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> I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer. But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers

> I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer. But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers. When people talk about memorization they talk about remembering the words without understanding the concepts, such a person is no better off than the person carrying around a text note with the concept written down. When you understand these concepts you will remember those formulas, but memorizing the formula doesn't make you understand it. Therefore creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, there is something else there.

muzani 2y ago
The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things. You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board. The ability to memorize opening moves may lead you into a stronger mid game, but it's not creativity. Creativity is searching for patterns where they can mate in three, or spotting positions where the bishop can attack two pieces at once in two moves.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things No it doesn't, understanding a concept doesn't come from memorizing N facts, if it did we could easily make everyone understand math in school but we can't. Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula. > You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board. That is just a theory, there is little behind that. Much more likely you become a chess master by training a board state evaluator in your hand that is really good at evaluating board states, not by memorizing lots of board states. Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it. That board state evaluator allows you to also remember board states easily, but you don't build that by memorizing board state patterns.
  - simiones 2y ago
    Memorizing is clearly a necessary, but not sufficient part of learning. If you are to become an expert in any subject whatsoever, from math to football fandom, you will need to develop an ability for remembering huge amounts of raw facts. One of the first hurdles in a math education is memorizing the multiplication tables. In biology or medicine you have to learn literally hundreds of systems that happen to exist in a certain way, and from all of the raw facts, could very well be a different way. > Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula. Sure, you can wing it at a primary or high school level if your teachers are impressed by your understanding. But you will never become a math expert if you don't remember the specific formulae, and many other more complex things. Even if you are fully able to deduce the theorems from scratch, you won't be able to function if you have to invent and then prove every single theorem you want to use. > Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it. No, it is precisely the other way around. DeepBlue is deducing how good a board state is by trying to calculate all possible follow-up moves up to a depth of 13 or something. In contrast, AlphaGo has memorized patterns occuring in billions of games (in a lossy archive format, of course) and basically can recall games that are close enough to the current game and what you need to do to win from the current position. And this is exactly how chess masters mostly work as well, to the extent that it has been studied, and based on their own reporting. They just recognize positions or certain aspects of a position, and can recall how the game works from that position.
- will1am 2y ago
  I think memorization is a tool to deep understanding
ozim 2y ago
Without memorizing at first, it is much harder to understand the topic. Memorizing builds fluency, fluency builds proficiency. You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up. Yes at some point you build up experience so you never really think of it but for it to become intuitive it needs to be learned by rot repetition
- Jensson 2y ago
  > You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up. But I learned Ohms law without learning any formula, or memorizing any picture. I just internalized that electricity are electrons that gets pushed by a force against a resistance, so it is obvious that the amount that gets pushed through is force divided by resistance. I couldn't write down the formula for that, because I don't remember which symbol represents what, but I understand the concept as good as any expert and I never need to look that up because my intuition instantly solves any related problem. Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized.
  - kiba 2y ago
    Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized. If you mean by rote learning and just remembering information in an arbitrary manner, then that's memorization. I doubt that such a person have even acquired the knowledge, except maybe for the simplest case such as multiplication tables. I know how multiplication works actually, but I never used them. Instead I go for the memorized answer. But all knowledge a person have is based on memory. How you acquire it is up to you, preferably in the most efficient way possible so that we actually retain the information and don't have to "study" as often.
WalterBright 2y ago
The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formulae. But if you didn't already know them, you didn't have the time to open the book and learn about them.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formula. Yes, you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests. Don't underestimate how far mindless pattern matching can take you, you can get pretty high up in international competitions just by dumb pattern matching and very little broader understanding, tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level compared to that. But of course such an engineer can be useful to solve constrained problems, but I wouldn't call them good since they don't really connect to the larger picture so they need a lot of oversight.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests Of course. But the issue is can you be a good engineer if you flunk the tests? > tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level That's a nope.
will1am 2y ago
Creativity comes from a deep understanding of concepts

muzani 2y ago

The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things. You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board. The ability to memorize opening moves may lead you into a stronger mid game, but it's not creativity. Creativity is searching for patterns where they can mate in three, or spotting positions where the bishop can attack two pieces at once in two moves.

Jensson 2y ago
> The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things No it doesn't, understanding a concept doesn't come from memorizing N facts, if it did we could easily make everyone understand math in school but we can't. Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula. > You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board. That is just a theory, there is little behind that. Much more likely you become a chess master by training a board state evaluator in your hand that is really good at evaluating board states, not by memorizing lots of board states. Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it. That board state evaluator allows you to also remember board states easily, but you don't build that by memorizing board state patterns.
- simiones 2y ago
  Memorizing is clearly a necessary, but not sufficient part of learning. If you are to become an expert in any subject whatsoever, from math to football fandom, you will need to develop an ability for remembering huge amounts of raw facts. One of the first hurdles in a math education is memorizing the multiplication tables. In biology or medicine you have to learn literally hundreds of systems that happen to exist in a certain way, and from all of the raw facts, could very well be a different way. > Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula. Sure, you can wing it at a primary or high school level if your teachers are impressed by your understanding. But you will never become a math expert if you don't remember the specific formulae, and many other more complex things. Even if you are fully able to deduce the theorems from scratch, you won't be able to function if you have to invent and then prove every single theorem you want to use. > Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it. No, it is precisely the other way around. DeepBlue is deducing how good a board state is by trying to calculate all possible follow-up moves up to a depth of 13 or something. In contrast, AlphaGo has memorized patterns occuring in billions of games (in a lossy archive format, of course) and basically can recall games that are close enough to the current game and what you need to do to win from the current position. And this is exactly how chess masters mostly work as well, to the extent that it has been studied, and based on their own reporting. They just recognize positions or certain aspects of a position, and can recall how the game works from that position.
will1am 2y ago
I think memorization is a tool to deep understanding

ozim 2y ago

Without memorizing at first, it is much harder to understand the topic. Memorizing builds fluency, fluency builds proficiency. You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up. Yes at some point you build up experience so you never really think of it but for it to become intuitive it needs to be learned by rot repetition

Jensson 2y ago
> You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up. But I learned Ohms law without learning any formula, or memorizing any picture. I just internalized that electricity are electrons that gets pushed by a force against a resistance, so it is obvious that the amount that gets pushed through is force divided by resistance. I couldn't write down the formula for that, because I don't remember which symbol represents what, but I understand the concept as good as any expert and I never need to look that up because my intuition instantly solves any related problem. Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized.
- kiba 2y ago
  Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized. If you mean by rote learning and just remembering information in an arbitrary manner, then that's memorization. I doubt that such a person have even acquired the knowledge, except maybe for the simplest case such as multiplication tables. I know how multiplication works actually, but I never used them. Instead I go for the memorized answer. But all knowledge a person have is based on memory. How you acquire it is up to you, preferably in the most efficient way possible so that we actually retain the information and don't have to "study" as often.

WalterBright 2y ago

The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formulae. But if you didn't already know them, you didn't have the time to open the book and learn about them.

Jensson 2y ago
> The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formula. Yes, you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests. Don't underestimate how far mindless pattern matching can take you, you can get pretty high up in international competitions just by dumb pattern matching and very little broader understanding, tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level compared to that. But of course such an engineer can be useful to solve constrained problems, but I wouldn't call them good since they don't really connect to the larger picture so they need a lot of oversight.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests Of course. But the issue is can you be a good engineer if you flunk the tests? > tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level That's a nope.

will1am 2y ago

Creativity comes from a deep understanding of concepts