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Thanks for reading and the response! One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which

by shw1n 2y ago

Thanks for reading and the response! One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization. I understand the connotation of "memorization" evokes an image of blindly memorizing without connecting, but isn't the tastefully developed expertise just memorization of a better heuristic?

etrautmann 2y ago
not the parent poster but I think I agree with your perspective here. The alternative is that some individuals' taste or sense of aesthetics is somehow innate and unmoored from the statistics of the things they experience. There may be something to this, but for most practical purposes I would agree with your point.
- tikhonj 2y ago
  Another alternative is that taste is something you can only learn through experience and mentorship, where memorizing simple rules and heuristics is not sufficient. Taste is an example of tacit knowledge[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
  - shw1n 2y ago
    Perhaps this is where I disagree -- I believe while difficult, all tacit knowledge can be made explicit, but is just hard to do so This may be because I'm not good at picking up on social cues, so had to learn things more consciously But ofc I could also be wrong and maybe there are things the subconscious can learn that the conscious cannot
    - etrautmann 2y ago
      There’s another argument though that some taste is genetically programmed, like our affinity for campfires or sweeping views. Those don’t seem to be learned as they seem to be entirely cross cultural and innate. Those aren’t examples of art of course but make the point that some sense of aesthetics may not be learned.
tikhonj 2y ago
That's true if you broaden the definition of "memorization" to cover all learning, but "learning is necessary for creativity" would not be a particularly interesting thesis. Expertise is the result of learning from past experience, both in developing an internal intuition for what you're doing and in having past patterns to draw upon. To the extent that experts have simple easily verbalizable heuristics, these are largely post-hoc attempts at explaining their intuition rather than an accurate reflection of how they make decisions. And, in fact, experts can't even always do that: it is perfectly possible for experts to make good decisions without being consciously aware of why they are making them, and explaining how to make good decisions is a separate skill from being able to make them in the first place. The book I mentioned has a memorable story about a firefighter who thought he had precognition after pulling his team out of a dangerous situation without any specific indicator of the danger, but I figure a more common example is experts saying they did something because it was the "obvious" or "clean" or "better" way to do it and getting a bit flustered when pushed further. We can see this in action pretty clearly if we look at advice for, say, writing. There is a lot of advice from good writers but just memorizing and blindly following this advice is actively counterproductive. Advice you can memorize fundamentally must lack nuance and context. We can see this clearly because so many different pieces of writing advice contradict each other and because good writers do not follow any of those suggestions with any consistency. The same definitely applies to programming, which is why we have both "don't repeat yourself" and "you ain't going to need it", and why new programmers trying to apply either rule (or both!) to a codebase inevitably create a mess. What I've found with programming advice is that most suggestions are either actively wrong or too vague to be useful. (By the time you've learned enough about programming to be able to follow the vague advice, you don't need it very much!)
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  This happened about 20 years ago when they were trying to automate recognizing cancer cells. They showed photos to experienced diagnosticians and asked 'What features do you look for?' They couldn't articulate what they were seeing.
  - heenrik 2y ago
Llamamoe 2y ago
I don't think I can agree, as an extremely creative person with extremely bad memory - to a point where I pretty much never memorize anything, whether intentionally or by accident. What I find instead, is that by just processing novel information, especially if I focus on analysing it, my brain internalizes insights and builds model of that type of thing, allowing me to either imperfectly reconstruct what I've seen, or to come up with an infinite array of permutations, extrapolations, etc which is where the real ideas come from. Further, ideas crucially revolve not around just the information itself, but the "feel" for what role they play in the whole, how well they do it, in what way they're notable, etc. In fact I'd straight up claim that memorization is antithetical to creativity - a perfect ML autoencoder or GAN would just regurgitate the training data. Creativity comes from generalisation while memorisation is analogous to overfitting.
- XenophileJKO 2y ago
  A million times this.. I also am extremely creative and in fact I think the MOST creative people are really bad at intentional memoration, but are good at seeing patterns. I feel like often the reason a creative person is hyper creative is they haven't memorized things so they are trying to rebuild information all the time in their heads from very sparse details. This creates the transformative and relational combinations of information that a person memorizing can't see because it is created from a lack of organized specific information rather than a bounty of it.
- Sammi 2y ago
  "What I find instead, is that by just processing novel information, especially if I focus on analysing it, my brain internalizes insights and builds model of that type of thing" Sorry, but this is memoization.
  - guitheeengineer 2y ago
    I feel like every reply making a point against memorisation would benefit from having their definition of what is memorization, because every single one of those replies sound like they're still implicitly describing some sort of memorization as the better way
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
>One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization. seems to me there is a relatively big inductive gap there, you believe that there is an internalized heuristic and at its core is memorization, you may even have some evidence that this internalized heuristic has strongly informed your development of taste, but it is pretty difficult to make an argument that is the case for all people. Aside from that I would say that "internalized heuristic with memorization as the core" puts everything on nurture and no input of nature - which I am pretty much in the camp of combinations of nature and nurture creating the person - of which taste must surely be a big component.
passion__desire 2y ago
Schmidhuber reached your conclusions first. Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
also a question - if you have better long term or short term memory how does that affect taste? How does it affect creativity, if all of these things are essentially memorization you would have to assume that people were more creative and had better taste the greater their ability to memorize things, which in the case of taste especially seems slightly absurd. In the case of creativity it may be easier to make an argument - but surely you can find people who seem more creative with less ability to memorize.
bccdee 2y ago
Why are you attached to the word "memorization" here? Certainly taste comes from experience and learning. Maybe you could argue that all learning is an oblique and imperfect form of memorization—but why argue that at all? The only reason I can see is if you think memorization could be a shortcut to good taste, which it can't. Acquiring good taste requires broad experience—more information than you can possibly remember—such that you retain a suite of sophisticated intuitions. Cutting that information down to something that can be memorized would require you to (1) already have the intuitions you're seeking to acquire, and (2) be able to express them all in plain English, which, as far as I know, cannot be done. No painter has ever expressed their aesthetic in such a way that a student could memorize that expression and then have the same creative sensibilities as the original painter. Ultimately, there's no substitute for the process of simply consuming lots of art while paying close attention to what you like about it.

by shw1n 2y ago

etrautmann 2y ago

not the parent poster but I think I agree with your perspective here. The alternative is that some individuals' taste or sense of aesthetics is somehow innate and unmoored from the statistics of the things they experience. There may be something to this, but for most practical purposes I would agree with your point.

tikhonj 2y ago
Another alternative is that taste is something you can only learn through experience and mentorship, where memorizing simple rules and heuristics is not sufficient. Taste is an example of tacit knowledge[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
- shw1n 2y ago
  Perhaps this is where I disagree -- I believe while difficult, all tacit knowledge can be made explicit, but is just hard to do so This may be because I'm not good at picking up on social cues, so had to learn things more consciously But ofc I could also be wrong and maybe there are things the subconscious can learn that the conscious cannot
  - etrautmann 2y ago
    There’s another argument though that some taste is genetically programmed, like our affinity for campfires or sweeping views. Those don’t seem to be learned as they seem to be entirely cross cultural and innate. Those aren’t examples of art of course but make the point that some sense of aesthetics may not be learned.

tikhonj 2y ago

That's true if you broaden the definition of "memorization" to cover all learning, but "learning is necessary for creativity" would not be a particularly interesting thesis. Expertise is the result of learning from past experience, both in developing an internal intuition for what you're doing and in having past patterns to draw upon. To the extent that experts have simple easily verbalizable heuristics, these are largely post-hoc attempts at explaining their intuition rather than an accurate reflection of how they make decisions. And, in fact, experts can't even always do that: it is perfectly possible for experts to make good decisions without being consciously aware of why they are making them, and explaining how to make good decisions is a separate skill from being able to make them in the first place. The book I mentioned has a memorable story about a firefighter who thought he had precognition after pulling his team out of a dangerous situation without any specific indicator of the danger, but I figure a more common example is experts saying they did something because it was the "obvious" or "clean" or "better" way to do it and getting a bit flustered when pushed further. We can see this in action pretty clearly if we look at advice for, say, writing. There is a lot of advice from good writers but just memorizing and blindly following this advice is actively counterproductive. Advice you can memorize fundamentally must lack nuance and context. We can see this clearly because so many different pieces of writing advice contradict each other and because good writers do not follow any of those suggestions with any consistency. The same definitely applies to programming, which is why we have both "don't repeat yourself" and "you ain't going to need it", and why new programmers trying to apply either rule (or both!) to a codebase inevitably create a mess. What I've found with programming advice is that most suggestions are either actively wrong or too vague to be useful. (By the time you've learned enough about programming to be able to follow the vague advice, you don't need it very much!)

ahazred8ta 2y ago
This happened about 20 years ago when they were trying to automate recognizing cancer cells. They showed photos to experienced diagnosticians and asked 'What features do you look for?' They couldn't articulate what they were seeing.
- heenrik 2y ago

Llamamoe 2y ago

I don't think I can agree, as an extremely creative person with extremely bad memory - to a point where I pretty much never memorize anything, whether intentionally or by accident. What I find instead, is that by just processing novel information, especially if I focus on analysing it, my brain internalizes insights and builds model of that type of thing, allowing me to either imperfectly reconstruct what I've seen, or to come up with an infinite array of permutations, extrapolations, etc which is where the real ideas come from. Further, ideas crucially revolve not around just the information itself, but the "feel" for what role they play in the whole, how well they do it, in what way they're notable, etc. In fact I'd straight up claim that memorization is antithetical to creativity - a perfect ML autoencoder or GAN would just regurgitate the training data. Creativity comes from generalisation while memorisation is analogous to overfitting.

XenophileJKO 2y ago
A million times this.. I also am extremely creative and in fact I think the MOST creative people are really bad at intentional memoration, but are good at seeing patterns. I feel like often the reason a creative person is hyper creative is they haven't memorized things so they are trying to rebuild information all the time in their heads from very sparse details. This creates the transformative and relational combinations of information that a person memorizing can't see because it is created from a lack of organized specific information rather than a bounty of it.
Sammi 2y ago
"What I find instead, is that by just processing novel information, especially if I focus on analysing it, my brain internalizes insights and builds model of that type of thing" Sorry, but this is memoization.
- guitheeengineer 2y ago
  I feel like every reply making a point against memorisation would benefit from having their definition of what is memorization, because every single one of those replies sound like they're still implicitly describing some sort of memorization as the better way

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

>One of the points I'm trying to make is that taste and elegance fundamentally stem from an internalized heuristic -- which at it's core is memorization. seems to me there is a relatively big inductive gap there, you believe that there is an internalized heuristic and at its core is memorization, you may even have some evidence that this internalized heuristic has strongly informed your development of taste, but it is pretty difficult to make an argument that is the case for all people. Aside from that I would say that "internalized heuristic with memorization as the core" puts everything on nurture and no input of nature - which I am pretty much in the camp of combinations of nature and nurture creating the person - of which taste must surely be a big component.

passion__desire 2y ago

Schmidhuber reached your conclusions first. Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

also a question - if you have better long term or short term memory how does that affect taste? How does it affect creativity, if all of these things are essentially memorization you would have to assume that people were more creative and had better taste the greater their ability to memorize things, which in the case of taste especially seems slightly absurd. In the case of creativity it may be easier to make an argument - but surely you can find people who seem more creative with less ability to memorize.

bccdee 2y ago

Why are you attached to the word "memorization" here? Certainly taste comes from experience and learning. Maybe you could argue that all learning is an oblique and imperfect form of memorization—but why argue that at all? The only reason I can see is if you think memorization could be a shortcut to good taste, which it can't. Acquiring good taste requires broad experience—more information than you can possibly remember—such that you retain a suite of sophisticated intuitions. Cutting that information down to something that can be memorized would require you to (1) already have the intuitions you're seeking to acquire, and (2) be able to express them all in plain English, which, as far as I know, cannot be done. No painter has ever expressed their aesthetic in such a way that a student could memorize that expression and then have the same creative sensibilities as the original painter. Ultimately, there's no substitute for the process of simply consuming lots of art while paying close attention to what you like about it.