they have a blog, but you see what I’m getting at?). That stuff is worth remembering, the stuff you can’t just google. Or the vague notion of what to google to solve the problem. You need both good memory and a good sense of what’s worth remembering and what you can just look up.

TheRealPomax 6y ago
But just spending an insignificant amount of time learning to remember the syntax that you use constantly is even more efficient: why waste time looking up what you already know? Spend that time on the real thing you want to do, instead. Not remembering what you can look up is the beginner's shortcut, not looking up what you can just remember is the advanced tactic, and is what gets you to fluency in any subject.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  You're assuming anyone here seriously resists learning something they use all the time because they can google it, something I have a hard time believing yet you assert otherwise. In reality, the things you tend to google every time you need it are precisely things you don't actually use enough to memorize. When you do memorize them, enough time elapses each time to where you forget.
  - xur17 6y ago
    Exactly this. Googling to me is long term memory - I can access it, but it takes a tiny bit longer to retrieve. Stuff I use more frequently I do memorize.
  - sdht0 6y ago
    As with many other things, the extremes might be clearer but the interesting parts lay in the huge grey area in between. Sure, we might not need to deliberately memorize syntax, but what about memorizing the different ways of writing loops (for the lack of an better example atm)? My take is that there is value in putting in deliberate effort to remember the key takeaways from our readings or talks we've listened to (among other things), as the original comment pointed out. The blog post is then on how to go about doing it.
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    Don't ask me, ask the person I responded to. It sure sounded like that was their modus operandus and their counter-argument to the article's "remember the things you are enthusiastic about learning".
allenu 6y ago
+1 to your points. I think the thing to remember is the "patterns" that are novel. Remembering approaches to solving problems, ways of thinking, are the things that help with creativity. Remembering specific solutions to problems isn't as useful, unless they're things you do regularly. I think the trick is to take a problem and "see" the higher-level patterns in the solution rather than the specifics.
EForEndeavour 6y ago
> You can just google syntax so I don’t bother memorizing syntax. Specific syntax is never going to be the thing I remember that puts all the pieces together. As you continue programming in a given language, you automatically memorize low-level things like syntax and idioms. That's not something that everyone needs or wants to practice explicitly with flashcards or whatever (that's not how I learn, anyway). But memorization of syntax is absolutely critical to achieve "fluency" in the programming language, just as in human language. Imagine a monolingual English speaker learning German and scoffing at their classmates' attempts to internalize the grammar rules. You can Google or look all that stuff up in a few seconds! But having to pause and look up every conjugation or word ordering is exactly what prevents the learner from actually communicating clear ideas at a useful speed in their target language.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  You don't have to internalise grammar to be fluent. If that's the case nobody would learn a language. You need practice, at the right level, and lots and lots of it. Rote memorization is what happens naturally.
- yread 6y ago
  My biggest problem is remembering the things that are done similarly everywhere: is it .length, .len, .size or .count? Or are they methods? Or globals? Why do these things have to differ even between SQL dialects
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    IDE helps in those situations. Or cheat sheets.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    This is why I'm such a big fan of good code completion. I don't need it that much in my main language, but when I use other languages every once in a while it's much much quicker than googling these things.
    - 6y ago
BeetleB 6y ago
It's interesting that whenever memorization is mentioned, there will always be a response like "I don't need to memorize X", when the person never said you should. Your parent did not recommend memorizing syntax.
- carlmr 6y ago
  Maybe they can't remember what the person said, so they argue against what they misremember.
- ritchiea 6y ago
  I provided two specific examples. One area where memorization isn't valuable. And one where it is. That's the point of the comment.

mtgx 6y ago

I also figured out quite a while ago that those "from the guy" business decisions, are unconscious brain decisions that are basically made in an instant out of the information your brain already possesses. So I've been trying to feed my brain with as much business strategy and learning as possible, so I can make better "from the gut" decisions.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

physicsyogi 6y ago

This is true for me also. It's much easier for me to make connections between things when I have information about them in my head already.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

I think most of us would agree that you don't have to remember trivia like how bubblesort is implemented or which timezone is Papua New Guinea or some specific syntax in a given language that you use thrice a year, but very few of us would fulfill your strawman that you literally don't have to know anything because you can just google it. The very meaning of this sort of trivia, like which element is #81 on the periodic table, is that it's not really a foundation for deeper general knowledge. I'd be surprised if I met someone who saw themself in your comment.

zeroxfe 6y ago
FWIW, I don't consider bubblesort as trivia -- it's literally the simplest and most obvious sorting algorithm. IMO, it's a lot harder to understand more complex algorithms unless you have at least these basics in your head.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Knowing the atomic number of all the elements on the periodic table is also very simple to memorize. The fact that you don't know them all isn't because it's hard nor complex. The same thing applies to bubblesort and every other thing you might not know off-hand without googling. Watch Jeopardy and ask yourself if any of the questions are particularly hard or complex to memorize. Perhaps that's not why you don't know them. I've implemented bubblesort at least 10 times in uni. I remember a few of the sorting algorithms I had to impl, but I forget which one is bubblesort. It would take me 10 seconds to go "oh right, that one" if I ever need to see it. I haven't had to in the 15 years since uni. Remembering that bubblesort is algo A vs algo B without googling it the one time I need to know is worthless. Knowing higher level concepts of sorting and perf trade-offs, on the other hand, is not. Having a set of trivia that you consider essential is itself trivia. As I could have my own arbitrary list of easily googleable essentials, like the wall socket voltage in every country in the world. No matter how handy I claim that knowledge is, it doesn't even pay its rent in the grey matter is takes up when you can just google it.
  - daxxa1 6y ago

Swizec 6y ago

You google details, you remember concepts. Creativity comes from knowing what’s possible. A good clear map is fantastic for creativity. Google is for implementation. What’s the syntax for strpos in JS vs PHP? How do I leftpad in this project? Stuff like that. You gain creativity points from knowing leftpad is a solved problem, not from memorizing its details for today’s particular case.

Arubis 6y ago

A lot of US-based STEMmers (at least of my era, so late Gen X/early Millenial) had the experience that the rote learning presented through the public education system was tiresome and pointless, and concluded—with some justification—that _all_ rote learning is tiresome and pointless. This is a really unfortunate outcome, as getting base facts and figures into your memory is actually hugely beneficial. There’s no other way to rapidly pick up a new spoken language, for example.

redorb 6y ago
Oh how I wish we could just use years like '84-'93 in lieu of obscure generational tags.. I agree with your general idea a lot of people were burnt out of rote memorization. It's okay to memorize things - but I think if you teach the 'why of the equations' instead of just memorization of them - the memory would lock in with 'forced memorization'
- Izkata 6y ago
  > but I think if you teach the 'why of the equations' instead of just memorization of them - the memory would lock in with 'forced memorization' I have a simple but great example of that: A decade of schooling and I could never remember the formula for volume of a sphere. And then, one day when I was bored at my part-time job, I pulled out a piece of paper and used what I'd just learned in calculus to derive it. It's stuck with me since, now that all the parts of the equation have meaning.
ritchiea 6y ago
This is another good point, some things you can’t get around memorizing. I also grew up in an environment where I learned to loath rote memorization. But some things are impossible without a bunch of memorization work. I tried DJing for a bit and it’s just a fact the better you have songs memorized and lots of them the better you’ll be at it. The best DJs I’ve met have a memory of at least the structure of thousands of tracks.
- cgriswald 6y ago

punnerud 6y ago

How can you ask question about something you don’t know that you don’t know?

Cerium 6y ago
Exactly, the unknown unknowns are your biggest weakness.

lambdaloop 6y ago

The greatest advantage of memory is that you can connect what you learned today to what you learned before and thus map out the structure of the world.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

This is the reason for taxonomies like Bloom's Taxonomy [0] and the DIKW Pyramid. [1] Deep understanding, and the ability to apply a concept, and the ability to draw deep comparisons between concepts, are not the equivalent of having instant recall of many facts. Early in the learning process you'll have to be able to remember the basic facts of a topic, as this is necessary to develop deep insight, but once learnt, deep insight doesn't depend on perfect recall of the particulars. It's reasonable for an exam on language theory to expect a student to know that deterministic finite automata are represented as 5-tuples, but students learn about DFAs in order to develop understanding; little is lost if they later forget that particular detail. The ability to apply the concept is what's really valuable. [0] https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
It seems like the education system is not set up to test deep understanding and rather exclusively focuses on instant recall, though. At university a lot of my friends would be able to regurgitate answers to questions, but if I tried to talk to them about the "why" behind a methodology they would basically respond with "uhh, I don't know I just do it like this".
- Uehreka 6y ago
  I work in curriculum, and things like Bloom's Taxonomy are the bread and butter of how curriculum authors structure content. IMO, the problem isn't that teachers and authors aren't thinking from these angles (they have for decades) it's that in practice, it's really hard to teach and assess skills without ending up testing recall. The solutions that work well (lots of individual attention from human experts) don't scale and the things that scale (multiple choice tests) don't work well.
  - falcor84 6y ago
    > solutions that work well (lots of individual attention from human experts) don't scale I'm really interested in this. Could you please point me towards any reading about the efficacy of such individual attention and/or scaling it with tech?

User23 6y ago

That's actually completely incorrect. I say this as someone who was blessed with eidetic memory for the first few decades of my life. I could see or read something once and it stuck. I actually trained myself to not remember things that I found emotionally unpleasant and didn't want just popping up. I literally got tired of people telling me how smart I was, because I knew I wasn't. I was just capable of recalling what other actually smart people thought about the scenario in question or one analogous enough to more or less fit. It always felt incredibly empty. It's clear to me that the actually smart people don't need to recall someone else's clever solution, they just figure it out on their own from the observables.

majormajor 6y ago
> It's clear to me that the actually smart people don't need to recall someone else's clever solution, they just figure it out on their own from the observables. You gotta be able to make connections. If you have to figure out everything from observables, you're gonna be very slow at anything that isn't truly uncharted territory compared to others. If your memory is lacking, you won't be able to make the leap from "here's what I'm seeing right now, here's a vaguely similar pattern from that past, what does that suggest?" That's where "just google it" breaks down too because if you don't know that the symptoms you're seeing are characteristic of a race condition, say, you won't know to google for "race condition"!
aaaxyz 6y ago
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Isaac Newton, some actually not smart guy
BeetleB 6y ago
The parent did not say memorizing will make you smart. He said it was something smart people tend to do. There's a big difference.
brigandish 6y ago
How did you learn to forget specific things? That skill seems just as interesting to me as learning to remember specific things but I've never heard of anyone doing it, probably because eidetic memory (in adults, at least) is rare.

alexpotato 6y ago

In the book Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin [0], she mentions that there was one member of the LIGO project who became the "go to" person for any technical discussions because they had memorized large parts of the infrastructure. Having memorized it, they could quickly "debug" issues and evaluate proposed changes. The implication was that asking the individual was faster than having to get together multiple people and then poll them for what they thought the answer might be. In my own career, I've spent the last 15 years working in finance technology. Many of the systems involved in this industry are legacy (with lots of patches), complex and distributed with all of the attached problems that come with them. Multiple times over that, I've seen people with excellent memories and understanding of the system be able to pinpoint problems just by taking a couple symptoms and deducing the root cause in a few minutes. It really can be a superpower. The one down side of course is that you build this great mental model for a system that only ever exists at one firm. This can lead the situation where you become more valuable to the firm over time as fewer people remain who understand the system. In turn, your opportunity cost of leaving goes up because you would have to start from zero at your next job. [0] - https://amzn.to/3lkSfmu https://amzn.to/3lkSfmu

brianpan 6y ago
I don't think that's a downside. If you have that superpower, you can build it at a different place. The downside I find is that some people who can do this assume everyone can do this. If complexity is not difficult for you then simplifying (code, architecture, etc.) is not a priority and it becomes harder for other people to understand and maintain.
- mr_overalls 6y ago
  I'm the the go-to guy at a small government agency for the overall network/system architecture. There are some technical & memory-related prereqs (i.e. I have a CS degree, and I'm not a dummy), but mainly I know our systems so well because I've worked actively on them for more than a decade. It would probably take me a decade to build such a detailed mental model at another company or agency. And that's even assuming I could get hired. One consequence of working on an idiosyncratic, one-off architecture is that my mainstream tech skills have atrophied significantly. I definitely could not pass a leet-code interview at a FAANG anymore.

drieddust 6y ago

Personally this idea of "I will just Google it" or "I will just derive the formula when I need it" have costed me a lot. As the article says learning progresses from what to how and finally to why. Starting with why is just a way of deciving ourselves into feeling smart. I would say in areas like language learning asking why question isn't even possible generally.

nullsense 6y ago

I think of memory, and lookups in humans similar to L1/L2 cache, RAM, Network and Disk. Knowing stuff cold makes you incredibly fast. Doing a lookup of a problem you've solved in a personal project / elsewhere you have the code for is also very quick, but not as much. Having to perform lookups is akin to having to go out to RAM. Having to ask a coworker is slower still. And the slowest is having to learn something entirely from the ground up before you can process what you are seeing. It all makes a difference to your throughput, and as you say your creativity!

harshitaneja 6y ago

Mathematics is quite similar as well. I hated memorising formulae and theorems as I always thought if I can derive them then why bother. But the cognitive load when working on more complex problems and having to think about the problem at hand as well as the tools used to solve it just doesn't scale well enough and it limited me until I accepted that a large part of mathematical intuition involves having these as a part of my memory. Of course, this doesn't need to(and shouldn't need to) happen through rote-learning but rather through a large number of problems that it happens naturally.

pjmlp 6y ago

When I got into programming it took me about 10 years before I could search anything online, the best I could hope for was getting something out of the local library. Even BBS were available only to the selected few that could afford bloody expensive long distance calls.

dandanua 6y ago

If you don't remember something then your brain can't do pattern matching based on that information. And pattern matching is the basis of any thinking process. So, yes, Google won't help you with that. But, you can retrieve and memorize just patterns from the information and forget the details. This is my way of thinking, I believe. Still far from optimal, because you can miss important patterns before forgetting the details.

mordymoop 6y ago

All of the Very Successful People who I've had the privilege to work with have been disgustingly well-organized and disciplined, and had almost supernatural memories, including memory for fine detail like the specific values of relatively inconsequential numbers they saw six months ago in many cases. I can't help but wonder if these two things are related.