[HN Gopher] Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
___________________________________________________________________
Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?
Author : shw1n
Score : 305 points
Date : 2024-07-30 22:37 UTC (1 days ago)
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| shw1n wrote:
| Something I noticed from being raised by Indian parents while
| going through the US school system
|
| And again after learning how to acquire new skills quickly
| galkk wrote:
| I will disagree. Creativity comes from applying acquired
| knowledge (that's where memorization comes into account) in new
| contexts.
| shw1n wrote:
| Appreciate you reading!
|
| But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in
| this new context?
|
| It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is just a
| less obvious form of memorization
|
| i.e. you've memorized the match between inherent traits of the
| context with a specific application of that knowledge
| GavinMcG wrote:
| To me, "memorization" implies an active process focused on
| learning a particular set of "matches" (to adopt the term
| you're using here). But it seems to me that tacit knowledge
| (and other products of less concentrated/deliberate learning)
| often plays a substantial role in creativity.
|
| That is, creativity fundamentally comes from internalized
| knowledge (as the article says) but internalized knowledge
| doesn't necessarily come from memorization.
| shw1n wrote:
| I think I see -- in your view "memorization" only refers to
| conscious learning
|
| While internalized knowledge comes from "subconscious" (for
| lack of a better word) learning?
|
| I guess I'm equating the two here and just using
| memorization as "committing to memory", with the belief
| being that you can construct the heuristic you'd normally
| acquire subconsciously and cut down time to mastery
| GavinMcG wrote:
| I think memorization can play a role in internalizing
| knowledge, but it isn't a "fundamental" as in necessary.
| Internalized knowledge can also come from other sources.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > But how do you know how to apply this acquired knowledge in
| this new context?
|
| That question has a false precondition baked in. If you know
| how, it's not creative.
|
| > It's some form of pattern matching right -- which imo is
| just a less obvious form of memorization
|
| No. Sensing and matching patterns does not imply
| memorization. Everything you're saying is completely loaded.
|
| Did you just discover memorization? Because the pattern I see
| in your words is similar to anyone who's just learned a new
| tool or technique - they overapply it everywhere as they
| learn to use it.
| shw1n wrote:
| But you must have knowledge of the basic units of your
| chosen art to apply that to the new situation right?
|
| E.g. if you're an artist, at the very least you need the
| knowledge of how to draw a line
|
| From other comments here it seems the definition of
| "memorization" seems to be where disagreements are
|
| Maybe this is a better explanation: once I started trying
| to make whatI just learned is called "tacit knowledge" more
| explicit and then committing it to memory, I was able to
| cut learning times down significantly
| Sakos wrote:
| I think the disagreements are largely from this weird
| cultural bias against any form of explicit
| "memorization". It's very, very strange.
| Jensson wrote:
| > E.g. if you're an artist, at the very least you need
| the knowledge of how to draw a line
|
| But no artist memorize how to draw a line. They learn how
| to draw a line, but learning isn't the same thing as
| memorizing.
| rokob wrote:
| This seems to resonate with my experience, although I feel myself
| bristling due to the baggage of the word memorization.
|
| Although sometimes "memorization" doesn't happen because you sit
| down to do it but rather that you keep using the same things over
| and over when solving problems that they become internalized. I
| find that to be a more fruitful path towards understanding that I
| don't want to call memorization but it is.
| shw1n wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| And agreed -- it's this exact realization that led me to both
| this method and title
|
| Imo this negative connotation has made many people refrain from
| calling internalization what it is
|
| But acknowledging that it's memorization has actually made me
| more efficient at learning, since I can now consciously look
| for the heuristic, codify it, and try to commit it to memory
| Sakos wrote:
| Maybe you should first try to separate the negative feelings
| you have towards the word "memorization" and the word itself
| "memorization". There's nothing bad about memorization. This
| sort of negative bias about inconsequential things is something
| that can easily hold us back from things that could help us
| further ourselves.
| rokob wrote:
| Tell me about it. Trying to get better every day.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I genuinely thought creativity was something else until LLMs hit
| escape velocity and humbled me hard.
|
| After that I realized that creativity wasn't some magical quality
| that would be hard to reproduce mechanically.
|
| And that also made me a little sad.
| shw1n wrote:
| I'm glad you said this -- I felt the same way after making this
| discovery through my method outlined in this post
|
| It similarly took the magic out of creativity and learning a
| bit, and made it all seem like work
|
| The main way I've found around it is the joy in being creative
| once basic autonomy is achieved in new skills
|
| Consciously discovering the heuristic is another fun part
| sva_ wrote:
| But LLMs to date can't really differentiate well between a
| creative insightful answer, and a nonsensical one. The
| selection process is still done by a human.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This is true. I hadn't thought about that aspect.
| euvin wrote:
| I think memorization gets a bad rep because you need to be
| acutely aware of what you're memorizing, like memorizing the
| sequence of an answer sheet instead of core concepts. But when
| done sufficiently rigorously, the foundations of memorization
| _make room_ for higher-level critical thinking and reasoning.
|
| Practice is an oft suggested solution to developing mastery, but
| I did like how the article framed it: creating subconscious
| heuristics and memory.
| shw1n wrote:
| Couldn't have said it better, exactly -- the negative
| connotations of the word prevent us from recognizing what
| powers learning at its core
|
| But imo acknowledging this unlocks greater speeds and gets us
| to the "fun part" quicker
| kiwi_kim wrote:
| Absolutely, especially in real world application. If you don't
| have the ability to pull on fundamental ideas anywhere,
| anytime, then have you really mastered the learning material?
| usrbinno wrote:
| Right. I noticed this acutely in an abstract algebra course. We
| learned several different proof methods, then the exam was just
| "prove these theorems with the tools you have". I'd never been
| challenged with math like that before. I mean, I bombed it lol,
| but nobody was going to pass if they didn't remember, say, how
| to do a proof by induction or what it means. At some point, you
| need to be able to recall this information. Maybe the
| psychologists categorize these things differently, but I'd
| argue it's clear that some form of memorization is necessary
| for the task.
| tikhonj wrote:
| "a flash of inspiration connecting internalized concepts"
|
| Well, okay, but rote memorization is neither necessary nor
| sufficient to internalize concepts.
|
| One of the reasons people make fun of the author's approach to
| creativity is that systematic memorization fundamentally can't
| teach _taste_ --so the systematic approach reeks of awkward, try-
| hard, low-brow, tasteless art.
|
| More broadly, memorization doesn't help much with any sort of
| tacit knowledge, not just taste. I just figure taste is
| especially important in creative endeavors. That's definitely the
| case for programming! Memorization in programming gives us
| architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than
| elegant code.
|
| For what it's worth, I do think that it is useful and important
| to have a good mental model of what expertise is and how you can
| develop it. Memorization might be a _component_ of this, but it
| 's going to be a _small_ component at most. I expect that
| realistic practice with fast feedback and expert mentorship
| matters far more. (If you 're curious, I found the book _Sources
| of Power_ by Gary Klein gave me a good way to think about how
| expertise works.)
|
| At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time and
| it's frightfully dull. For me, at least, trying to memorize
| something without context is not just ineffective but also
| totally kills any intrinsic motivation I have for whatever I'm
| learning. Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but
| I've found that to be relatively rare. Otherwise, my time is
| generally better spent on some sort of practice in context.
| shw1n wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| shw1n wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The concept is called 'tacit knowledge'.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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
| maksimur wrote:
| I feel like this is about the difference between
| rote/explicit memorization and organic/implicit/tacit
| memorization, for a lack of better words. I suspect the
| former could narrow/restrict your understanding because
| it may be constrained/limited by the
| vocabulary/definition itself.
| djeastm wrote:
| I think perhaps there's a confusion of "memorization"
| with "rote memorization". The word "rote" connotes
| flashcards and dull drills, but memorization by itself,
| to me at least, is more like "a focused attempt at
| internalizing information", in whatever way that means to
| a person, as opposed to just ingesting it or letting it
| wash over you/osmosis.
|
| But that's just my interpretation of the terms. I don't
| know what the "official" meanings are.
| alan-hn wrote:
| Exactly, everyone here is just describing different forms
| of memorization
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Is it? If I don't remember any of the detail, but just
| the general "feel" of the concept.. is that memorization?
| jaggederest wrote:
| https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-basics/memory/types-memory
| barrkel wrote:
| What do you call it when you remember things so you can
| repeat them but you can't generalize? E.g. if you learn a
| poem or phrase in a foreign language, but can't reuse the
| words in different contexts? Or being able to recite a
| rule, but not automatically applying it?
|
| Is there a word for this?
|
| Similarly, we should have a word for knowing how to reuse
| something in a different context, but not recall its
| origin or its canonical portrayal. Being able to apply a
| rule, without being able to recite it.
|
| Do you think there's one word which means both of these
| things, which are opposites, as I've stated them?
| Izkata wrote:
| > What do you call it when you remember things so you can
| repeat them but you can't generalize? E.g. if you learn a
| poem or phrase in a foreign language, but can't reuse the
| words in different contexts? Or being able to recite a
| rule, but not automatically applying it?
|
| "Rote memorization"
| barrkel wrote:
| Rote means learning by repetition.
| Izkata wrote:
| And "rote memorization" is a compound term that means
| what you were asking for. It's one of those things you
| can't get the exact meaning of by just looking at the
| components.
| inciampati wrote:
| Modeling is not memorization. It's more generic and can't
| allow you to reproduce the memorized information, only
| describe its underlying structure.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I think I would call it internalization instead of
| memorization. People memorize equations not knowing what
| the variables are, others internalize the concepts of
| what is trying to be calculated.
| Izkata wrote:
| > > and builds model
|
| > memoization
|
| Was this intentional and no one caught on?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization
|
| Or just a typo?
| Sammi wrote:
| Typo. Funny typo given we're on hn.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| If I cannot recall the information or even that I've come
| across it unprompted, is it really? Because that's my
| norm, and I still retain insights from that, that are
| then applicable across topics.
| kqr wrote:
| I would describe myself exactly the same way as you, and
| I've always been that way (noticed it at first in school
| where I would take forever to hand in the memorisation half
| of an exam but finish the analytical half in record time.)
|
| I recommend giving spaced repetition a serious go. It
| doesn't cost much and you might be surprised how far it
| takes even someone like you. It completely changed how I
| view the role of memorisation in analytical work.
|
| Strictly speaking, someone like you does not need to
| memorise things because you can always derive them from
| more fundamental principles. But being able to do that,
| while a blessing, is also a crutch.
|
| Reasoning from first principles _every time_ is slow
| compared to pulling out the right relationship for the
| problem at hand right away.
| philipov wrote:
| Yes! Creativity often happens when you try to reconstruct
| something you failed to memorize, but succeed at making
| something else.
| bobbruno wrote:
| I think we have a problem of semantics here. Your notion of
| "the brain internalizes insights" is very close to what the
| author means as memorizing patterns. They even gabe a few
| examples where they started with rote memorizations, which
| were not that useful at first, but eventually a pattern, an
| insight if you will, emerged.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Anything you "know" is because you have memorized it. It
| has nothing to do with either effort, or consciousness.
|
| Memory is the basis of knowledge.
| moate wrote:
| Which is why the thesis here is boring/less useful. "All
| colors come from memorization" is also accurate. "All
| thought comes from memorization". At that point, you're
| factually accurate but saying little of use.
|
| If you're trying to teach creativity, what do you make
| people memorize? The author even points out: some
| cultures are great at memorizing and bad at innovation
| and vice versa. That's interesting to talk about. "Try-
| hards use spreadsheets to be funnier" is...sad?
| awahab92 wrote:
| does it hurt being as stupid as you?
|
| maybe go to a doctor and show them this post.
|
| They will be sad lol. another victim of american school
| system.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| euvin wrote:
| Interesting perspective. I do agree that there are people out
| there who develop a distinct "taste", but I can't tell if this
| refers to a "style", an emergent property of multiple "habits",
| etc? I've always wondered how one develops their "taste".
|
| Also, would you consider a subconscious habit "memory"? What's
| the difference between the two?
| knighthack wrote:
| I completely disagree with your assertion that _"...rote
| memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize
| concepts. "_
|
| I would recommend reading the book _Moonwalking with Einstein_.
| There is a lot of discussion there on how memory is linked
| directly to creativity, and to understanding concepts deeply.
|
| ---
|
| A choice passage:
|
| "... _If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts
| and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations,
| and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the
| better you 'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes
| to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother
| of the Muses._
|
| _The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the
| same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity
| seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea
| that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was
| once even taken for granted. The Latin root 'inventio' is the
| basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory
| and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory,
| those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of
| inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some
| alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first
| needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on.
| Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a
| way of finding just the right piece of information at just the
| right moment._
|
| _This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful
| for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of
| invention and composition. "The realization that composing
| depended on a wellfurnished and securely available memory
| formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity," writes
| Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing
| cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed
| into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go
| missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together
| on the fly. The goal of training one's memory was to develop
| the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new
| connections between old ideas. "As an art, memory was most
| importantly associated in the Middles Ages with composition,
| not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who
| practiced the crafts of memory used them---as all crafts are
| used---to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons,
| pictures, hymns, stories, and poems." ..."_
| shw1n wrote:
| Great passage -- this is exactly what I was trying to get at,
| though they've described it with much more eloquence and
| historical backing.
|
| Have never heard of this book but adding to my list now!
| kiwi_kim wrote:
| Great book, motivated me to then read The Art of Memory by
| Frances Yates.
|
| Although I'd say traditional mnemonic devices like memory
| palaces are basically linear information storage and recall
| devices. This can create issues in building a flexible web of
| information, because loci or the order of the path can become
| dependencies and you can run out of unique spots in a given
| space, leading to memory interference.
|
| Even spaced repetition methods (e.g. Anki) tend towards
| fragmentation of micro-ideas. Its perfect for terms,
| languages, and simple one question -> one answer ideas.
|
| I've found a hybrid method of images, nested loci and spaced
| repetition to be most useful, because its flexible over time,
| and preserves relationships of ideas.
|
| (Context: I co-founded a SaaS in this space:
| www.sticky.study)
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| You are very correct in my experience since mnemonics
| backfired on me that way. It was like my brain constricted
| on those but recall was good in limited situation.
|
| Thanks for sharing your alternative. I like that you've
| included your references for each component of your method.
| That might help as many people as your product. I'll look
| into it sometime.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Didn't Einstein say that don't memorise what you can look up?
| E.g. nothing nowadays since we have the Internet.
| djeastm wrote:
| All of us over here memorizing words to speak instead of
| looking up each word each time...
| andai wrote:
| Counterargument: the alphabet.
| naasking wrote:
| > Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts
| and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
|
| Elegance is probably orthogonal to creativity, and likely
| follows from some kind of minimization principle, like minimum
| program length. You are effectively distilling the "essence" of
| something from all of the noise.
|
| Creativity seems different, more like novelty, and creativity
| following some kind of remix of memorized elements + some
| randomization seems very plausible.
|
| You can create something novel but not elegant, and something
| elegant but not novel, and you can distill an elegant version
| of something novel that your or someone else created and that's
| the best of all creations.
| keybored wrote:
| The book _Make it Stick_ taught me that this Don't Cramp My
| Style With Your Boring Rote Learning (Man) attitude is
| prevalent in teaching. At least American. They argue that it is
| wrong for the same reason that the author does.
|
| But saying this to a programming crowd must be the most futile
| thing. At least instrumentalists have to rote train their
| muscle memory. That lowest bar has to be passed, even if it's
| just three chords.
|
| But the article isn't about _programming_ creativity though. It
| is a general concept. But if honing in on the mythical lone-
| genius activity (geniuses never practice in a structured way)
| helps you win an argument then so be it.
| linearrust wrote:
| > Well, okay, but rote memorization is neither necessary nor
| sufficient to internalize concepts.
|
| Of course it is. It's how every human child learns initially.
| By rote memorization. How does a toddler learn how to say mama?
| By constantly hearing and repeating it. How does a kid learn
| their ABCs? Rote memorization is the basis of all memory.
|
| > Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts
| and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.
|
| Dumbest thing I've ever read. You write programs well by doing
| and remembering. Same with writing. Memorization is the
| necessary component to programming well. In other words, you
| program well by remembering elegant code.
|
| > For me, at least, trying to memorize something without
| context
|
| After the basics, most memorization is contextual.
|
| > At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time
| and it's frightfully dull.
|
| Oh dear. Something isn't fun all the time. What a childish
| worldview. It's more fun to eat candy and drink soda than
| eating 'dull'. It's more fun to sit and watch youtube than to
| workout.
|
| > Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but I've
| found that to be relatively rare.
|
| Relatively rare? In order to be competent in anything, you have
| to memorize lots. You can't write a good essay without having
| memorized much of the material. Trying reading a book where you
| have to constantly look up definitions of words because you
| lack the vocabulary. Try having a conversation with someone who
| has to constantly look up words because he lacks the
| vocabulary. Try having code review with someone who doesn't
| remember anything about their code.
|
| > Otherwise, my time is generally better spent on some sort of
| practice in context.
|
| Why? Because it helps you remember?
|
| To the idiot ( probably OP ) who downvoted, try coding without
| having 'memorized' the keyboard. The anti-intellectual, anti-
| hard work, anti-memorization agenda pushed by some 'people'
| online bears looking into.
| herdrick wrote:
| Strong points, but insults and emotion aren't how we do it on
| HN.
| flir wrote:
| > One of the reasons people make fun of the author's approach
| to creativity is that systematic memorization fundamentally
| can't teach taste--so the systematic approach reeks of awkward,
| try-hard, low-brow, tasteless art.
|
| Well... can you think of an artist who didn't have a deep
| knowledge of their art-form before they pushed it forward?
| Three that jump out for me, in no particular order, are
| Picasso, Borges and Jack White. After all, great artists steal.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Pollock is often regarded as pushing painting forward, for
| example
| flir wrote:
| Thanks, I don't know enough about him - does that support
| my hypothesis or tear it down?
| groby_b wrote:
| Wait, why do you think Picasso didn't have deep knowledge? He
| studied both at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona & the
| Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, for ~5 years before
| moving to Paris.
|
| Borges was incredibly talented, but it's worth keeping in
| mind his dad was a writer too.
|
| Good art very much relies on being exposed to lots of other
| good art first. I don't know that rote memorization is the
| best way to achieve that, but you definitely need that
| exposure.
| flir wrote:
| Sorry, I must have expressed myself badly. I'm picking
| examples of people I think did/do have deep knowledge of
| their chosen mediums.
|
| I don't think it's possible to have "good taste" without
| exposure to lots of examples, because I believe taste it
| culturally bound. Whether you do it explicity via a system,
| or on a more ad hoc basis, I think most artists need it.
|
| It might be interesting to look at film, where the process
| is compressed into a couple of generations. I don't know it
| it will support my argument or not.
| groby_b wrote:
| Ah, misread you then, thanks for clarifying.
|
| I don't think film will look very different here - early
| film work was very much informed by theatrical tastes at
| the time, and then started to diverge as people figured
| out what _else_ they could say in the language of film.
|
| Fundamentally, all art exists in a cultural context. If
| you've ever taken an art history course, you've been hit
| over the head with that info a few times ;) And that
| means furthering/changing taste in a given field means
| being aware enough of the existing rules to deliberately
| choose which ones you're breaking, and why.
|
| There are some (very few) artists who didn't have a
| formal grounding, but I'd argue that even they were
| steeped enough in cultural context to be informed by it.
| Even famous autodidacts like Grandma Moses did develop a
| love for art based on being exposed to a bunch of it.
|
| (Fully recognizing that it's a somewhat tautological
| argument because it's kind of impossible to grow up in a
| society without being somewhat exposed to its predominant
| art forms)
| tikhonj wrote:
| There's a big difference between "artist who didn't have a
| deep knowledge of their art-form" and "artist who didn't
| follow an explicit system to memorize a bunch of rules to
| make their art".
| boppo1 wrote:
| Picasso was a hack. People often cite his "early
| masterpieces", but those pieces are pretty mid in the context
| of 19th c. painting.
| watwut wrote:
| I think that argument is that these artists did not memorized
| rules or previous pictures and then applied them. They did
| put a lot of effort into learning, but that is different
| claim. If you define "memorization" as "any learning of
| anything", then the word is kind of useless.
| hosh wrote:
| I think it is more of becoming fluent with primitives that can
| be composed in versatile ways. I can see how that can be poorly
| understood as memorization.
|
| The main implication is that if what you are "memorizing" is
| not easily composable, then you won't be able to apply them
| broadly or creatively.
|
| However, I disagree with the author on what creativity is,
| although his definition is one experience of a creative
| inspiration.
| navaed01 wrote:
| I disagree with elements of this article, but enjoyed reading it.
| True creatives do not subvert norms consciously or with an acute
| awareness as part of this article suggests, I agree they need to
| be exposed to the norms to generate their own interpretation, but
| I don't believe that true creativity is a conscious exercise.
| shw1n wrote:
| Completely agree -- but isn't internalization of their art
| (i.e. memorization) needed to achieve this subconscious
| creativity?
|
| That's the point I'm trying to make at least -- that
| unintentional creativity stems from learning, which at it's
| core is memorization
| ArcaneMoose wrote:
| Well said - what's funny is that many creative ideas (from an
| outside perspective) are often very simple connections of two
| existing ideas for the person that actually did something
| creative! It's just that other people don't have the same
| context/knowledge as the creator, so an idea can seem
| extremely original to them
| ambyra wrote:
| It's not memorizing, it's actually knowing and understanding the
| utility of different concepts. When you learn of a problem in a
| new field, you go through your bucket of tools and modify one to
| fit the new problem.
| RRWagner wrote:
| Exactly. And "synthesis" is the better word than "creativity".
| I wrote an essay about this very topic some years ago: https://
| docs.google.com/document/d/1tbMTpkPWkkN8_KH2KSpteFsb.... (if
| you can't open Google docs, an older draft is here:
| https://rogerwagner.com/creativity.html)
| shw1n wrote:
| Interesting -- hadn't heard of this synthesis vs creativity
| take before
|
| I could see that -- agreed that "creativity" can be too blunt
| of a word to use for all situations
| shw1n wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| Isn't learning which tools in the bucket fits the a problem
| best just memorizing a heuristic?
|
| That's the point I'm attempting to make, that it's not blind
| memorization without context, but still memorization of a
| heuristic at its core
| stoperaticless wrote:
| Probably you would have had more agreement, if you would have
| used a different word (though I'm not able to suggest that
| different word that captures the meaning I think you
| intended)
| suzzer99 wrote:
| For me anyway, it's getting so familiar with something that
| your mind wanders and considers other possibilities.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| You have to know things to be reasonably creative but there is a
| point where memorizing more stifles creativity. Memorization is
| often very passive and is fundamentally different from searching
| for new ways of doing things. It's hard to make sweeping
| statements like this because there are different modes of memory
| and different modes of creativity.
|
| There is a lot of memory involved in being creative, but I think
| setting out to memorize things is a bad way to be creative. You
| have to practice being creative. In doing so, you will naturally
| remember a lot of stuff like what works, what doesn't, and most
| importantly which types of things you ought to memorize. For
| example if you're programming you will find it useful to remember
| the syntax of your languages. If you're writing you'll find it
| useful to remember styles and vocabulary. And so on...
| shw1n wrote:
| Agreed -- I'm not trying to suggest that memory is a
| replacement for creativity
|
| I'm suggesting that it enables it, as it's hard to be creative
| when you're still trying to remember the basics of your art
|
| But once things become autonomous -- you can focus on those
| higher-level explorations
| rychco wrote:
| I agree with the author, at least in my own creative experiences.
| However, it's more likely the case that 'creativity' is arrived
| at differently for everyone. I find memorization to be a
| _comforting_ foundational activity that builds knowledge &
| confidence, which I can later express creatively.
| shw1n wrote:
| Exactly -- memorization provides the base for creativity to
| take place upon
|
| But that creativity can come from many places and in many
| forms!
| singleshot_ wrote:
| This claim makes little sense because it fails to distinguish
| between memory and memorization. I memorize almost nothing, but I
| remember the broad strokes of a lot of things. This allows me to
| be creative.
|
| In a way, memorization is a severe risk: if you memorized
| something before it changed, for example, your creativity may not
| mean much.
| shw1n wrote:
| Hey thanks for reading!
|
| What I was trying to convey is that fundamentally learning is
| memorization, whether conscious "rote memorization" or more
| less-intentional committing to memory from doing an activity
|
| And that recognizing this allows us to speed up the process of
| learning fundamentals
|
| Which in turn enables creativity as most people see it
| lelandbatey wrote:
| You state that "learning is memorization" but I don't think
| that is true. Of course learning involves something being
| persisted in one's brain, but stating that memorization and
| brain persistence persisting are synonyms seems like an
| incorrect description.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| You're right. The OP is mistaken as to the distinction
| between memory and memorization. I am able to be creative
| because, for example, I remember that a woman's hair
| smelled like flowers and secrets. It would not be possible
| to memorize such a thing.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| repetitio mater studiorum est -- repetition is the mother of
| learning
|
| "Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action,
| which makes it the architect of accomplishment."
| watwut wrote:
| Conscious memorization and rote memorization are two
| different things. I can intentionally put things into memory
| without doing rote memorization - or even intentionally
| avoiding rote memorization. The techniques you use also give
| you different results in terms of whether or how you use the
| memorized concept or word in foreign language. (For example
| getting the effect where you can translate a word between
| foreign and your language, but can not use it foreign
| language sentence and do not understand it in context without
| translating.)
| ArcaneMoose wrote:
| What's more is that memories are just a replaying of neuron
| connections activating in the brain - and when we are prompted by
| the world around us those connections will fire in response to
| the stimulus. Quite similar to how AI neural networks function -
| which is why I believe that AI can indeed be creative and create
| "new" ideas
| ArcaneMoose wrote:
| I actually made a video diving deeper into this and comparing
| responses from people and ChatGPT for a creative thinking
| problem - https://youtu.be/l-9EUBbktqw
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think your hypothesis here (and probably the entire article
| as well) is strongly challenged by the 'progenitor argument.'
| Take humans at the dawn of humanity. Language did not even
| exist beyond what may have been crude sounds or gesturing and
| collective knowledge did not fall that far beyond 'poke him
| with the pointy side.' Somehow we went from that to putting a
| man on the Moon in what was essentially the blink of an eye.
|
| Training an LLM on the entirety of knowledge at this dawn of
| humanity and, even if you give it literally infinite training
| time, it's never going to go anywhere. It's going to just
| continue making relatively simple recombinations of its
| training set until somebody gives it a new training set to
| remix. This remix-only nature is no different with modern
| knowledge, but simply extremely obfuscated because there's
| such a massive base of information, and nobody is aware of
| anything more than a minuscule fraction of it all.
|
| ---
|
| As for the 'secret' of LLMs, I think it's largely that most
| language is _extremely_ redundant. One thought or point
| naturally flows.... why do I complete the rest of this
| statement? You already know exactly what I 'm going to say,
| right? And from that statement the rest of my argument will
| also mostly write itself. Yet we do write out the rest, which
| is kind of weird if you think about it. Anyhow the point is
| that by looking at language 'flow correlations' over huge
| samples, LLMs can reconstruct and remix arbitrarily long
| dialogue from even the shortest of initial inputs. And it
| usually sounds at least reasonable, except when it doesn't
| and we call it a hallucination, but it's quite a misnomer
| because the entire process is a hallucination.
| ArcaneMoose wrote:
| Interesting point - thanks for sharing! I think one big
| missing piece we have with AIs today is the ability for
| them to learn on the fly and reconfigure the weights. We
| are constantly bombarded with input and our neurons adjust
| accordingly. Current LLMs just use a snapshot. I would be
| really curious to see how online-first AI models could
| work, focusing on a constant input stream and iterating on
| weights. Also I wonder how much knowledge is baked into our
| DNA through evolution. I have a hunch that this is somewhat
| analogous to model architectures.
|
| Btw - although I see evidence of LLMs creating "new ideas"
| through combinations of ideas, I am a bit mystified by
| their apparent reasoning issues. I wonder how that is
| different in nature from the memory-based approach. ARC-AGI
| benchmark has had me thinking about this for sure.
| Terr_ wrote:
| On the other hand, _episodic_ memory (insofar as that is distinct
| from "3*9=27" memorization) is built on top of creativity.
|
| The vast majority of what we consider "memories" are the creative
| brain doing an on-the-fly story generation, massaged until it
| "seems right" and serviced plus a big dollop of emotional
| confidence.
| swayvil wrote:
| You may as well say that creativity comes from writing. Because
| obviously all of the most creative writers write. And the
| writings of creative non-writers are entirely absent.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Is there anything substantive here?
|
| It's just a bunch of arbitrary unprovable assertions.
|
| Everyone here seems to have, broadly speaking; neither a) the
| qualifications to knowledgeably comment of the (honestly poorly
| understood, afaik) function of "creativity" or b) anything more
| meaningful than "here is my naive personal lived experience and
| opinion" to contribute on the topic.
|
| It's just armchair psychology.
|
| If you want to wax philosophical, by all means, but I think
| anyone taking "thoughtful insight" away from this article or
| thread is fooling themselves.
| bubblyworld wrote:
| Whatever the epistemic quality of the article is, it's
| triggered some interesting discussion here which I think is
| valuable. No need to denigrate talking about human experience
| with other humans, I think?
| threatofrain wrote:
| One might talk about it from the perspective of birdsong, which
| is used by mates to judge sexual fitness. First a tutee bird
| learns from a tutor bird, and then eventually applies
| variability to the original song.
|
| It's strongly suspected that anterior forebrain pathway (AFP)
| may be a source of behavioral variability. We naturally age
| over time, including our vocal musculature, so in some sense we
| must constantly relearn how to use our muscles to deliver a
| song.
|
| When a bird is deafened its birdsong will naturally drift, but
| when we precisely damage the AFP along with deafening we find
| that birdsong remains stable for a longer period of time, until
| of course inevitably it must drift due to aging vocal
| musculature.
| kreetx wrote:
| You'll experience the creativity outlined in the article
| directly when you start doing deliberate memorization, i.e
| spaced repetition. No qualification needed.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think semi-obvious would be a better criticism than
| unprovable.
|
| You can't make connections unless you have things to connect
| to.
|
| You can't recognize (your own discovered/inspired) novelty
| unless you have memorized normality.
|
| If you are creative in the absence of knowledge of what already
| exists then that's considered as reinventing the wheel, and not
| very useful, even it it's Ramanujan reinventing much of
| established mathematics.
| relaxing wrote:
| All very nice and handwavey, but then you see the user's current
| venture is scammy deepfakes as a service, which is about as
| creatively bankrupt as it gets.
|
| Shame about the national stereotypes as well. There is plenty of
| creativity in Asian countries. Just bizarre assertions all
| around.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Historically eastern Asian cultures have placed duty to a whole
| host of things before oneself, and in many cases the old
| aphorism "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" applies
| as well. Plus Japan and Korea have well established cultures of
| adherence to tradition and mastering simple, time tested things
| to a ridiculous degree rather than trying to innovate.
|
| Not true of everyone, but if you compare a culture that values
| conformity and tradition to a country that values the freedom
| for the individual and trying new things, of course it's not
| going to measure up by western standards of creativity.
| watwut wrote:
| Have you seen their art and entertainment? I assure you there
| is whole lot of creativity in there. And it has a whole lot
| MORE variety then western tend to have.
| corimaith wrote:
| Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions
| and critiques from mainstream norms. The funny thing is
| that if you have a rigid conformist society, the rejects
| are going to double down on the "weird" much more than a
| well adjusted creative would.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Their art and entertainment in many cases are rebellions
| and critiques from mainstream norms
|
| No, that's just the art that Western readers notice
| because that's the only thing they recognize as art in
| the first place. Calligraphy (in China traditionally
| considered the most important form of visual art) for
| example has an astonishing tradition in East Asia, also
| notably related to the topic of the thread, memorization
| and repetition and practice and has very little to do
| with critiques of norms.
| watwut wrote:
| I found asian genres to be way more diverse and creative
| then western entertainment even when they dont criticize
| anything.
|
| Western entertainment tend to produce the same story, in
| like, two genres, again and again and again and again.
| Most of the time you can predict the movie storyline down
| to minute - and people will argue that it is the only
| correct way.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The people arguing that is the only correct way are the
| capitalists putting their money on the line, and that
| comes from a perspective of being risk averse, which is
| why "corporate art" in America is in such a shambles.
| Independent video and music are in a great state though.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Are you seriously going to hold up calligraphy as an
| example of extreme Asian creativity? The art of writing
| letters with subtle flourish? It's literally an art of
| understatement, and embodies all the characteristics that
| I stated are reasons east Asians are culturally biased
| towards being less innovative.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Yes. Understatement, subtlety and an eye for detail
| aren't opposites of creativity, it's actually sad that
| this even needs to be stated. There's no indicator at all
| that Asian societies are, in any way, biased against
| being innovative. I recommend reading Jun'ichiro
| Tanizaki's _In Praise of Shadows_ , it's a fantastic read
| on the indirect and minimal ways in which Asian societies
| express creativity and aesthetics.
|
| Just because you're loud and brash and write your
| inventions on your forehead doesn't mean you actually are
| more innovative or creative than anyone else. I know
| we've had bad comedians in the West who have made careers
| out of thinking that being loud equals being funny but
| you seem to have made an entire worldview out of that
| idea.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Tell you what. You can use the word "creativity" to mean
| "creates things" and keep that separate from "innovation"
| which means to create new things. Sure, east asians are
| "creative" but 2000 years of evolution in calligraphy
| pales compared to 500 years of stylistic evolution in
| western art. In general, westerners like to take chances
| for personal glory while asians seek to elevate the
| things their culture already values and has done for
| generations.
|
| As for your comments about my taste, it's a good thing
| taste is entirely subjective, you can think I'm boorish
| and I can think you're boring and lack vision, and we're
| both entitled to our opinions.
| lanstin wrote:
| Some minds get a lot done with a lot of memorization and some
| minds get a lot done with seeing commonalities and creating
| simplifying abstraction. We need all sorts of minds.
| dzink wrote:
| One would argue it's the opposite as people with memory problems
| have less imprint of old and more creative new ideas.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think that's true. People with memory problems more
| seem to retread the same foundational ideas repeatedly, whereas
| those with good memories recognize this repetition and then
| seek something novel.
| noideawhattoput wrote:
| A Columbia b-school professor has written a lot about this and
| developed a very compelling framework based on this. Bill Dugan -
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/7325584.William_Duggan.
|
| The first two books are fantastic.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| "Repetitio est mater studiorum" - repetition is the mother of
| learning.
|
| My creative writing professor, of all people, used to repeat this
| three times before every class. He was my favorite teacher at any
| level.
| jack_pp wrote:
| Ah, I knew that phrase but never connected it to the title
| "mother of learning" (web novel). Thanks for that tiny epiphany
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I
| fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
|
| Bruce Lee
| djeastm wrote:
| My Arabic teacher liked to say "ltkrr y`lWm lHmr" which rhymes
| and says "Repetition teaches the donkey"
|
| Not the most flattering of proverbs, but it stuck with me.
| kqr wrote:
| I was the sort of person who did not believe in memorisation as a
| solution for anything. Then I tried getting really good at spaced
| repetition for a year (yes, it is a skill that needs to be
| trained for good results) and I've completely changed my mind.
|
| Spaced repetition allows me to become proficient even in things I
| don't get the natural opportunity to practise daily, so that when
| the day comes and I need them, I have some level of knowledge
| already. This has happened to Kubernetes troubleshooting,
| statistics, PowerShell windows programming, and traffic
| engineering just in recent history.
|
| I have yet to publish some of these, but I have examples from
| statistics:
|
| https://two-wrongs.com/intuition-and-spaced-repetition.html
|
| https://two-wrongs.com/inventing-fishers-exact-test.html
|
| The latter is certainly creative in my book, although it does
| imply creativity within strict bounds.
| kiwi_kim wrote:
| I'm similar. This from your top link stood out to me:
|
| "It's a little like building with lego bricks or something -
| spaced repetition helps ensure all the tiny pieces are in the
| right place, so that the big castle can happen without
| structural integrity issues."
|
| The book Make it Stick (by Henry L. Roediger III) had a similar
| idea they called 'Structure Building'. Very similar to what you
| described, more experienced and effective learners were
| creating mental schemas of how the little, but crucial parts of
| a subject fit together, and successfully cut through the noise.
|
| Structure Building was associated with interleaved practice
| (shuffling of problem types) and spaced retrieval practice.
| alecco wrote:
| Anki flash cards?
| kqr wrote:
| I use org-drill in Emacs but it's the same idea, yes.
|
| The trick is not so much which software or settings one uses,
| but writing high-quality prompts.
| naasking wrote:
| You're always memorizing something at some level, even in math
| where you can derive so much after memorizing some core
| concepts and deductions.
| kqr wrote:
| My argument is that it is worth memorising also the
| derivations, rather than re-deriving from scratch each time.
|
| Meorising the derivation makes it easier to derive a second-
| order derivation, and so on. At some level of abstraction,
| going from first principles becomes prohibitively expensive
| and caching intermediary results, or so to speak, unlocks
| that again.
| naasking wrote:
| Sometimes yes, just like jargon is sometimes useful. Why
| use long-winded terms or descriptions when shorthand works
| between professionals.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Math proof and derivations are a bit like remembering a
| walking route. You've seen the start and end, and the main
| turns taken, and there's also a general "walking" skill you
| need.
| parmenidean wrote:
| I really enjoyed both blog posts, thank you for sharing! And I
| have to say, your explanation of the subexponential
| distribution property was remarkably clear for someone without
| a background in statistics :)
|
| Would you mind sharing the flashcards you generated to build
| this intuition? I've been using Anki for a while and really
| trying to focus now on improving my prompt writing; would love
| to see how you managed it for this problem.
| kqr wrote:
| As much as I would like to, I think getting to that
| understanding required at least 500 flashcards on general
| statistical and probability concepts, ranging from
| fundamentals to extreme value theory. Most of those are only
| barely relevant at face value, but still contribute to
| understanding.
|
| It's not that I set out to understand this specific thing but
| that I had studied statistics with flashcard support for a
| year and that happened to work after a few attempts.
| parmenidean wrote:
| Completely makes sense, appreciate the thoughtful reply.
| Any tips for writing flashcards when studying a textbook?
| kiwi_kim wrote:
| We recently described this to a parent of one of our students as:
|
| Understanding -> Remembering -> Applying
|
| If you don't understand the basics of a concept, and you're
| talking about memory, its probably just rote memorization.
| Students generally find this tedious, and since it's shallow its
| very hard to retain and connect to disparate but parallel ideas
| from other fields (roots of creativity).
|
| But, most schools and students stop there. They hear 'memory' or
| 'memorizing' as only rote memory. Step 2 is critical if you want
| to get to higher levels of learning. As you said in the essay -
| "Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of
| their art". At www.sticky.study this is what we focus on. It's
| fast 2D memory palaces + spaced repetition.
|
| Only if you have understanding + remembering can you get to step
| 3 - applying what you learn reliably at relevant moments in your
| life. This is the gold standard that schools claim they desire -
| analysis, synthesis, application, broad transfer, and creativity.
| You can't reach master efficiently if you lose 80% of all you
| read or learn.
| sgt101 wrote:
| This is better : https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/margaret-
| boden-creativ...
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| I hear with llm/chatGPT people don't have to blog anymore, but
| rather the generated plausible-sounding well-structured nonsense
| flows like an open sewer onto the web.
|
| 1. Creativity in a commercial context once stolen/cloned through
| back-channels accrues value, and manifests as several competitive
| campaigns
|
| 2. New disruptive ideas are usually shelved until the IP/patents
| expire. No one wants to go through the sometimes impossible
| licensing process
|
| 3. Emerging technology is usually degraded in the rush for IP
| assets by established firms i.e. large firms dump billions on
| ridiculous concepts out of fear of market fragmentation
|
| 4. Startups do not usually have cash to burn on speculative IP.
| Thus, real cutting-edge experimental technology is sometimes
| never made public for numerous reasons.
|
| Creativity:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUVix0STUqo
|
| Best of luck, =3
| nyc111 wrote:
| I agree with the conclusions of the article. A concert pianist
| can only add his/her creativity to the piece if he/she totally
| internalized the piece.
| naasking wrote:
| Creativity is probably some combination of memorization +
| randomization.
| samirillian wrote:
| > breaking down the humor patterns of comedians and memes
|
| This guy does sound funny but I doubt he can write a joke
| miika wrote:
| I see it like this: after I have seen some colors and a ball I
| can then imagine a ball in any of those colors.
|
| In other words, everything I have experienced and memorized
| becomes this pool of resources I can imagine from. More I have
| seen, more combinations I can imagine.
|
| Then I understand how traveling actually broadens my view. It's
| not just some nice phrase but hard reality.
|
| Also this means maybe anything we can imagine we can also create.
| Because whatever I can imagine I can also plot a path from here
| to there, imagine all the steps in-between.
| Herz wrote:
| Umberto Eco had already discussed this extensively in his paper
| "the combinatorics of creativity".
|
| Unfortunately, I couldn't find the English version, but it should
| be very easy to translate, it's only 16 pages.
|
| http://www.umbertoeco.it/CV/Combinatoria%20della%20creativit...
| leocgit wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Didn't know the text.
|
| I found an English translation here:
|
| -
| https://w4nderlu.st/media/pages/publications/combinatorics-o...
|
| Translated by Piero Molino at https://w4nderlu.st/publications
| Herz wrote:
| Oh wonderful. I hope you can find time to read it! Umberto
| Eco was one of the most important modern Italian
| philosophers.
|
| I love his pragmatic and rational approach.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Developing heuristics to categorize patterns and internalize
| concepts != memorization. If anything, it is the opposite of
| memorization.
| shw1n wrote:
| Completely -- it's sort of glanced over in my post as an
| intermediary step to get the next "thing to be memorized" for
| two reasons:
|
| 1) I've often found these heuristics from books/online/mentors
| and just had to memorize instead of create them
|
| 2) In my own experience heuristic creation has been less of a
| bottleneck than committing to memory
|
| But it is certainly a key piece of info to have
| lukko wrote:
| Wow, what a load of rubbish. I hate this kind of reductive,
| formulaic view of creativity. I think true creativity expands
| what is possible - so some kind of awareness of the current state
| of things is important, but rote memorisation has no real part in
| it.
|
| The idea that memorisation leads to creativity is actually very
| misleading - especially the assumption that what you are learning
| is 'true'. It just means you are more aware of the restrictions
| and existing work in a field - often the most exciting work comes
| from the excitement and slight naivety of exploring something new
| - 'beginner's mind'. Kids are very creative, partly because their
| model of the world is not fully established.
| stoperaticless wrote:
| Pure creativity without skill (i.e. kids) does not yield much.
| (Spaghetti drawing's creative value is limited)
|
| Skill requires practice, which is building "muscle memory"
| (which is approx. what is meant by "memorisation" by the
| author)
| shw1n wrote:
| ^ exactly
| lukko wrote:
| Huh, muscle memory implies motor programs that are
| subconscious and stored in the cerebellum - this is very
| different to creativity. It may enable you to make
| something new, but that is not a prerequisite. The value of
| spaghetti drawings is subjective, and actually to be able
| to make such disinhibited drawings with similar qualities
| as an adult is very difficult and requires unlearning.
| Picasso knew this very well.
|
| The safe and very systematic approaches the author
| describes are defensive, too rigid and avoid what
| creativity really is - a leap into the unknown.
| dash2 wrote:
| The most striking comment was this:
|
| > Growing up with Indian parents in California, I was exposed to
| both. My mom would write daily Kumon sheets out by hand for me to
| do, and teach me from Indian textbooks from the same grade (which
| were much more advanced than the US equivalents). The result was
| me breezing through the US school system without much thought.
|
| Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the UK
| school system, where the maths is much less advanced. Philippines
| schools, meanwhile, have better discipline and more motivated
| students.
|
| I conclude that Western public education is in a bad state, and
| this is a source of chronic social weakness.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| > Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the
| UK school system, where the maths is much less advanced.
|
| This doesn't appear to be reflected in PISA scores (489 UK, 441
| Ukraine)
| groby_b wrote:
| With the caveat that I haven't looked in a while, the rot
| seemed very anglo-specific. Coming over from Germany almost
| three decades ago, it was amazing how much US text books just
| didn't cover.
|
| There were a few developments in Germany that pointed in the
| same direction, but there a large gap at the time. Meanwhile,
| even back then, eastern Europe certainly had even higher
| standards. (I replaced a lot of math textbooks with a copy of
| Bronshtein & Semendyayev)
| rickydroll wrote:
| The influence of religious and conservative types has
| weakened US textbooks. Do a deep dive into how Texas can
| dictate what is presented in schoolbooks nationwide.
| tonmoy wrote:
| There are plenty of south/East Asian counties that have
| just as much if not more restrictions in textbooks. So I
| don't think that alone accounts for the discrepancy
| tuennesje wrote:
| Be careful about reading and comprehending schoolbooks in
| Texas. Parents don't like to be pressed on most of the
| content, and are sometimes going to great lengths to get
| your book banned entirely.
| watwut wrote:
| Why do you assume Ukrainian math is memorization based? They
| actually do a lot of problem solving, they are not doing rote
| memorization.
| Mindey wrote:
| Then a hard drive without processing is very creative? False.
| bamboozled wrote:
| My phone book is super creative.
| nvln wrote:
| There is deliberate practice for skill-building. There is
| exploratory "making" that fuels originality. There is inspiration
| hunting and incremental tweaking to get to creative mutation.
| There is high productivity that triggers eventual ingenuity. I
| find the article hyperbolic in its thesis and execution
| especially when it comes to the final hand-wavy bit about how
| there is more per-capita creativity in non-rote learning.
|
| While its hard to prove or disprove without a long study to prove
| or disprove the author's claim, I'm willing to die on the
| following hills:
|
| 1. Kumon sheets are the antithesis to creativity 2. Understanding
| is not a form of memorization (not the rote variety anyway)
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I've thought a lot about education, and my personal take is
| that in the US we way undervalue drilling (by which I mainly
| mean building up familiarity and muscle memory) and way
| overvalue understanding.
|
| I've been collecting quotes about these topics for a few years.
| One relevant to creativity and drilling is Bob Dylan's
|
| > If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me.... you'd have
| written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
| nvln wrote:
| There is definitely a lot of value in practice and
| repetition. I don't think rote memorization / drilling are
| the only means of getting that practice and repetition.
| Ironically, with a bit of creativity, we can provide both.
| Lot of practice, lot of repetition, paired with
| understanding, play and making things.
| zharknado wrote:
| OP and others here are stretching the definition of "memorize" to
| mean "anything that leads to something being retained in memory."
| I reject this idea.
|
| The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you
| won't soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an
| act of memorization.
|
| Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty "learning"
| practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill
| exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow
| we will absorb the concept itself.
|
| We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with
| learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for
| them but not for the learner.
|
| It's the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and
| actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
|
| Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.
| They aren't being "drilled" to learn "mama." They have actual
| needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details
| of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the
| world, their perceptions, and their body. Mostly subconsciously.
|
| Yes, there are specific areas where drilling can help us
| accelerate or catch up. Many kids seem to need explicit phonetics
| instruction in order to make the leap to reading words.
| Phonological speech interventions are often drill-like.
| Practicing musical scales does make you more fluent in
| improvisation. Drilling the mechanics of a repertoire piece frees
| your mind to focus on higher-order expression and interpretation.
| They're valuable, they have a place.
|
| But this is just a small slice of learning. It's
| disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired
| at tech companies!), which to me is the crux of the issue.
|
| If I had to reformulate OP's argument to something I can get
| behind, it would be more about deliberate practice or "putting in
| the reps." This is also often boring, and differentiates highly
| successful people from average performers. But it's a broader and
| more purposeful set of activities than "memorization" would
| imply.
| linearrust wrote:
| > It's the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards
| and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
|
| You need the 'flashcards' before you can read, listen or talk.
| Go try reading a book where you don't know most of the words.
| Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for
| words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first. Try reading a
| text where you haven't learned the writing system.
|
| > Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.
|
| Because they can't read.
|
| > They aren't being "drilled" to learn "mama."
|
| Obviously you aren't a parent. You think a child magically
| decides one day to say mama? Or do you think it's the mother
| constantly saying 'mama' to the child until the child
| 'remembers it' and repeats it?
|
| > They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend
| to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical
| inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body.
|
| What? Complex statistical inferences about the world?
| chaps wrote:
| How are you defining a "flashcard"?
| watwut wrote:
| You should be aware that people are able to become fluent
| without ever using flashcards.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Kids say mama almost universally and regardless of their
| local language because it's an easy sound to make.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for
| words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first.
|
| I've a toddler who can read 3 paragraphs of 3 sentences each,
| and then tell you the details of the story he read[1]. He is
| 4y6m, right now. He has never learned the alphabet or the
| names of the letters (A,B, C, D, etc). He has only learned
| the sounds a letter or sequence of letters make for certain
| patterns.
|
| _You most definitely do not need to memorise the alphabet in
| order to learn to read!_
|
| Teaching children the alphabet before teaching them reading
| makes it a lot harder for them to learn actual reading.
|
| [1] I've seen kids as old as 7 get confused by a book with no
| pictures, and he sails right on through because _I_ taught
| him to read (using the DISTAR alphabet), and made sure none
| of our daily lessons had even a single picture in it.
| gwervc wrote:
| > It's the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards
| and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
|
| Those are not opposite activities. Drilling vocabulary
| flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to
| read/listen/speak; and it's not even clear from research that
| output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.
|
| Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without
| rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers
| learn them by repetition. You can't be serious advocating "just
| go read stuff" as a way to learn a language. Some foundation,
| acquired by explicit learning, is required to even start
| reading.
|
| > Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.
|
| That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly
| different than an adult. A young child has basically nothing
| but figuring out what's going around him (including language)
| at least 16 hours per day, every day. An adult has much less
| time for that.
| nickburns wrote:
| _> A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what
| 's going around him_
|
| Right--not simply memorizing what's happening around them.
| Those _are_ fundamentally different activies. That _is_ the
| gist of the parent comment 's point.
|
| They've also acknowledged expressly that rote memorization
| techniques are "valuable" and "have a place."
| kqr wrote:
| > That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly
| different than an adult.
|
| Also it takes a surprisingly long time for children to learn
| language. I used to think it sorta-kinda happened over a year
| or two, but having children myself revealed how wrong I was.
|
| I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they
| mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they
| don't know the one in their native tongue. My oldest rarely
| contributes individual words to this dictionary anymore, but
| he still improvises expressions and idioms.
| nickburns wrote:
| _> I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words
| they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because
| they don 't know the one in their native tongue._
|
| Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand,
| not merely memorize.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Sometimes those made up words were way more fun than the
| correct ones.
|
| I could usually see why my little ones combined them that
| way.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I remember one where the kid was asked, "do you want some
| half-and-half?"
|
| "No, I want whole and whole!"
| coldtea wrote:
| Understanding coming from years of exposure leading to
| memorizing the whole low hanging words of a language and
| their meaning.
|
| They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they
| also remember the word sounds attached to the associated
| concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those
| words as well). All the while commiting to memory all
| kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name
| and the ABC.
|
| Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a
| generalized concept -- then again nobody said
| understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is
| done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes
| hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective
| in being able to use and think with not just the concepts
| but also the relevant facts related to them).
| bunderbunder wrote:
| An anecdote I once heard provided in support of this point
| in a lecture: there are aspects of Spanish grammar that
| native speakers typically don't grasp until their teenage
| years.
|
| I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of
| practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples
| comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a
| glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure
| selection bias.
| kqr wrote:
| The one thing children can learn that adults generally
| cannot is native pronounciation. If that is included in
| language proficiency, then adults take an infinite amount
| of time to learn!
| Izkata wrote:
| > Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without
| rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers
| learn them by repetition.
|
| I've tried this for years with Japanese kanji and never
| really got very far. Just didn't work well, they largely were
| just a big blob of lines.
|
| Then I found an Android app (Kanji Study) that mixes this in
| with informational screens that break down kanji into
| radicals and puts them alongside a bunch of multi-kanji words
| and uses them in sentences so we can see them in context, and
| it's actually been working.
| hosh wrote:
| Learning to read Chinese is done by learning to write
| Chinese. The strict (but structured) stroke order while
| writing becomes part of muscle memory, and in turn, becomes
| a kind of kinesthetic mnemonic device while reading.
| Izkata wrote:
| The app I mentioned has that too, but stepping back and
| giving context helps me more.
|
| For example, Yu being composed of Yan , Wu , and Kou
| reduces it down to 3 things instead of 14 strokes. This
| is an easy one since the parts are distinct, but plenty
| aren't nearly as obvious, like the left side of Jiao
| watwut wrote:
| Vocabulary flashcards are not all that efficient way to start
| being able to read/listen/speak. They teach you translation
| rather then meaning directly, you don't get context or the
| "context" is super repetitive sentence and so on.
|
| And plus, general recommendation is to learn words elsewhere
| and just put them into anki to not forget.
|
| Some people like it, but it is not the only or the most
| recommended way to learn speak and write.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| > Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to
| start being able to read/listen/speak
|
| This isn't actually a settled matter. I did a literature dive
| a while back and found that drilling vocabulary flashcards
| shows the highest benefit on artificial recall tasks (like
| multiple choice tests), and over relatively short time scales
| (days to weeks). Studies that looked at longer time scales
| (months to years) and more organic tasks generally showed
| mixed results. Which I generally interpret as a sign that the
| literature in question is highly susceptible to the file
| drawer effect.
|
| And that in turn suggests that the magnitude of
| flashcarding's value for this kind of thing has a lot to do
| with your goals. In a nutshell, are you more interested on
| the science on how to develop communicative proficiency over
| the long run, or are you more interested on the science on
| how to get a good grade in class?
|
| I'm studying Chinese right now, and I do use flashcards, but
| it's not because I believe it's the best way, _per se_. It 's
| because it's a convenient option for reviewing characters and
| words that don't appear often in the reading material I have.
| When they _do_ appear often in my reading material, I find
| (anecdotally) that it takes a lot fewer organic repetitions
| to get the character or word to stick in my head than it does
| with flashcard repetitions.
|
| It's also worth mentioning there's no particular reason to
| assume Chinese and Japanese schools are any less likely than
| schools elsewhere in the world to cling to inefficient
| pedagogical techniques out of a sense of tradition. So one
| can't necessarily assume that the way they are doing it is
| the way they ought to be doing it.
| zharknado wrote:
| > and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking
| and writing) is useful at all for learning.
|
| Only if your goals don't include being able to speak or
| write.
|
| > You can't be serious advocating "just go read stuff"
|
| True, not "just." And Chinese is particularly tricky because
| the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even
| so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to
| traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation),
| listening along to highlighted text or closed captions,
| deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills
| you mentioned. (Or better, "write 5 phrases that all start
| with character X"). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards
| offer very little of it.
|
| > even native speakers learn them by repetition
|
| No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition,
| but I'm interested in context. Native speakers already know
| the verbal form of most words they're learning to write, even
| in Chinese. I'd argue the meaning is stronger.
|
| > life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult
|
| True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than
| ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family
| exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing,
| that they want and need things, and that they can get them by
| communicating.
|
| > An adult has much less time for that
|
| I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue
| for me---small children don't "set aside time to learn," they
| just learn. You and I do this also, though it's less novel
| and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we
| place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as
| "real" learning when in fact it's often extremely inefficient
| compared to our natural learning tendencies.
|
| There's a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose
| to pay attention to, to an open-ended "study time," to guided
| classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at
| the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we
| like them because they're easy to understand, uniform,
| predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more
| effective learning opportunities and supports is
| substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.
| usrbinno wrote:
| > ...experts suck at empathizing with learners...
|
| Or maybe we just don't want to coddle them. When has learning
| anything been easy, and why do you expect people to be able to
| acquire new knowledge and skills without putting in the effort?
| It shouldn't be grueling, not for its own sake, but yeah, you
| might have to stare at a compiler error for a few hours or even
| a few days before you figure out what's broken. Truly, how else
| are you supposed to learn if you don't, eventually, do it
| yourself?
|
| I'm so sick of this anti-expert, anti-knowledge attitude. It's
| why we have bootcamp juniors being thrown into otherwise-senior
| roles, with laughably predictable consequences for the field.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| This attitude seems unrelated to the topic at hand quite
| frankly. Experts suck at empathizing with learners not
| because of this spite, but often because it's actually quite
| difficult to switch gears in language and understanding. It's
| a completely different way of sharing knowledge, where you
| have to explicitly express things that are just assumed
| shared understanding among colleagues.
|
| Also, to answer your questions in a very simple way: the
| entire reason you even became an expert is because another
| expert somewhere along the way gave you an easy in to the
| knowledge, they coddled you. This is why you can "stare at a
| compiler error for a few hours before figuring out what's
| broken". Without that expert, you wouldn't even understand
| what a compiler even is.
| apsurd wrote:
| Parent is saying there's a big difference between being an
| expert in a field and being a good teacher.
| zharknado wrote:
| Perhaps I worded it too emotionally. I mean that experts
| struggle to remember what it was like before they understood
| something. It's very common for experts to ask novices to
| make leaps that they aren't capable of making, because they
| seem natural or obvious from an expert POV.
|
| I'm all for hard work; learning is usually very hard work. I
| also think we need expert guidance.
|
| But let's make the difficulty useful/effective rather than
| counterproductive.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Memorize means "to retain in and quickly recall from memory".
| Weather that is by synthetic or natural process is irrelevant.
| From the point of understanding how memory and recall work, yes
| burning your hand is an act of memorization.
|
| Sure there is a natural repetitive process that leads to base
| learning like L1 you mention.
|
| On the other hand no one adds or multiples enough in daily life
| for natural memory formation. Humans consider the skill vital
| enough that we have developed methods to memorize them. Same
| for spelling, especially for infrequently used words.
|
| Flashcards used with Spaced repetition isn't cargo cult, it is
| a well studied, and pretty good method of inducing memory
| formation.
| zharknado wrote:
| I'd say that's the definition of "remember" rather than
| "memorize."
|
| To most people I'd wager "memorize" has a strong connotation
| for the synthetic version only, with an emphasis on a
| stripping-out of context.
|
| I recognize that stripping away context can be valuable---
| drilling a tennis serve over and over outside the real-time
| context of a game is extremely helpful.
|
| Flashcards are rarely valuable in the same way. For
| semantically oriented tasks, an impoverished context is
| usually not very helpful. Receptive skills like letter and
| character recognition might be an exception. But even then
| you've got to make the leap to reading at some point.
|
| > no one adds or multiplies enough in daily life for natural
| memory formation
|
| To the contrary, there's a fascinating study of children in
| South America who had very fluent mental math skills for
| making change because they sold fruit on the side of the
| road. They couldn't solve the exact same problem in story
| problem format in a classroom, though. Synthetic contexts
| usually don't transfer well to real life.
| jacobolus wrote:
| By _far_ the best way to learn arithmetic facts is to
| 'naturally' use them in service of solving more interesting
| or relevant problems. Someone who spends the same amount of
| time doing nontrivial word problems, pattern-discovery
| projects, playing a game or solving a puzzle involving
| embedded arithmetic, or just talking about numbers in a group
| will come out vastly better prepared both for recalling or
| figuring out arithmetic solutions per se and for mathematical
| fluency in general than someone who does narrow practice
| drills. Arithmetic drills are not only a total motivation
| killer for most people, but also just suck at aiding
| retention. Time spent on arithmetic drills in school is
| somewhere between a waste of time and an actively harmful
| punishment.
|
| If anyone wants some primary school appropriate word
| problems, let me recommend the collections by Lenchner, e.g.
| https://archive.org/details/mathematicalolym0000lenc
|
| Also try Kordemsky's _Moscow Puzzles_
| https://archive.org/details/boris-a.-kordemsky-the-moscow-
| pu...
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Memorize means "to retain in and quickly recall from
| memory". Weather that is by synthetic or natural process is
| irrelevant. From the point of understanding how memory and
| recall work, yes burning your hand is an act of memorization.
|
| I think in common usage the word "memorize" very strongly
| implies that it's the _lossless_ storage and retrieval of
| some highly specified sequence of information. No amount of
| studying American Civil War history would be referred to as
| "memorizing the Gettysburg Address" unless you could recite
| the speech word for word.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The EEs I have known that carried around a card with:
| V = I * R I = V / R R = V / I
|
| because they couldn't remember it were all bad at EE and bad at
| math.
|
| If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are
| you going to remember the concept?
|
| > It's disproportionately important for passing tests (And
| getting hired at tech companies!)
|
| I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really
| a great engineer.
|
| BTW, one of the tests fighter pilots go through is they are
| blindfolded, and then have to put their hand on each control
| the instructor calls out.
|
| I also have some written tests for certifying pilots. There are
| questions like max takeoff weight, fuel burn rate, max dive
| speeds, etc. Stuff a pilot had better know or he's a dead
| pilot.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Some times the brain is wired to intuit the concept. That's
| something that fascinates me. You grasp the idea before any
| articulate explanation. Somebody shows you a problem and
| rapidly you start discussing solutions with the other person
| and even go further.
|
| Most of the time memorization is a key role for creativity,
| the easier you can jump between ideas the more combinations
| you can explore (seems like the brain is constrained by some
| cache bottleneck in a way).
| jjk166 wrote:
| > There are questions like max takeoff weight, fuel burn
| rate, max dive speeds, etc. Stuff a pilot had better know or
| he's a dead pilot.
|
| You don't want a pilot who is creative when it comes to max
| takeoff weight.
|
| Obviously there are good reasons to memorize certain things,
| creativity just isn't one of them.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _You don 't want a pilot who is creative when it comes to
| max takeoff weight._
|
| In certain combat situations, or when smuggling coke across
| South and Central America, you certainly do.
| lambda wrote:
| Gravity works just as well if you're in combat or
| smuggling coke. They don't suddenly give you the ability
| to takeoff under too much load
| coldtea wrote:
| Sure, there are hard laws of physics.
|
| Until you get to those, you'd be surprised how far some
| creativity with weight distribution, getting rid of
| unneeded cargo or even plane parts, using stuff to your
| advantage, and a little daring to push the plane to its
| limits, goes...
|
| Way beyond what the "by the book" pilot who isn't
| creative can achieve in times of need.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| ozim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| sgregnt wrote:
| This is different memories? the one for the formula and the
| one for the concept. So you can remember the meaning of the
| word but don't remember how to write it. So can reproduce the
| formula from your deep understanding, but it is quicker to
| check it out instead of apply the first principle every time.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was
| really a great engineer.
|
| This is just confirmation bias. Either you're in a field
| where you must have a degree, so everyone who couldn't pass
| tests simply never became an engineer (eg EE) and whether or
| not the test is a good measure is irrelevant because it
| nonetheless gates your sample
|
| OR you're in software engineering and the people who
| struggled on tests work beside you, but they don't tell you
| about their past performance on tests because you have a chip
| on your shoulder and they don't want you to look down on
| them.
|
| I failed a lot of tests in college and now I'm a great
| software engineer.
| redhed wrote:
| I also failed a lot of tests and I like to think that I am
| currently a good engineer. Frankly I do not see much
| overlap between what I was expected to do in school vs.
| what I do at work besides lab work and projects, which were
| the things I did do good in.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how
| are you going to remember the concept?
|
| This is not mere memorization. The GP's point that not
| everything that makes you remember this is simply
| "memorization", and certainly all of those things contribute
| differently to creativity.
|
| > I also have some written tests for certifying pilots.
|
| Yes, piloting is one of the tasks where you absolutely need
| lots of random information memorized. You should also not do
| a lot of "creativity" in it.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Isn't that exactly the result of a focus on memorization
| instead of understanding (yes yes at some level that also
| involves memory), though? To a certain type of person
| memorizing an arbitrary arrangement of 3 symbols is quite
| difficult but OTOH it's easy to remember that current goes up
| with voltage and down with resistance.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Makes total sense. Kinda like how we can't train an LLM how to
| speak by just giving it a dictionary.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I am not commenting on or agreeing with the OP, but your
| response is false. LLMs aren't given just a dictionary, and
| they do not know how to speak. Speech implies grasp of
| semantics. There is zero semantics in a block of text, only,
| according to some interpretation, various textual
| correlations.
| pfortuny wrote:
| You are changing the definition of memory we have had for like
| 25 centuries in the West. That is your choice but there is no
| stretching on the other side.
|
| "To me" is not what defines what something is.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _OP and others here are stretching the definition of
| "memorize" to mean "anything that leads to something being
| retained in memory."_
|
| They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?
|
| > _The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a
| memory you won't soon forget, but almost no one would
| understand it as an act of memorization_
|
| It still is a kind of memorization, just not a voluntary one.
| And such learning is still is a very important function of
| mental development and evolutionary fitness, that shouldn't
| just be shunned "because trauma".
|
| > _Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty "learning"
| practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill
| exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that
| somehow we will absorb the concept itself_
|
| Well, I see your cargo cult and I raise you tried-and-true.
|
| "Absorbing the concept itself" might take more effort
| (including personal, for logistical reasons, not everything can
| be tailored to the individual learner, who might not even care
| enough for learning compared to all kinds of diversions, and
| have zero passion for the subjects, even if a clone with the
| teaching skills of Feynman with the presentation skills of
| Tonny Robbins, and the passionate conviction of Jean D' Arc was
| to present it to them.
|
| But absorbing the concept is not enough, there needs to be
| instant recall, or at least fast enough recall) of all kinds of
| facts and factoids and tables, and also this "absorbing" also
| needs to encompass boring concepts, that are nonetheless
| crucial, if one is to be succesful in anything technical or
| scientific, or generally creative in any sort of organized way
| that combines concepts and information (not just Jackson
| Pollocking away).
| LoganDark wrote:
| > They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?
|
| To memorize means to commit to memory. It is an action. But
| memories are created by not just actions, but experiences.
| Experiences can create memories without you having committed
| them; without you having memorized anything.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _To memorize means to commit to memory. It is an action._
|
| There is no action of "commiting to memory". It's not an
| action we do, it's a process that results in that.
|
| The actual action we do (when we consciously try to
| remember something) is e.g. to study (read, repeat, and so
| on).
| LoganDark wrote:
| > There is no action of "commiting to memory".
|
| Mental notes are a pretty commonly known concept; not
| that I'm claiming everyone can make them easily, or at
| all, but they don't typically require focused studying.
| I'd consider them an example of committing something to
| memory intentionally. Sure, studying is another way of
| committing things to memory. You can read something
| repeatedly and completely ignore it just as much as you
| can read something repeatedly with the intention of
| remembering it. You can also make mental remarks without
| them becoming mental notes. But it is certainly possible
| to create a memory on purpose. It's just that studying an
| entire subject requires you to train your understanding
| quite a bit in order to build a good memory of it, as
| opposed to memorizing a single simple idea or lesson that
| you already intuitively understand.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Please teach me to this magical "commit to memory" skill.
| Up till now memorizing has always been a side effect of
| some other process like studying for me. I would love to be
| able to skip all of that.
| LoganDark wrote:
| You can't create a memory of something you don't already
| have in your head. Studying puts stuff into your head for
| you to remember. Memory comes naturally after that
| happens, but it usually cannot come before, unless you
| happen to have perfect recall and memorize the image of
| whatever you are reading.
|
| A good example of committing something to memory on
| demand is making a mental note. I don't know if everyone
| has this ability, but it's a pretty commonly known
| concept. You don't have to study the subject of the note
| in order to remember it; it's often something simple like
| "do this tomorrow" that you already understand, so it's
| easy to memorize.
| josephg wrote:
| > We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with
| learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for
| them but not for the learner.
|
| I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can
| use your example of a child learning their first language. They
| will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously
| terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to
| conjugate, and how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest.
| But it's all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of
| it. If that's the case, we can't explain it in words.
|
| Here's a weird fact: if you look around the room you're in now,
| I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick
| everything you see. We probably learned that in the "put
| everything in your mouth" baby phase.
|
| You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach
| that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of
| things for themself.
|
| I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I
| taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My
| students would ask things like "what's the best way to
| structure this program?" And I would say "I don't know. Let's
| brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try
| writing it like that. Figure it out in code." I think you
| become great at programming by licking all the programs you can
| find. Same with music and art and languages (go have
| conversations with native speakers).
|
| There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you
| just have to walk around licking things.
| azeirah wrote:
| Yes. Tacit knowledge is hard to teach.
| josephg wrote:
| Right. And, I think, real expertise in any subject is choc
| full of tacit knowledge. Even - and especially - in areas
| where we have good symbolic representations. (Like music,
| math, programming and languages.)
| UltraLutra wrote:
| I'm not in anyway an expert, so I googled what some research
| says. Here's an interesting meta-analysis
| (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-023-02303-4).
| Memory and creativity are a lot more complex than I realized.
| There are different types of each, and it seems like they
| interact in complex ways. Here's the findings from the abstract:
|
| > We found a small but significant (r = .19) correlation between
| memory and creative cognition. Among semantic, episodic, working,
| and short-term memory, all correlations were significant, but
| semantic memory - particularly verbal fluency, the ability to
| strategically retrieve information from long-term memory - was
| found to drive this relationship. Further, working memory
| capacity was found to be more strongly related to convergent than
| divergent creative thinking. We also found that within visual
| creativity, the relationship with visual memory was greater than
| that of verbal memory, but within verbal creativity, the
| relationship with verbal memory was greater than that of visual
| memory. Finally, the memory- creativity correlation was larger
| for children compared to young adults despite no impact of age on
| the overall effect size. These results yield three key
| conclusions: (1) semantic memory supports both verbal and
| nonverbal creative thinking, (2) working memory supports
| convergent creative thinking, and (3) the cognitive control of
| memory is central to performance on creative thinking tasks.
|
| So some memory seems to be correlated with convergent creativity,
| which according to wikipedia
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking) is "the
| ability to give the 'correct' answer to questions that do not
| require novel ideas, for instance on standardized multiple-choice
| tests for intelligence." It sounds like there's less correlation
| with divergent creativity, which (again from wikipedia
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking)) is "a thought
| process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many
| possible solutions."
|
| But my real takeaway is that people here seem to have strong
| (emotional?) opinions on "memorization vs creativity: which is
| better", but few people seemed to bother reading page 1 google
| results on the topic. So I like to think that bothering to do
| some cursory research beats both. :)
| hello_kitty2 wrote:
| Disagree. Best technique is no technique.
| bootcat wrote:
| I agree and feel likewise the author's comments on the above
| about memorization, but I realized - A higher framework
|
| and is as below, https://rajivkapur.com/3-pillars-of-vedantic-
| practices/
| lubesGordi wrote:
| Kind of shocking to see so much angst against memorization here.
|
| Memory has been long thought to be a critical component of
| intelligence, with elaborate mnemonics systems developed by
| people to help memorize more things (see Francis Yates' The Art
| of Memory, and to a lesser extent her book on Giordano Bruno).
|
| I would contend that memorizing concepts is a first step in
| understanding them. Also, that generally understanding concepts
| isn't a one and done thing, usually there's layers. Personally I
| found that memorizing things in math helped me immensely when
| years later I needed to actually understand the things I had
| memorized.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| A fellow CS student didn't understand a theorem, because he
| didn't understand any of the three definitions used to state
| it. We went through the definitions together and suddenly the
| theorem was "trivial"
|
| That is true understanding. He won't need to remember the
| theorem, because in his mind, it automatically follows from the
| raw data.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Creativity is actually defined by this transformation of finding
| connections between raw data that you already have to know.
|
| Consider use cases for a rock.
|
| Boring would be using it as a paperweight or throwing it through
| a window.
|
| Novel but uncreative would be throwing it at the sun, or painting
| it red. Novel, but kind of useless.
|
| But what about using a rock to play rock paper scissors? Planting
| it in the soil and watching it grow? That's kind of novel, by way
| of subverting rock's rules (it doesn't grow, unlike plants) or
| transforming the concept of 'rock' itself -- a real rock isn't
| needed for rock paper scissors.
|
| So only connections between known concepts are creative. Others
| might be novel, but useless.
| hosh wrote:
| I think the more precise term used by educators is "fluency"
| highfrequency wrote:
| A lot of debate in the comments about the definition of
| "memorization"; this is just semantics and misses the point.
| Creativity is aided by 1) exposure to a wide variety of existing
| ideas, 2) deep understanding and integration of those ideas, 3)
| recombination of those ideas.
|
| Superficial exposure to existing ideas alone won't get you there,
| and neither will isolated deep reflection. You need both.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Being forced to do rote exercises sometimes makes you creative.
| Solve a thousand trivial multiplication problems and you will
| spontaneously discover lots of shortcuts, patterns, intuitions
| that can warn you when you make a mistake and so on.
|
| A common issue I notice when people discuss the terrible state of
| math education in the US is that teachers demand that you solve a
| problem a specific way, such as multiplying two-digit numbers by
| drawing base-ten blocks and applying the distributive property.
|
| People who are good at doing multiplication in their head think
| the method makes perfect sense and don't know what all the fuss
| is about. But I believe that those people learned how to apply
| the distributive property "by themselves". That is, by adults
| forcing them to multiply two-digit numbers over and over until
| they developed an intuition of the distributive property by
| necessity.
|
| When people who didn't go through countless drills are taught the
| base-ten method directly, they have a harder time understanding
| it. So ironically it is the students who "mindlessly" drill
| trivial computations over and over that are more prepared to have
| a "true" understanding of the distributive property, while the
| ones whose teachers believe drilling is for chumps and try to
| just explicitly show them the true distributive right away, they
| end up memorizing the words of the distributive property without
| understanding it.
| brushfoot wrote:
| Friendly reminder: This blog post represents a software
| engineer's personal opinion on creativity, upvoted here by fellow
| software engineers.
|
| No studies are cited. The assertions are corroborated by the
| author's personal experience.
|
| Take its claims with a grain of salt.
| shw1n wrote:
| ^ 100x this, absolutely
| stoperaticless wrote:
| I think we need some citations to know if what you are talking
| about is true /s
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I think this analysis as a bit guilty of over-fitting -- it is
| quite easy to rote memorize a bunch of things while having little
| to no understanding of what they are or how they work. Trivial
| examples include training a room of people to memorize a series
| of facts written in a language they don't speak (the fact that
| they have memorized doesn't at all mean they have any
| understanding of the content). So I would say it's not
| memorization per say, but meaningful exposure to a thing, the
| more chances you have to meaningfully interact with a thing, the
| higher the chance is you will learn how to manipulate it and do
| things with it. This is the difference between understanding and
| mere memorization, and the more exposure you have, the greater
| the chance you will start to see the patterns and understand,
| versus focusing your efforts on memorizing which will just lead
| to over-fitting and not understanding. As with NNs, so with
| humans.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| The acts of the mind, where in it exerts its power over simple
| ideas, are chiefly these three:
|
| 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus
| all complex ideas are made.
|
| 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex,
| together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of
| them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all
| its ideas of relations.
|
| 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that
| accompany them in their real existence: this is called
| abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.
|
| John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."
|
| - Paul Valery, famously quoted by Robert Irwin
| Jensson wrote:
| Alphazero was very creative, yet it didn't memorize a single
| move, it just self played. Deep blue was not creative at all, but
| it was the chess engine that memorized the most moves, todays
| chess engines are much better at chess and they don't memorize
| many moves at all, if you dig through their internals you wont
| find a lot of board states there.
|
| So no, creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization,
| memorization is neither sufficient to become creative nor is it a
| requirement. You don't memorize concepts you build models around
| the concepts. You wont be able to reproduce the exact
| descriptions of concepts but you will be able to produce
| something similar that means basically the same thing.
| maksimur wrote:
| Related discussion: _Variability, not repetition, is the key to
| mastery_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354355
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| That thesis is way, too oversimplified and a bit misleading. It
| could lead you to think the real source of creativity is how much
| you store, facts or patterns. Put Wikipedia on a computer with a
| pile of heuristics (eg How to Solve It). Then, it will be more
| creative than humans in no time. Yet, humans with virtually no
| knowledge are more creative.
|
| My first study of creativity was Cracking Creativity by Michalko.
| Skimming its tools, I noticed all of them were about changing how
| one looks at a problem or connects its pieces. Another work told
| me geniuses are defined by what they forget or ignore more than
| what they memorize. The two ideas combined into my working
| approach.
|
| When I did CompSci research, I would look through the papers for
| the concepts they reported on. High level ones, core
| prerequisites, and techniques in how they are combined. From
| there, I could enumerate variations on each. Then, just keep
| combining them in straight-forward or random ways. Eventually,
| something emerges.
|
| Likewise, prior work on creativity and A.I. showed reasoning by
| analogy was huge in humans. We find patterns in one domain that
| we generalize to look for patterns in another domain. Then,
| there's some process of knowing when to try one or not.
|
| These processes so far are extracting a tiny amount of
| information, filtering most of it, identifying heuristics in a
| domain, and heuristics across domains. Also, letting the mind
| just soak on things to do whatever it does in the middle of the
| night. These are collectively creativity.
|
| Memorization is a building block of, but different from,
| creativity. The proof is how we've long had memory and reasoning
| in systems but they sucked at creativity. Recently, systems are
| extrapolating enough to be more creative but are hallucinating
| nonsense they definitely didn't remember. So, they're orthogonal.
|
| "Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of
| their art -- they can see the connection or novelty because it's
| all in their head."
|
| Edit: I'll also add that, for planning and creativity, many of us
| use a deliberate, trial-and-error process that takes time. We
| don't just "see" it from something we internalized. We work
| toward it using the creative process. We usually do see it when
| it's finished, though.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Did this author read a single book on creativity? Or did he just
| make everything up?
|
| Being creative is simply knowing what you want, knowing where you
| are and is the process of making choices along the way to get
| there. The point at which your creation comes to life is fuzzy,
| but this is the underlying process. As for what
| rules/patterns/etc that you follow to arrive where you want to
| go: the whole point is not presubscribe to any of these.
| Sometimes you draw from a known way. Sometimes you come up with
| an entirely knew way to take a step. The point is simply to make
| choices that bring you closer to what you want to make.
| louthy wrote:
| > A DJ can't mashup two songs unless they're familiar with both
|
| As someone who's DJ'd at a pretty high level I can tell you this
| is nonsense.
|
| And to prove the point, here's a mix I did recently [1] with
| brand new records that I'd just received in the post and had
| never played before or even listened to (other than the samples
| on the online store).
|
| I used to take unlistened records to gigs and play them for the
| first time, live, in front of a crowd. Simply because I enjoyed
| the creative process of 'making it work'.
|
| Creativity for me isn't "writing down heuristics on best DJ
| transitions" -- I haven't once considered that. It sounds, to me,
| to be the exact opposite approach to fostering creativity.
| Creativity for me comes out of play. It grows over time. It's
| feeling and emotion, not memory.
|
| I stopped reading after that. Especially as I am someone with a
| terrible memory but am also very creative in a number of fields.
|
| [1] https://on.soundcloud.com/xZ28hvv5ieV9RnTU7
| ethlala wrote:
| I think this is right, and one implication is that 99.9% of the
| self-help content you passively consume on the internet will have
| no impact on your life, because (barring deliberate learning /
| repetition), you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments
| when it might have made a difference.
| shw1n wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| This brings up an interesting point -- while I think many
| people read and forget self-help books without ever improving
| their lives, the way they can mostly help people (imo) is by:
|
| 1) identifying a heuristic 2) making memorization easier
| through stories
|
| The stories, analogies, acronyms they teach all just make
| memorizing/remembering/learning their heuristic easier
| Jensson wrote:
| > you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it
| might have made a difference
|
| But how would you learn to remember the right advice in the
| right context? The act of remembering something when you need
| it requires you to do more than just memorize it, you have to
| properly learn when the thing is actually useful and train your
| mind to recall this advice in those situations.
|
| It is much better to know that an advice exist and learn when
| to look it up than to memorize the advice without the ability
| to realize when you would need it.
| willguest wrote:
| The category is not the thing categorised.
|
| Just because you can put things into boxes does not mean that
| everything belongs in a box. Whatever essential element you seek
| to create, whether or not it is concrete or abstract, can simply
| be put forward as a target of memorisation, without pausing to
| think about whether you can truly memorise it.
|
| E.g. a heuristic for determining the best heuristic. Simple, just
| memorise it, right?
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