[HN Gopher] The Expert Mind [pdf] (2006)
___________________________________________________________________
The Expert Mind [pdf] (2006)
Author : JustinSkycak
Score : 177 points
Date : 2024-08-18 14:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (personal.utdallas.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (personal.utdallas.edu)
| neom wrote:
| People who are good at something have done it in may different
| ways for a very long time, perfecting the optimal way. Shocking.
|
| Edit: this appears to be from 2006, so maybe that was a
| marginally more novel idea then?
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| The 'shocking' part was that the main advantage comes in
| seconds, suggesting a specialized region of the brain that had
| a fuller development. This is however no longer controversial
| as cognitive functions have emerged as perfectly reasonable
| stand ins for many cases thought to need a full generalized
| intelligence.
| north_african wrote:
| What's the point of mastery anyways? If you are a master software
| engineer, what does that guarantee? is investing in mastery the
| best use of your time?
| ramenbytes wrote:
| I don't know if I'm using the word the same way, but I
| understand the benefit of mastery to be that you automate and
| abstract away things and can get to a point where you're just
| firing off mental routines instead of having to consciously
| focus on the specific task. This means that in a multi-faceted
| task I can focus primarily on the elements I haven't mastered,
| since the things I _have_ mastered come easily and
| automatically. As a consequence, anything that relies in part
| on the mastered skill gets easier.
| JustinSkycak wrote:
| Totally agree. The key idea here is _automaticity_ , the
| ability to execute low-level skills without having to devote
| conscious effort towards them. Automaticity frees up limited
| working memory to execute multiple lower-level skills in
| parallel and perform higher-level reasoning about the lower-
| level skills.
|
| For instance, think about all the skills that a basketball
| player has to execute in parallel: they have to run around,
| dribble the basketball, and think about strategic plays, all
| at the same time. If they had to consciously think about the
| mechanics of running and dribbling, they would not be able to
| do both at the same time, and they would not have enough
| brainspace to think about strategy.
|
| (This comment is basically the intro to a detailed article I
| wrote on the topic with plenty of scientific citations:
| https://www.justinmath.com/cognitive-science-of-learning-
| dev...)
| ramenbytes wrote:
| That is a much better way of putting it, thank you.
|
| (edit) One thing neither of us directly mentioned in our
| comments, but which I feel is important is this bit from
| your article intro:
|
| > Insufficient automaticity, particularly in basic skills,
| inflates the cognitive load of tasks, making it exceedingly
| difficult for students to learn
|
| A real-world example for myself was when I was learning a
| small lick on guitar with an uncomfortable-to-me rhythm. I
| initially just played it slowly so I could get everything
| right, trying to speed it up every now and again to check
| progress. I progressed, but slowly. What ended up
| demolishing the challenge is the separation of the rhythm
| element(s) from everything else involved in the lick, and
| practicing those individually. By themselves they were easy
| to knock out (matter of minutes), and after those few
| minutes when I revisited the entire integrated lick I could
| suddenly knock it out of the park.
| JustinSkycak wrote:
| Great example. Yeah, I fully agree that in general, the
| fastest way acquire a complex skill is to focus your
| practice on the particular components that are giving you
| the most trouble. That's the main theme behind deliberate
| practice: find the bottlenecks and concentrate your
| practice time on them.
| ramenbytes wrote:
| I've been surprised to find that this isn't a common
| viewpoint. In fact, I have a long-term bet with a friend
| that I'll learn something faster using deliberate
| practice 'n stuff then he did trying to learn everything
| at once.
| revskill wrote:
| Solve real world problem in a formal way, not ad-hoc.
| convolvatron wrote:
| as opposed to rewatching Seinfeld? Competency is its own
| reward. Does it make me more effective the job market?
| certainly not.
| north_african wrote:
| Any research/advice/tips on how a software engineer makes
| himself more effective in the job market?
| convolvatron wrote:
| you're not there to make software. you're there to pad out
| someones headcount and not make any trouble. associate
| yourself with an enterprise that becomes successful
| independent of your contribution, and leverage that to get
| similar roles elsewhere.
| cyberax wrote:
| Try to master new fields that are just beyond your current
| comfort area. Make sure you actually practice them, and keep
| memorizing stuff.
| eleveriven wrote:
| In a rapidly changing world also
| namaria wrote:
| Why wouldn't you want to master something you do for a living?
| Who would want to permanently struggle?
| north_african wrote:
| There's a big area between mastery and struggling plus the
| cost of mastery is time investment with no obvious financial
| reward for example!
| namaria wrote:
| So what you're saying is you're fine with being mediocre,
| as long as your compensation sits at a local optimum?
| modin wrote:
| I played Kasparov in 2017, in a setting similar to Capablanca in
| the ingress of the article. Whilst I managed 50+ moves, he was
| sometimes struggling in a way I wouldn't have expected for a GM.
| It so happened that our chess board was turned "upside down" by
| the organisers (we didn't notice until it was time to start;
| white was on row 7,8 instead of 1,2), and I have always wondered
| how much that mattered.
| adonovan wrote:
| I'm surprised neither of you noticed immediately. I would have
| thought it as jarring as a mistuned musical instrument.
| modin wrote:
| We did notice immediately, but we had the first board to play
| following a grand speaker introduction, and we just went with
| it instead of resetting the board with all eyes on us and
| making the hosts look bad. Speaking for myself at least, I
| can't believe he didn't notice immediately too.
|
| It made my noting down of the moves quite hard.
|
| > I would have thought it as jarring as a mistuned musical
| instrument.
|
| This was exactly my thought, how much it mattered to him at
| his level.
| ckcheng wrote:
| > I can't believe he didn't notice immediately too.
|
| Is it possible that maybe Kasparov noticed and just like
| you, he went with it instead of making the hosts look bad?
| YZF wrote:
| This would be my guess. It's hard to imagine Kasparov
| didn't notice. There are variants of chess where the
| pieces are organized differently and obviously as the
| game progresses beyond the opening you can get into all
| sorts of positions. I'm sure Kasparov can calculate from
| any given arrangement of the pieces. The difference would
| be that moves that he would play automatically because of
| preparation now have to be thought through deeper.
|
| I'm impressed parent survived that many moves. Must be a
| good chess player even with the simultaneous game
| setting.
| modin wrote:
| That's what I think, and also what I think I wrote. Sorry
| if it's unclear, I'm not a native English speaker.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| At first I was imagining this was a blindfolded game, in which
| case this would have been especially surprising and impressive!
| modin wrote:
| That would've been impressive for sure! A somewhat recent
| world record[1] I just found shows a blindfolded simul for 48
| boards, with 80% win! (All boards correctly turned, I'd
| expect and hope!)
|
| The games in the article must've been a normal "simul"[2],
| which was what I enjoyed playing too.
|
| [1]: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-
| records/72345-mos... [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_exhibition
| WJW wrote:
| Surely when playing blindfolded it doesn't really matter
| how the boards are turned?
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Moves are played by square names, and with the board
| turned around, the king and queen are on the wrong
| squares (not to mention all other pieces, at least given
| their color). I imagine it would be an utter nightmare,
| but have no experience with it myself.
| munchler wrote:
| I think you mean sideways, not upside-down? There should be a
| white square in the bottom-right corner from both players'
| point of view.
| modin wrote:
| No, upside-down, or rather rotated 180deg. You have rows 1-8
| and columns a-h (which are usually written in lower case, as
| upper case are used for piece value). h1 and a8 are the white
| corners you mention, with rooks on them initially. White's
| "home" are on row 1 and 2. These coordinates are usually
| printed on the board.
|
| In our case black's home was on row 1,2. The king and queen
| was thankfully positioned "correctly" given this mishap, as
| normally the white queen are on a white square (and likewise
| for black queen and square), but not in our case. White still
| had short castling on his right hand side.
|
| What I wonder is if Kasparov (or any expert) remembers
| movements from the coordinates, rather than (or in addition
| to) seeing the pieces on the board, and how much this
| impacted our game.
| munchler wrote:
| That's interesting. I've never played chess on a physical
| board that had printed row and column ID's. I'm surprised
| anyone would care about that while playing, since it's
| irrelevant to the rules, but I'm no more than a casual
| player.
| sandspar wrote:
| Besides the mismatched board, could you sense something
| different in his play compared to other people? Some kind of
| exceptional presence?
| lupire wrote:
| Kasparov could have played the game with his eyes closed. He
| was not distracted by markings on the board.
| wavemode wrote:
| My personal opinion? It seems moderately unlikely that a player
| as strong as Kasparov, who could have played the entire game
| against you blindfolded, would have been adversely affected by
| this. Most strong players' personal chessboards have no
| coordinates written on them at all. (Mine certainly don't, and
| I'm not even strong. Identifying squares is just trivial.)
|
| He probably just wasn't putting much mental energy into your
| game, as he had other simultaneous games to worry about, and
| then a move you made perhaps caught him by surprise in some
| way.
|
| (It also seems unlikely coming from Kasparov specifically - he
| has historically raised quite a fuss, even when on camera, when
| simul exhibitions were not conducted to his standards. If the
| board bothered him, I think he would have had it flipped.)
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| > The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that
| experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated
| ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music
| and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the
| schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage
| in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading
| and math skills?
|
| This is an interesting point. I think our schools (in most of the
| West) are proficient in producing generalists. Especially our
| state schools.
|
| I think there is potential for improvement in producing
| specialists.
|
| As one example, go to the top universities in Europe, and look at
| classes in STEM fields. You will find a preponderance of Romanian
| students, far overindexing their relatively small 19 million
| population, which is especially surprising considering their
| relative poverty to other European countries. I would suggest
| that their specialist schools are the key to this surprising
| success.
|
| One thing about specialist schools is that selection is
| necessary. So the public of most Western nations will never
| accept it.
| f1shy wrote:
| > our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing
| generalists.
|
| From a german perspective, I would say exactly the opposite.
|
| In my experience, the poorer the country the more you find
| "jacks of all trades" and less mega-super-experts. Of course,
| statistically speaking...
| beardyw wrote:
| > I think there is potential for improvement in producing
| specialists.
|
| Let us not forget that these are human beings. I doubt I will
| hear an adult say "I was produced as a ....".
| dartos wrote:
| No, but you would hear a school say "we produce the highest
| performing doctors in the country" or whatever
| ckcheng wrote:
| > the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an
| expert--in chess, music ...--sets a clear challenge before the
| schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to
| engage in the kind of effortful study...
|
| What's interesting is the subtle shift from saying objective
| ability can improve to asking if schools can encourage
| (motivate?) students to engage.
|
| I'm guessing most teachers know that given the right
| circumstance, students can be made to improve in math/reading.
| But getting all/most students to engaged in the right "kind of
| effortful study" is just a different task.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Selection is an important consideration in many areas of the US
| military.
| kragen wrote:
| > _I think our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in
| producing generalists._
|
| schools are proficient in wasting time, and most students would
| be better off without them
|
| taking the usa as a significant example of 'most of the west',
| less than 47% of adults can name all three branches of
| government https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-
| events/news/americans-civics-... (only 24% knew the first
| amendment guaranteed freedom of religion), only 49% knew that
| heart disease was the leading cause of death in the usa
| https://newsroom.heart.org/news/more-than-half-of-u-s-
| adults..., only 48% of _usa college undergraduates_ in 02012
| knew that baghdad was the capital of iraq (which the usa was
| currently quasi-occupying)
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9,
| only 42% could name sputnik, only 31% knew moscow was the
| capital of russia, only 30% could name einstein as the proposer
| of the theory of relativity, and only 16% knew gunpowder was
| invented in china
|
| you can guarantee that they were told all of those things in
| school at some point, but they mostly forgot. and you can't
| claim these facts are irrelevant to their lives (unlike some
| others listed in that last survey). a quarter of those surveyed
| will die from heart disease; all of them are governed by those
| three branches; all of them are subjected to racist anti-
| chinese propaganda and interact with chinese-americans; many of
| them had high-school classmates occupying iraq; all of them
| face the problem of religion
|
| these are not generalists, who know a little bit about
| everything. they're dunces, who know virtually nothing about
| anything, until they get out of school and start getting
| responsibilities, at which point they learn what they need to
| learn to handle their responsibilities
|
| it's harder to find good statistics on _skills_ rather than
| declarative knowledge, but if someone can 't name the #1 most
| likely cause of their own death (let alone #2 or #3), their
| decision-making about health is going to be seriously impaired,
| and if they don't know who einstein was, they probably don't
| know much about physics either. the few statistics on
| proficiency at skills that i've been able to find also look
| terrible
|
| if children were being turned into generalists by schools, then
| children without access to schools would be far behind when
| they entered the school system, and would remain persistently
| behind for years. in fact within a year or two they're
| indistinguishable from the kids who've spent their whole lives
| being subjected to schooling. examples of such children are
| immigrants to places with compulsory schooling, ex-
| homeschoolers, and homeschoolers who go to university
|
| how do schools in the usa, and for that matter everywhere,
| manage to be so profoundly useless and even destructive to
| learning? the 02007 rohrer & pashler paper linked yesterday
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274602 probably explains
| a lot. it's well known that schools waste students' time on
| overlearning, use massed practice rather than spaced practice
| (across many timescales), reward recognition rather than
| recall/retrieval, reward recognition or recall rather than
| performance, reward conformance rather than performance, and
| are profoundly dysfunctional in many ways. see gatto's famous
| jeremiad at
| https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...
| and pg's milder 'the lesson to unlearn' at
| https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
| vik0 wrote:
| I find it extremely depressing that people here wish for more
| experts (i.e. specialists). The greatest minds that have thus far
| graced this planet were not specialists, they exceeded in a wide
| pool of areas. They were, as the saying doesn't go - jack of all
| trades and masters of dozens
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Most of us cannot be those "greatest minds that have thus far
| graced this planet." For many of us, it's more fulfilling to be
| good at one thing than mediocre at dozens.
| wslh wrote:
| I think the core point of being "mediocre at dozens" is that
| you could connect dots that the experts can't, so at the
| macro level you can have advantages while the averages turns
| to specialization.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| I suppose there's levels of mediocre. For the vast majority
| of us, the level of mediocre we could accomplish across
| many fields may not enable us to do much connecting at all.
| But I realize this is all very vague and depends on
| individual traits. I just don't think that what OP points
| out is "extremely depressing."
| haswell wrote:
| I think the key is balance. The people I've worked with
| who are the most effective and successful are really good
| at one or a short list of things, but have their hands in
| many other things.
|
| And often they're really good at the one thing _because_
| they have their hands in many things.
|
| Cultivating a breadth of knowledge often isn't just being
| mediocre in a bunch of subjects, but about broadening
| one's awareness to potential connections and
| opportunities.
|
| If you can't go deep on anything, that shallow knowledge
| may not get you very far.
|
| But if you can go deep on X subject with enough surface
| level knowledge of a variety of potentially related
| topics, you'll be able to accomplish far more interesting
| things than someone with equivalent but exclusive
| knowledge of X.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I have been a deep specialist in my career. Currently I am
| a generalist.
|
| My bosses task me with being the 'dot connector' for a
| bunch of specialists. Seems to work out well.
| paretoer wrote:
| Many people are just interested in expert credentialism and
| expert theatrical performance for an audience though.
|
| If you really want to know a subject well beyond theater,
| you obviously would have to know many adjacent subjects and
| many seemingly unrelated subjects since "subjects" in this
| context are just imaginary divisions within human
| knowledge.
|
| If your interest is credentialism though then the unrelated
| subjects are just a complete waste of time and most likely
| the adjacent subjects are just a distraction from
| memorizing your lines for the theatrical "subject matter
| expert" performance.
|
| It is really a question of the best way to pretend to be a
| great mind when you are average and that is to specialize
| to a degree that minimizes the amount of people who know
| what you are talking about on the subject of interest.
|
| We have built an entire class of society on this method.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I have a thing that I do. I would like to be better at it.
| Insight into how worldwide-recognized experts achieved their
| expertise is of interest to me.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Renaissance-like approach to knowledge and skill acquisition in
| many ways can be seen as outdated. The rise of specialization
| in the modern world is, I think, a response to the increasing
| complexity of many fields.
| north_african wrote:
| Does a "kernel" of a field really does increase in size over
| time? or is it that we are accustomed to being highly
| specialized?
| lxm wrote:
| > The greatest minds that have thus far graced this planet were
| not specialists, they exceeded in a wide pool of areas
|
| For each polymath there's also Michael Jordan and golfing.
| vik0 wrote:
| I never thought someone would compare polymaths (let's call
| it, intellectual or mental power) to people with great
| athletic ability (let's call it, physical power)
|
| Although thinking about it a bit more right now, I don't see
| why someone shouldn't be able to be great at a wide range of
| physical activities to be considered a polymath - as opposed
| to both physical and mental activities, or solely just
| intellectual activities
|
| If someone excels in a great deal of, say, a number of sports
| (which I admit, would be nigh impossible in the current age
| with all the professional sports leagues and their
| exclusiveness), one could probably argue that that person is
| a genius
| jltsiren wrote:
| It doesn't have to be either-or. Narrow specialists lack the
| intellectual curiosity that would drive them to seek
| understanding. False generalists lack the drive to become good
| at anything. True generalists have wide interests and become
| experts in many things.
|
| You can't be a generalist without being an expert.
| namaria wrote:
| Depressing? I think it's natural, and good for the competent
| generalist. Most people don't have the incentives or the will
| to invest a lot of time in learning lots of things.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| The industry wants experts, people shouldn't be so quick to
| confuse that with what ought to be.
|
| "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
| invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write
| a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort
| the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
| solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
| computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
| Specialization is for insects."
|
| -- Robert A. Heinlein
| cyberax wrote:
| One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that
| memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an expert.
|
| But it's not fun, it's boring, and it takes up a lot of your
| time. You can't really train your memory with a nice Youtube
| video, and it's incompatible with the "learn while playing"
| concept.
|
| So schools in the US tend to sideline it by handwaving that "they
| teach how to think" instead. And I think we're now seeing the
| result, with the ever-declining test results. The NAEP scores in
| the US peaked in 2014 and have been declining ever since:
| https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
|
| It's also interesting that there's no similar decline in China,
| where rote memorization is unavoidable because of the writing
| system.
| shostack wrote:
| I'm not sure how you can link these test results to lack of
| memorization when so many other factors are likely at play from
| the worsening parental support many children face with school
| due to economic decline, to the pittance teachers are paid, to
| the war on education some states seem to be playing (curiously
| they are all heavy red states).
| cyberax wrote:
| The scores are falling in the Blue states a-flush with cash.
| E.g. Washington: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/s
| tateprofile/over...
|
| The Red states are actually staying fairly steady.
|
| I don't think that the lack of memorization is the main
| reason, but it definitely is one of the reasons. Mobile
| phones and tablets in education are also not helping, and
| their spread is well-correlated with the start of the
| decline.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not exactly sure what you're arguing here. It more
| seems like you're pointing to California in 4th grade.
| Which I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable using California as
| the prime example given how diverse it is in culture and
| demographics. Too much noise introduced through
| aggregation.
|
| When looking at the other grades and varying by subjects it
| very much looks like the data is noisy. I'm sure there's
| meaningful analysis to be drawn from here but I'm certain
| there's no obvious one.
| cyberax wrote:
| You can look at other states and at the 8th grade. It's
| the same pattern almost everywhere: achievements peaked
| in 2014 and have been declining. CA, WA, NY were hit
| pretty severely.
|
| I like to look at 4th grade because most of the learning
| by that grade _is_ memorization.
| lbalazscs wrote:
| There is a difference between memorization and rote
| memorization. In chess, rote memorization of master games or
| chess positions is not a recognized training method. Chess
| memory improves as a byproduct of analyzing many positions.
| blueboo wrote:
| That seems reasonable, but at the same time my understanding
| is that there's enormous value in novice and intermediate
| players to memorizing openings. I wonder if that effect is
| significant enough to categorize chess as another high-rote-
| memorisation-affinity task.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Learning openings beyond a very basic level is not going to
| help the club player very much and it's generally a good
| way for them to waste their time, at least from an
| improving your ELO perspective.
|
| Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a
| "quarter pawn" ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or
| equalizing as black. Then if you're a novice you will
| immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind.
| Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you'll be a
| quarter pawn ahead again.
|
| The other problem with learning opening theory against
| novices is you will learn 30 moves a side of Ruy Lopez
| opening theory and your opponent won't get 10 moves without
| leaving theory rendering your study moot.
|
| There's far more emphasis on memorizing openings at the
| grandmaster level because people are playing a tight enough
| game elsewhere for that slight advantage to really matter,
| and because of all the pre-game preperation where teams of
| grandmasters and chess engines will come up with novel
| moves to throw an opponent off balance while the star
| player memorizes the lines. To the point of grandmasters
| like Bobby Fischer complain it ruined the game and
| inventing variants like chess960. All super grandmasters
| have outlier memorization abilities.
|
| Generally club players just need to rote memorize not too
| deeply and understand the broad sweeping ideas and key
| moves of the openings (when white does that, counter them
| with this). That should allow them to come up with
| reasonable moves on the fly which might be the best or
| third best moves. Memorizing fewer openings at first is
| probably better. At the more casual level memory is much
| less important.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > Being the best out of the opening will typically put
| you a "quarter pawn" ahead, maybe putting you ahead as
| white or equalizing as black. Then if you're a novice you
| will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns
| behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you'll
| be a quarter pawn ahead again.
|
| While this is true if you know openings, many openings
| have a trap or two that make up a very tricky line that
| puts you 3-5 points ahead. Knowing the traps and how to
| punish them is a huge material advantage in some games.
| So while knowing your opening well is "worth" only a
| quarter pawn in a typical game, it is worth a several-
| percent increase in win rate from knowing these lines.
|
| Openings like the Jobava London system have 10-20
| different trap lines like this, and if you want to play
| them, you must know the lines.
|
| It is very common for players with your mindset to
| plateau around 1400-1600, at which point it's time to sit
| down and start memorizing openings and endgames. Just
| being good at searching the game tree gets you to that
| point, but now you need to know the times when the game
| tree collapses 30 moves later.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Rote memorization is absolutely a mainstay of learning both
| openings and endgames.
|
| It's usually a part of tactics training as well although not
| as purely, the polgar sisters for instance were drilled on
| the same chess positions day in day out in a spaced
| repetition system. This is going away a bit because chess
| puzzle databases have so many unique positions that there's
| less need for repetition.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| This can't be more wrong. It's absolutely a training method,
| and the importance of recognizing certain openings is even
| more pronounced in professional play.
| godelski wrote:
| > One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that
| memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an
| expert.
|
| Has this ever been in question?
|
| I don't think any serious expert in ML that is pushing against
| LLMs is making a claim that memorization and/or compression
| isn't a necessary part of intelligence. Rather that there's
| more to it.
|
| Too much memorization is a bad thing, it's called over fitting.
| Bringing up schools is a good example. I'm sure many here have
| met people who can answer questions really well when in
| specific contexts but not in others. People who do well on
| tests but not in the lab. The difficulty of word problems is a
| meme, but are just generalization.
|
| If you ask me, what makes humans and animal brains special is
| the fuzziness. It's this seemingly contradictory nature of well
| defined understanding through rules (such as physics) but also
| understanding that resolution is far from perfect. In our quest
| to become more precise it is recognizing the impossibility of
| precision and finding balance.
|
| What I'd say is wrong with both the US and China is failing to
| teach how to think. The truth is that this is exceptionally
| difficult to test, if not impossible. It's difficult to
| distinguish from memorization when the questions are not
| clearly novel. But how do you continually generate sufficiently
| novel questions when not teaching at bleeding edge?
| cyberax wrote:
| > Has this ever been in question?
|
| Yes. Reading is a prime example:
| https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-
| teachers... - connecting pictures of cats to the word "cat"
| is so much more fun than learning letter combinations.
|
| > Too much memorization is a bad thing, it's called over
| fitting.
|
| It's not. It's just a skill that might become unused, like
| playing piano. Children who grow up in religious cults that
| emphasize memorizing the holy texts (Hasidic Jews, some
| Muslim sects) do surprisingly well on standardized tests.
| Even though they receive a fraction of instruction time.
|
| > What I'd say is wrong with both the US and China is failing
| to teach how to think.
|
| And I maintain that you can't learn how to think without
| grinding through facts, learning how to organize them in your
| mind.
| godelski wrote:
| > Yes. Reading is a prime example
|
| This article does not appear to be supporting a point
| counter to what I said. It is also focused on the opinions
| on non-experts. In fact, the majority of the article is
| discussing how schools aren't "following the data."
|
| I would be surprised if the dominant method was "memorize"
| for reading, as this would mean a curriculum that has
| little free reading.
|
| I'm not too interested in what non-experts have to say
| unless there is quite compelling evidence. The average
| person quire frequently overestimates their confidence in
| how something should be done. > It's not.
| It's just a skill that might become unused, like playing
| piano
|
| I grew up playing piano and memorizing holy texts. Even
| participating in scripture competitions as well as music
| competitions. With the highest confidence I can assure you
| that no professional in either of these subjects believes
| that one should memorize without limit. In music they will
| use the words "without soul" while in scriptures they may
| say that you know the words but not the meanings.
|
| I'll directly quote from the bible to demonstrate both at
| once: > Therefore I speak to them in
| parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they
| do not hear, nor do they understand. Mathew 13:13[0]
|
| I suggest reading the chapter in full, as it makes the
| point more explicitly.
|
| I think both groups understand something important to
| language (which yes, I will argue that music is _a_
| language): that the "words" (sounds) used are only tools to
| convey what is the deeper meaning inside. In music you seek
| to draw that out of the listener. In scriptures it is the
| same. The clearest cases of these may be proverbs,
| parables, koans, or fables. The words hold only what is at
| the surface. It is ironic you specifically mention Hasidic
| Jews, as they are deeply entrenched in the Kabbalah, which
| is famous for being entrenched mysticism. That there are
| hidden meanings in the scriptures. This isn't even uncommon
| in religion in general! I don't think it is hard to see
| this in music or any art. If you are in any doubt, please
| go visit your local art gallery and listen to one of the
| local artists. Even if you believe they are full of
| hogwash, it still illustrates that they are trying to
| convey something deeper. If you wish to get this lesson and
| learn a bit about Jewish mysticism at the same time I'd
| recommend A Serious Man[1] (a Coen brothers movie)
|
| I must stress that language (of any form) has three key
| aspects: what is intended to be conveyed, the words and way
| the words are used (diction), and the way the person
| receiving interprets this. The goal is to align the first
| with the last, but there is clearly a lossy encoding and
| lossy decoding. > I maintain that you can't
| learn how to think without grinding through facts
|
| I'm not sure why you thought we were in disagreement.
| Perhaps you know the words but not the meaning. I hope your
| head does not feel too heavy from all the things you carry
| in your mind[2]
|
| [0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%20
| 13%3A...
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1019452/
|
| [2] https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/76thestonemind.html
| cyberax wrote:
| > This article does not appear to be supporting a point
| counter to what I said. It is also focused on the
| opinions on non-experts. In fact, the majority of the
| article is discussing how schools aren't "following the
| data."
|
| In this case, "experts" who thought that "learning by
| playing" is better were wrong, as proven by data. Schools
| that use the traditional memorization-heavy approach of
| learning letter combinations do better.
|
| The example is Oakland's schools, where teachers
| considered the traditional approach to be "colonizing".
| Test scores cratered as a result.
|
| > I'm not too interested in what non-experts have to say
| unless there is quite compelling evidence. The average
| person quire frequently overestimates their confidence in
| how something should be done.
|
| I mean... The article quotes the evidence.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Unfortunately, yes.
|
| If you want to map the political system on more than one
| axis, you could look at economically liberal/conservative and
| socially liberal/conservative separately, but in a two-party
| system, not all quadrants will be equally represented. This
| particularly annoys libertarians.
|
| If you want to map education politics on more than one axis,
| one axis could be progressive/conservative in the political
| sense (Are we 'woke'? Do we teach that some people are gay?
| Let kids pick their own pronouns? Do we have prayer in
| school? Base our values on the Bible? etc. etc.).
|
| The other axis is 'progressive'/traditional in terms of
| methods, e.g. do facts matter and should kids learn by rote?
|
| Again, not all quadrants are equally represented. The
| 'progressive' side in terms of methods genuinely holds that
| rote memorization is bad and useless, and even taeching kids
| to read with phonics is outdated - where that led, is
| explained in https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
| which has been featured on HN before now too.
|
| Unfortunately, most attempts to debate the methods axis
| online degenerate into fights about the political axis (see
| also: California math reform).
|
| > What I'd say is wrong with both the US and China is failing
| to teach how to think.
|
| The problem is, I'd say, that there is no such thing as "how
| to think". Thinking about environmental policy is very
| different from thinking about debugging **ing JavaScript
| callbacks (sorry, having a bad day). You need different
| degrees, for a start! There will never be a way to teach
| social scientists generically "how to think" so they can just
| pick up programming in 30 days, because all you need to do is
| apply your thinking skills to code! In the same way, we can't
| just "teach how to think" in a CS class and then expect the
| graduates to double up as MDs in a pinch, because that's just
| thinking about the human body!
|
| You can only do "critical thinking" in an area where you have
| domain knowledge. That's one reason that memorization is
| required - you need the base of domain-specific facts so you
| have something to think with.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| That is not correct as some of the comments suggest.
|
| Typically experts are designated as persons whose mastery of a
| craft extends beyond memorization such that they have forgotten
| the specifics of things learned as confidence and muscle memory
| have replaced memory recall. They are at one end of the
| Dunning-Kruger paradigm in that they have forgotten things
| learned, or avoided things unnecessary or anti-pattern,
| resulting in gaps of explanation that are not present at time
| of performance.
|
| It is beginners that are reliant upon memorization because they
| have not yet achieved the practiced mastery sufficient to
| perform with immediacy otherwise.
| sandspar wrote:
| Doesn't every expert start as a beginner i.e. as someone
| dependent upon memorization?
| lupire wrote:
| No. If you're willing to not be a fake expert, and wait
| until you've actually learned the material before holding
| yourself out as an expert, you don't need to rote memorize.
| wavemode wrote:
| Parent commenter stated that memorization is required, not
| that it's sufficient.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| It's not required, even starting out.
| wavemode wrote:
| The research disagrees with you.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Not the research I have read.
| beacon294 wrote:
| > One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that
| memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an
| expert.
|
| I'm very interested in this idea, but it doesn't immediately
| ring true to me, is there some research or other stories you
| know of that can escalate this from "interesting" to "must do"?
| mandmandam wrote:
| > it's incompatible with the "learn while playing" concept.
|
| That's definitely not always true.
|
| Even boring things can be turned into a game. Different games
| are fun to different people.
|
| > schools in the US tend to sideline [memorization]
|
| US education incentives are far more closely aligned with
| teaching for standardized test than "teaching how to think",
| whatever their claimed rhetoric. It's been that way since even
| before W and the NCLB Act, which made things much worse.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I think you're wrong to be honest. Experts have a lot
| "memorised" but never do memorisation. Chess grandmasters can
| recall huge sequences of moves from classic games. It's not
| because they sat down and tried to memorise "1. e4 e5; 2.
| Nf3..." It's because they understand those games, why the moves
| were made, why seemingly obvious alternatives weren't made etc
| etc
|
| I have a PhD in mathematics and some (minimal) claim to
| expertise. I have also met and worked with several serious
| experts. What I said about chess holds true here, at least in
| my opinion.
| bubblyworld wrote:
| Every strong chess player I know actually _has_ sat down and
| memorized the lines in their repertoire. It 's also true that
| they understand the "why" behind the moves but I don't think
| the memorization is avoidable at a high level. It's not
| always possible to find tactical compensation over the board,
| especially when you're running lines that have been tested by
| an engine, which many people are!
|
| Or for instance see the "woodpecker method", which is
| basically a technique for rote memorization of tactical
| patterns used by a lot of strong players.
|
| (I quit my PhD in mathematics so I have less claim to
| expertise, but I regularly get smoked by >2000 fide chess
| players in my local club and talk to them about chess a lot)
| Miraltar wrote:
| I think there is often a confusion between memorising and
| understanding because they often go together. I'm an amateur
| chess player and I learned a few lines from a few openings. I
| never sat down repeating blindly the move to make them stick
| in my head, I watched lessons that explain every move. But I
| did that on many openings and understood most. Yet I can only
| play a few of them because I forgot all the ones I was not
| actively practicing. Understanding makes remembering a lot
| easier but it isn't enough.
| Jensson wrote:
| > I watched lessons that explain every move. But I did that
| on many openings and understood most.
|
| People who say this usually didn't understood the lesson at
| all. When you ask people about the things directly
| afterwards they can't answer a thing, its just that people
| overestimate how much they did understand when they first
| heard it since they don't didn't test themselves on it.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| What is your rating?
|
| Everyone I know who is 1700 or above has spent a
| significant amount of time memorizing openings from books,
| and it would be interesting to see a counterpoint.
| khafra wrote:
| Other responses are pointing toward this position, but I want
| to make it explicit: Memorizing an elegant algorithm is a lot
| more fun and more broadly useful than memorizing the look-up
| table for a limited section of the results; but sometimes
| caching parts of the look-up table in your memory is necessary
| for expertise.
|
| For example: Many bright kids get frustrated when they have to
| repeat a section because of calculation errors, when they
| already get the concept. Even if you know a few good algorithms
| for multiplication, memorizing "the times tables" for double-
| digit numbers can be useful.
|
| On the other hand, you don't have to memorize everything. If
| you can reliably re-derive some result from theorems you know
| well, and you never need that result in a hurry, it's fine to
| leave it un-memorized.
| dhc02 wrote:
| As a second-career middle and high school math teacher, I have
| a working theory.
|
| In previous eras in the US, we taught primarily procedure and
| facts, and assigned lots of practice work. The average kid did
| _all_ the practice work, for societal reasons that have eroded
| but are still present in other cultures.
|
| In the course of grappling with all the practice work, the
| human brain couldn't help but recognize patterns and start to
| make broader conceptual connections, which led to deep
| understanding.
|
| Today in the US, teaching facts and procedure first doesn't
| work, because very few kids get enough practice to start to
| draw deeper connections. So we are teaching conceptual
| understanding first, and then layering procedure on top.
|
| But I don't think this is worse. There is some research showing
| that it works better than the alternatives, and in my
| experience the top 10% of students (the ones who would have
| learned well the old way) are still doing quite well and
| honestly just getting to the "math is fun and interesting" part
| of the journey a lot earlier in their school careers.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I have been doing some work on some lawsuit stuff recently,
| and I have been told repeatedly that the average juror is
| absolutely less intellectually capable than they used to be.
| In the 90's, the writing level to use for expert reports was
| a 6th-7th grade level. Now, if you are a court expert, you
| should be writing and speaking at a ~3rd grade level, and I
| have been recently told that even this level seems to be
| beyond the average juror.
|
| This is also information from a group of people who are
| highly incentivized not to lie to you. Unlike school
| officials who are incentivized to say that students are doing
| better than they are and clout-seeking education researchers,
| the question here is how to speak persuasively, and there is
| no judgment (well, they are lawyers, there is equal contempt
| for everyone). They also do enough science (mock juries,
| polling, etc.) to get a decently accurate picture beyond the
| level of "anecdata."
|
| While the top students are doing fine, they honestly always
| will do fine. The bottom 90% of students is doing worse in
| terms of actual education that makes it to their adult life
| in the current educational model than they were doing before.
| Whether that is due to a culture shift or a change to new
| supposedly-evidence-based education methods is not clear to
| me, but it is _very_ clear that outcomes from schools are
| getting notably worse.
| red_admiral wrote:
| I agree with almost all of that, including that there's no
| similar decline in China. I wonder whether it's really "because
| of the writing system" though. As a counter-argument:
| - We may have fewer individual symbols (letters) to memorise,
| but we still need to learn vocabulary in English. - In
| European languages with grammatical gender you have to memorise
| that too (in German, a fork is feminine but a spoon is
| masculine), same for languages with declensions. - And
| when you study something, you have all the technical terms in
| your field. - But you don't simply memorise (if you're
| clever) what inode, tail recursion, ACID, syscall etc. mean,
| you subconsciously construct a knowledge graph. - Chinese
| characters have structures and relationships too so you don't
| just have to memorise each one individually. For example, the
| character for "man" (as in "male") is a combination of
| person+field, I believe; whereas the word for "business" is
| apparently the compound buy+sell. So the "knowledge graph"
| argument still applies in China. - Children in school in
| China don't need to know all the charaters, they start off with
| a useful subset and learn (or look up in dictionaries) more as
| they go along.
| cyberax wrote:
| I actually learned both English and Mandarin Chinese :)
|
| Vocabulary in English is a problem, but it's much easier to
| learn than thousands of Han characters. Grammatical gender is
| not a problem for native speakers, you already know it from
| speaking the language.
|
| > - Chinese characters have structures and relationships too
|
| Most Han characters can be decomposed into simpler
| characters. But not all, and you still have to memorize that
| a character for "branch" (Zhi )consists of "ten" (Shi )and
| "again" (You ). And of course, some characters have multiple
| meanings, and even multiple readings.
|
| In short, you have to memorize a lot.
|
| > - Children in school in China don't need to know all the
| charaters, they start off with a useful subset and learn (or
| look up in dictionaries) more as they go along.
|
| Of course. But they still have to learn at least 2-3 thousand
| by the end of the school.
| groby_b wrote:
| > it's incompatible with the "learn while playing" concept
|
| I'm not 100% sure about that. I do believe "learn while play"
| is less efficient for memorization, and it especially sucks
| when it comes to somewhat hard-to-see patterns. But you still
| do get memorization from it. (E.g. in music, you could either
| learn the circle of fifths, or you spend forever noodling on
| songs and at some point discover that relationship).
|
| Learn-while-playing is essentially ab initio research, and that
| only works for an inquisitive mind, with lots of friction added
| over memorization.
|
| I'd _suspect_ that something like structured play is striking
| the best balance between being interesting and being useful. It
| definitely works for kids, based on the research I 've read.
| I'm less clear if it works for adults, but... probably yes?
| Just nobody's building those structured opportunities?
| nxobject wrote:
| Are you sure we're not conflating memorization with repetition,
| at least in certain domains? These debates focus a lot on early
| childhood education and core skills like math and literacy -
| but I think for, say, math competencies expected at an 8th-
| grade level (which these NAEP scores focus on) like ordering
| fractions or working with linear equations, I'm not sure
| "memorization" is more applicable than "repetition" (and, in
| any case, memorization isn't a significant subgoal - e.g.
| formulae or rules for determining concavity etc. where
| remembering them isn't comparable to bulk memorization.)
|
| You could certainly argue that this is more about foundational
| skills like reading and writing, but it does limit the scope of
| how we're thinking about things.
|
| (Personal caveat: I was taught elementary school math using a
| "reform curriculum", so my memory might be faulty.)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| "In the mind of a beginner there are many possibilities; in the
| mind of an expert there are very few." -- Unattributed
| eleveriven wrote:
| We need to balance expertise with a beginner's mindset
| namaria wrote:
| "A made up saying can make anything seem plausible to those
| unwilling to reflect upon it" - Unattributed
| sweeter wrote:
| I do find it baffling the mythos that surrounds "talent" and
| "meritocracy" in the West. I subscribe to the idea that so-called
| "geniuses" are made and not born that way. Obviously there are
| factors into this, like success early on, and a variety of
| factors that may influence your predisposition to doing a certain
| thing well.
|
| But, at the same time, I know for a fact that far too many people
| put way too much weight on "talent" and often tell themselves
| that they can't do something. Someone may see you do something
| (like drawing or playing music) and say "wow, you are talented, I
| could never do that" but what you didn't see was how awful they
| were when they started and the thousands of hours they put into
| studying light and practicing constructing form from abstract
| shapes.
|
| I think that this is a dangerous lie. You, in fact, _could_ get
| good at drawing... and you could overcome any blocks to that if
| you put in the effort and work. You just don 't want to or are
| not following through. Some people will naturally be better,
| sure, but that is no excuse to say you are incapable of doing
| something. I almost find that notion insulting.
| codazoda wrote:
| > far too many people put way too much weight on "talent" and
| often tell themselves that they can't do something
|
| I consider myself a "maker" and a serial hobbyist. I see this
| in others who seem to be afraid to make things for fear of
| failing. I love to document and share my own process and that
| sometimes feels like showing off. Maybe I should share more
| about my failures. I've recently come to the realization that
| what I really want is to inspire others to explore their
| creativity, learn new skills, and gain the confidence to make
| their own projects.
|
| A genius, I am not, and I'm talented in only a few narrow
| areas, but I love to explore many.
| sandspar wrote:
| Article brings up the Polgar sisters. Their father wasn't
| specifically a chess fanatic; he was more interested in the power
| of education as a whole. Here's their (rather charming) daily
| schedule:
|
| 4 hours of specialist study (for us, chess)
|
| 1 hour of a foreign language. Esperanto in the first year,
| English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third.
| At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language
| instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 -
| in place of the specialist study - for 3 months. In summer, study
| trips to other countries.
|
| 1 hour of general study (native language, natural science and
| social studies)
|
| 1 hour of computing
|
| 1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies (humour
| lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke-telling)
|
| 1 hour of gymnastics, freely chosen, which can be accomplished
| individually or outside of school. The division of study hours
| can, of course, be treated elastically.
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