I volunteer tutor high school kids in my local community. Particularly math and history. The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization.
Recent history curricula and pedagogy in HS has placed an emphasis on “analysis” and “critical thinking.” But the students who struggle all struggle for the same reason: they cannot remember at the moment of writing their paper the basic facts that give context or even give meaning to the documents they are to analyze. I can teach a kid how to do the ACT of analysis to a great level of competency but their papers will be filled with bad analysis and illogical conclusions because they do not know what they read. So, much to their protests, I train them to memorize. And that is often the last push they need to not only get good grades, but realize the joy of critical thinking itself. For now they are not wasting brain cycles trying to conjure up the facts.
Good memorization skills are a huge leverage and it is something that can be learned and practiced. It is a shame that schools are letting children let their mental muscles atrophy like this.
"Here is some long sentence that doesn't really say anything and which you've probably never read in your life before."
You could now probably recite that sentence with near perfect accuracy; at worse changing it in very slight ways that are still functionally identical. That's an absolutely remarkable degree of memorization - one pass for 22 words, 119 characters!? Of course the reason it's easy and natural is because you have an intuitive understanding of what you're memorizing and so one word kind of flows into the next to create the singular whole.
Amateur chess players often find chess masters able to recite their games from memory as evidence of some sort of super-human memory that must be what enabled them to become masters in the first place, but it's completely false. It's the exact same story - when a strong player plays or sees a game, the game tells a story to him not especially different than a very short story. And so people are not recalling random moves or positions from memory but instead the story that those moves and positions tell. A master reciting a game is no more impressive than a "normal" person reciting the plot of a famous short story, let alone one that they wrote!
So for instance I remember from high school memorizing the order of the presidents (yeah... great school...) but finding it relatively easy by instead remembering the logical stories there. For instance instead of just remembering JFK-LBJ-Nixon, etc you remember the story of JFK getting assassinated, LBJ coming to power (and JFK's wife's view of him), then Nixon coming to power and grinding the old axe he had with JFK and scrapping the space program, followed by his VP (Ford) becoming president after Watergate, then losing to good but incapable Carter which led to TV Star Reagan, etc, etc.
I couldn't tell you the order of the presidents at all, unless you give me one and then I can recount the story of how we got from him to where we are now. Because like most of all people I suck at memorization, but also am pretty decent at recalling interesting stories.
The cost in time to derive basic facts that would have been instantly available had they been memorized also harmed the ability, especially on tests, to get to the end within the time available. 'Drill and kill' has its merits and, if done right, gives the kids a sense of accomplishment and progress.
If you start with the wrong facts, or missing facts, you don't end in the right place.
I can relate to this amazingly well. I'm dyslexic, so I have trouble remembering thing in the correct "sequence" they need to be memorized in. While taking some of my math classes in college, I particularly struggled with finishing statistics exams in the allotted time since a lot of the rules were (for me) difficult to keep straight in my mind. So, I memorized the bare basic "truths" and would basically start each problem from first principles. I knew them well enough to go very quickly, but I still ran out of time in some of the exams.
I wound up with a C in the class, but the professor commented that I probably would have received one of the highest grades in the class if I had taken the time to commit more of the "shortcuts" to memory and actually finished all the exams. Nearly all the points I'd lost on the exams were from incomplete solutions.
That being said, it was still one of my favorite classes ever, and was immensely useful to me as a newly minted manufacturing engineer in a foundry.
>But the students who struggle all struggle for the same reason: they cannot remember at the moment of writing their paper the basic facts that give context or even give meaning to the documents they are to analyze.
It sounds like what you're describing isn't about students' ability to memorize, but rather about students' ability to develop their own mental models. Luquet and Piaget demonstrated that the ability to synthesize information to develop mental models isn't particularly connected to the ability to memorize the same information.
Some kids live in households where they listen to thousands of books by age 5 or 6, including not only stories of increasing complexity but also natural history, biography, science, technology, ..., and other kids never get that kind of attention or experience, and end up far behind in those skills.
The ability to “memorize” (i.e. learn) rests on a vast subconscious structure built up by fitting together language, starting from little bits and pieces of vocabulary, and building to subtle understandings of complicated ideas.
The way to train it is by giving the little neural net of the brain as much meaningful input as possible about the relevant parts of the world, and letting the brain fit them together in a web of connections. Not by trying to practice/drill rote trivia (say, reciting state capitals or the multiplication table).
I have an extreme amount of trouble memorizing basic facts, and so I can't recall a lot of historical dates. Things I didn't know which bothered her included the year America signed the declaration of independence and the year we entered World War I.
But, I knew how long World War I lasted, and that it coincided with the Spanish flu, and proceeded an economic boom period which ended in the Great Depression and then World War II. I'm quite good at remembering stories, and so I knew the context of these events—just not the specific year they happened.
Which I think is fine. Context is what matters.
My friend said that for her, knowing the date is what lets her recall the context. Because of what she memorized as a child, she's able to form a timeline of history in her head, and see when things happened and how they coincide. And I will admit that I sometimes have trouble forming a similar timeline, and it's a handicap. But I mostly manage; I have a limited number of hours in my life and I focus my energy where it makes the most sense.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that people are different. It may be that most students are like my friend and the children you tutor (which is something I should keep in mind, as I'm actually training to become an elementary school teacher). But it's not necessarily true for everyone. I resent the fact that when I was in high school, I had test questions which asked "what year did Christopher Columbus arrive in America". I studied for hours trying to commit these facts to memory, and I still got the questions wrong. But if the test had asked "how did Christopher Columbus's arrival in America affect the European economy", I could have answered easily.
Any recommendations in how to get better at memorization?
The teachers may force the kids to memorize, but that doesn't mean it does them any good in the long run. I met tons of kids that memorized mathematics from 8 to 13 years of age in Canada. I struggled badly with fractions when I was 8 years old. The fact that there wasn't one canonical representation broke my little brain. Before in mathematics you could always "keep going until you were done" and the number looked like 1.75 and that was it. Now you could stop at 14/8 or 1 6/8 or 1 3/4 or 7/4 or even 1.75 again! And sometimes they made me round it all the way up to 175/100 instead! Madness!
But unlike the kids in my class that seemingly did better than me in grade 4 while I was wasting my time trying to make this slippery math reliable I naturally ended up memorizing little gems like 7/2 being 3 and 1/2 because I kept at doing the actual work over and over again until my brain remembered it for its own sake. I'm not fighting my brain and trying to squash stuff that I don't care about into it, I'm letting it make the tradeoff as to what to memorize and what to keep as I keep doing the work over and over again.
By grade 6 (age 11, same time I started college) I was starting to wonder why we hadn't learned anything in a couple years in math. When you understand the building blocks or "first principles" so well, what looks to be a new lesson (the area of triangles!) barely registers because it's such a basic application of what you've already learned before. By grade 8 (age 13) I was actually complaining that we'd barely made any progress in 5 years of education. I believe my exact words were "we've basically learned nothing other than maybe the Pythagorean theorem" and I still mostly believe that.
When it comes to things like science, computer science, visual (ie, non-statistical) mathematics, and probably economics, physics, optics, and some areas of statistical mathematics we could probably move 3x as fast if we would just really hammer home the first principles until we were absolutely sure they were sticking.
We don't let babies fill containers with soup because they haven't demonstrated that they understand what a hole is and does. I feel like too often we force children to remember that 3*7 is 21 without really making sure they understand multiplication. The key to getting a child to really learn something isn't by jumping to intentional memorization. Not with mathematics, anyway. The key is to get them to reason about it and to practice over and over again. Not to memorize, but to understand and though knowledge and understanding are different things, understanding always comes with some knowledge though the reverse is not necessarily the case.
For example, having good memory may lead you to become more arrogant. If other people praise you for your skill, you become so confident in your conclusions that you stop questioning them and rather see confirmation in an echo chamber of sources.
This arrogance is the source of much evil, I think. You see it a lot in politicians and management.
> So they ended up reading *reference manuals* and writing down or memorizing the answers to their questions because they couldn't look up information very easily.
Good reference manuals are dope and they're so much better than tutorials or FAQ like stackoverflow because they are written to be general, you don't have to generalize yourself (which usually isn't trivial). You're almost never reading about a particular problem but about a class of problems, not about a technic but about a class of technics. In freshman we learnt ocaml (actually caml light, yeah you guessed i'm french) and we were all handed a text copy of https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/caml-light-0.74/cl74refman.... To this day i still love reference books, usually when i have a problem i look it up, get my answer, and then end up reading the whole chapter or so giving much more background knowledge.
Most people gave all that up because "search."
But aside from search being flawed (good luck finding an old Google Doc), when information was actually organized, you might be able to remember where it was. Without structure, you can't remember where it is because it isn't really anywhere.
I'd say this skill is very different than never learning any geography because you "could" look it up on Google Maps some day if you wanted to.
Of course, I still ended up learning the squares and the times tables by heart, but not because I actively memorized them, but because I just used them so much that I couldn't help but remember them eventually.
I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything - if you use the thing often enough, you can't help but memorize it anyway.
Of course, you could argue that how often you use something isn't necessarily equivalent to how much utility you might get out of memorizing said thing, and I don't disagree with that.
All that being said, I do agree with the article's premise that an expansive knowledge base aids reasoning, which does seem to be in conflict with my principle. I definitely do possess a basic knowledge of geography, and it does definitely aid my reasoning, but I don't ever remember actively memorizing that - not at school, nor elsewhere.
After having studied maths and physics at university and worked as a programmer in a mathematical field for 20 years (and studied much more maths in my spare time), I now see my poor recall as the limiting factor in my abilities in maths. The main reason I don't think I could ever have been a professional mathematician is that I would have reached (and have reached in my own learning as an amateur) a ceiling.
I have maths books that are beloved to me, that I have read multiple times (actively, working with pen and paper as one should) and which I will enjoy again in future. But the concepts in those books do not remain in my mind. I don't reach a point where the structure of basic linear algebra, say, is baked in.
I am good at the problem solving, but maths is an edifice, one people have been building onto for millenia. I explore that edifice, and keep returning to my favourite bits of it, but the portion of that structure that is resident in my mind is, and I think always will be, small. It's a window, and as more comes into it, more slides out. Everybody must have such a window, but I know others have much larger windows than me. And that's fine - I'm a programmer, not a mathematician. But I think it's something I would have benefitted from understanding earlier in my life. Perhaps I would have set about "learning to learn" differently. Rote memorisation and active curation of memories already formed could have benefitted me greatly.
Isn't the structure of the school curriculum also at fault here? If concepts like the quadratic formula being presented without context on why you will need to memorize them, and you're able to succeed without doing it, it's clear why you might choose not to memorize it. That wouldn't be the case if they presented you with challenging, applied problems where having the quadratic formula memorized really is actually necessary.
The curriculum seems to be structured under the assumption that the students will memorize the facts for the sake of memorizing (as most students do) in order to get good grades, and only later apply them on more advanced classes. If you're able to derive the results fast enough, and as such you see no point in memorizing them, then that assumption is broken, and the curriculum won't work the way it is expected to. Those students would need to take initiative themselves to adapt their learning style to the way books and classes are structured, as it's not obvious for them that such memorization is necessary.
Same story here. Undergrad engineering math curriculum came easy to me, and it stuck as it was our bread and butter (calculus + diff eq). Once I got to grad level courses, the frequency with which we would utilize the material elsewhere dropped dramatically, and the net effect of that was I could never recall the topics until I needed them.
The next problem was even more significant: If I took even higher level courses, they relied on knowledge of the material I took in one of those prior courses that had not been burnt into memory, and may have taken 2+ years prior. The only reason I did poorly was because I had not memorized enough of the prior material.
On my own, I studied/reviewed the undergrad statistics course 3 times over many years and it never stuck. Finally, in 2018 I used spaced repetition to memorize much of the material, and over 3 years later I can still read material that utilizes those statistics and understand what I'm reading.
Memorizing is useful for things you don't use often.
Did you ever learn another language? It's impossible without memorizing a massive amount of things, especially when the writing system is different than the one one is familiar with. In fact the most famous researcher in vocabulary learning (Paul Nation) states in one of his book that rote learning is one of the most efficient use of time.
I'm of the reverse opinion that memorizing things is a "secret trick" particularly effective, that is put aside by a lot of people because it takes effort.
That's in addition to computer languages, of course :)
I suspect that the parts of the brain involving in learning by rote and learning a new language are somewhat different. When I learn a new language, I'm desperately trying to connect anything I see to something I already know. When I learn a multiplication table or a list of unrelated dates, it doesn't work nearly as well.
Learning new languages no doubt involves a lot of memorization no matter which way you look at it, but I think you'd agree that the "active" kind is much more mentally taxing than the passive "immersion" kind, the latter of which I take no issue with. I also don't contend that learning a new language as an adult necessarily involves active rote learning.
I have had to learn other languages at school, including ones with non-Latin writing systems. It did involve a lot of rote learning, which I did to pass the classes, shortly after which I forgot everything. I personally don't value learning new languages, an opinion which I realize might come across as a bit uncultured.
edit: add side note
You were probably taught that memorization means "memorization, plus you will be examined and punished and rewarded accordingly, in many cases against any natural inclination to memorize the object of conditioning".
I doesn't, but you're right to not regard this highly.
> never memorize anything - if you use the thing often enough
You'll memorize it, yes.
I took a slightly different approach: memorize what is important.
For some reason, they wanted us to memorize the times table up to 12 when I was a kid. I quickly recognized that it was only important to memorize it up to 9, and even then there were patterns. Why is 9 more important than 12? Because it is incredibly inefficient to figure out a product each time you need it, but the rules for multi-digit multiplication were generals whereas the rules for single-digit multiplication only worked for single digit (and were necessary for multi-digit multiplication anyway). The trick is to figure out when the efficiency outweighs inefficiency.
Then way later in my 20s, when it was handy to know how to remember some multiples quickly, I realized that obviously there's a lot of patterns in there, and of course the magic of looking for an easier problem to do mentally to solve a more complex one.
No amount of effort at memorization ever succeeded in even trying to give me those tools, and they're so general - you can apply them to everything.
My entire 90s educational experience is a memory of teachers saying "you need to know your times tables" and no one actually trying to teach even basic reasoning about how numbers worked (which I suspect is why programming lept out at me - it's all number manipulation but it's all about the algorithms and patterns and finally things started to make sense).
I tend to use the term "contextual recall" rather than the term "memorization", since the former emphasizes that it's okay to rely on a combination of memorization and pithy resources.
Hand anatomy is the best example I can think of. A good diagram can help you recall enough information to answer complex questions that would otherwise require an incredible amount of memorization. You still need to memorize some things in order to answer questions -- mostly the kinematic aspects and various properties of the things being represented (tendons, bones, muscle, etc.) -- but far less than you would need otherwise.
The one pager of theorems and proof construction techniques sometimes allowed in mathematics courses is another example.
This is why generative models are exciting as the next "tool for thought" for me, up there with calculators and search engines. Contextual recall is a powerful tool, especially when combined with memorization, and is a limiter for lots of folks (including me).
I often tell people "Calculus is just algebra. However, it's fast, repeated algebra. If you aren't excellent at algebra, calculus is going to be terrible for you. On the flip side, calculus forces you to use your algebra so much that you get much better at it."
In this article, Barbara talks about how memorization helped her with Mathematics, a subject that she had previously struggled with. In particular, this line stands out to me
> Continually focusing on understanding itself actually gets in the way.
[1] https://nautil.us/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to-become-fluent-in... [2]https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
P.S: Her book is really good too https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/...
[Update: Apparently she wrote a book based on the course—https://www.amazon.com/Learning-How-Learn-Spending-Studying/...]
What you memorize here is the table of contents, and approximately where each answer is inside the book. Search might be better at first but it doesn't scale like logarithmic search over a static pile of paper.
There are programs I can still apply this approach to, vim comes to mind, but for the most part documentation is ambient now, with the leading search engine delivering meaningfully worse results year over year.
Both modes of learning have their place and a combination of a comprehensive overview plus detailed treatments of specific corners gives so much more understanding than either alone.
He said if you mastered 100% you'd get 100% on the exam. He would pick from the lot and that's the exam question.
His reasoning was. These are the basics, we were all smart, and we could use the basics to go beyond them. But only if we had them.
20+ years later and I still remember most of the things in that class. I can still write code in assembly (8086). I don't need to, but I have the knowledge, and it's helped shape my code.
"Retrieval is the key process for understanding learning and for promoting learning, yet retrieval is not often granted the central role it deserves. Learning is typically identified with the encoding or construction of knowledge, and retrieval is considered merely the assessment of learning that occurred in a prior experience. The retrieval-based learning perspective outlined here is grounded in the fact that all expressions of knowledge involve retrieval and depend on the retrieval cues available in a given context. Further, every time a person retrieves knowledge, that knowledge is changed, because retrieving knowledge improves one’s ability to retrieve it again in the future. Practicing retrieval does not merely produce rote, transient learning; it produces meaningful, long-term learning. Yet retrieval practice is a tool many students lack metacognitive awareness of and do not use as often as they should. Active retrieval is an effective but undervalued strategy for promoting meaningful learning."
Active recall (asking yourself questions about the text) is better than passive recall (rereading the text).
Only once the lines are memorized can you say them with feeling. And, when you know the feeling, you can make up new lines.
Understanding and memorization should not be seen as opposites.
Memorization implicitly requires learning and characterizing them entirely separately as modern education does is pretty faulty.
Quoth Sherlock Holmes:
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
Reminds me a bit of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari
The agile people have gotten ahold of this principle, but it's pretty cool.
Paraphrased:
Shu - learn to repeat and mimic exactly what the master is doing
Ha - Once you've (memorized?) learned the movements, then you can innovate and add your own twist to it
Ri - Finally, once you've learned to mimic the master and have learned to push boundaries, you can start redrawing them and improvising
These days I combine mnemonics with memory palace journeys. In a few hours of practice I went from being able to memorize 6 digits to around 70.
My penultimate challenge is to memorize texts verbatim. I haven't been able to find a straightforward method. My next thought is to research theater performers' methods and Hafiz methods. If anyone has any specific pointers to share I'd be grateful.
It's closer to prose, but the meter makes it harder to swap words out, and teaches you that words aren't fungible in memorizing a text (as opposed to learning from it, which is most of what we do with texts).
I recite a pair of lines multiple times until they feel natural. Then I put overlapping quintuples of words into my Spaced Repetition system. So with Ozymandias I read the first section:
I met a traveller from an antique land who said:
"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand ..."
Then into my SR system I put: I met a traveller from | traveller from an antique land ...
traveller from an antique land | antique land who said: "Two ...
etc. This has worked extremely well for me.YMMV.
But also, text I find is something that resists mnemonic systems. Rote repetition to make the text lived and part of you, to burn into your brain and tongue the very act of saying the words in that specific order seems to rule the day still.
Maybe they had more autonomy than most dev teams are allowed to have. I know I would have never been allowed to create a compiler for any of my previous jobs (to high risk).
I do agree you shouldn't just Google every problem you have.
I have found that I cannot remember certain mathematical properties at all. For instance I always forget whether to use sin or cos to get the x component or y component. But, I had a few teachers force us to memorize the fundamentals: SOH, CAH, TOA. Using the fundamentals allows me to prove to myself very quickly what I should use. It's the same thing with the quadratic formula. I can never remember it, but I had a calculus teacher show us how the equation is derived. I can remember what a parabola is, and I also remember the fundamentals of calculus. Using these two things I can derive the quadratic formula pretty easily.
So I wonder if there's a 2nd metric that we're missing. Where we need to memorize fundamentals, and critically think about how to use those fundamentals. I don't know, this could just be more anecdata though :)
I believe electronic notebooks haven't yet realized their greatest potential, spaced repetition. I want to take my notes in an electronic notebook, then review my notes and extract parts of them to become spaced repetition items. This is something I would happily have a dedicated device for, and would pay $1000+ for such a device, but they don't yet exist.
After taking notes, natural hand made notes, I imagine creating spaced repetition "flashcards" would work like so:
1. Review notes and draw a square around something I would like to memorize; perhaps a fact I have written, or a hand drawn chart or diagram. This square becomes a "flashcard".
2. Optionally, I may hide (by blurring, or pixelating, etc) part of the flashcard.
When the time came for study, these flashcards would be presented to me following a spaced repetition algorithm:
3. Present the flashcard, including all blurring and pixelation.
4. When ready, the user is shown the full unobscured flashcard. The user may also toggle the surrounding page the square was originally extracted from, this gives the user context.
5. The user can then judge how well they remember the flashcard. The user presses a button indicating how well they remembered the flashcard. This feedback goes back into the spaced repetition algorithm.
The important innovation here is that users can easily combine hand-written and hand-drawn notes and a spaced repetition algorithm. In Anki, you can import pictures, but this is burdensome. You can write markdown or LaTeX, but those suck compared to just drawing something by hand. Studies have shown that hand drawn notes aid in memorization. The would has never seen hand drawn notes easily combined with spaced repetition, and I believe it would be better than any other memorizing scheme we've yet encountered.
Image Occlusion is available via a third-party app[1]:
The app is open to pull requests (raise an issue/pop into chat), and provides an API which allows external apps to create cards.
[0] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/releases
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.infinyte7.ankiimageocclus...
The Art of Memory by F.A. Yates is still a nice read.
In the article, the engineers admired by the author were intel ops who were stuck in an airgap and had to use their minds. That's a principle I try to use in life - to some extent deliberately making things hard for myself. As with all exercise, what was impossibly hard becomes commonplace.
Part of this discipline is knowing what not to do (yes, attic theory). I never create new accounts on anything or unless I've a clear cost-benefit rationale that makes memorising a new 32 character passphrase worthwhile. That excludes a huge heal of crap that wants you to "sign up" for it.
>David Beazley: Discovering Python - PyCon 2014
>So, what happens when you lock a Python programmer in a secret vault containing 1.5 TBytes of C++ source code and no internet connection? Find out as I describe how I used Python as a secret weapon of "discovery" in an epic legal battle.
>Slides can be found at: https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2014 and https://github.com/PyCon/2014-slides
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330901
>How do you think Adventure games are like the Method of Loci, or Memory Palaces, in that they can help you remember and retrieve vast amounts of information geographically?
Scott Adams (game designer):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)
Not to be confused with Dilbert creator outed for using sock puppets on Metafilter and Reddit (reddit.com):
I'm going back and forth between these two workflows and I feel like progressing at a steady rate before getting bogged down, not because I have difficulty with the subjects I study per se, but because every month or so there is an article confuting the previous one, prompting me to switch to the other workflow, slowing me down considerably, every single time.
Similarly, there was an idea expressed in chess where some people rely on memory to reproduce thousands of similar scenarios, while others rely on the "feel" of the chessboard and the various heuristics related to it (e.g. is the king "safe" -- e.g. castled and not exposed etc., are the bishops "powerful and free to roam" -- e.g. not blocked by pawns or heavily contested etc.).
My argument partially comes from self-defense; my memory is comparatively poor. But I'm able to use heuristics developed over years of experience to make generally good decisions.
So in this case:
"Who would you rather hire: the person who knows exactly what features are available in PHP 7 and which are only available in PHP 8, or the one who will figure it out by trial-and-error of while writing each application and seeing what fails?"
I would hire the person who is able to write the best application, and understand when to use what features or not: similar to the Bond quote "Sometimes a trigger needs to be pulled -- Or not pulled, it's tough to know which in your pajamas". If memory was the most important part of cognitive ability computers would serve a much larger role in society than the (already large) part they do today.
What poems you all think serve as good reminders of truths of how to work well in teams and build good software?
Similarly I see no point in doing the opposite, like certain "GTD fanatic" who pretend not to remember what they need to do in next few hours because their GTD system is more efficient than their memory and so they need to keep memory free to focus on current thing.
Est modus in rebus.
We need to eat, eating too little is harmful, but also eating too much is harmful. We need oxygen to breathe but too much exigence fry our lungs and brain. Sport is important, a sedentary life is not healthy, but too much physical activity means being broken in the old age with a consumed body.
The most important thing to operate with their own brain IMVHO is having in memory "the big picture" so to being able to recall anything via computer as needed. Without the big outline our searches are limited, probably biased, we can't correlate things we encounter etc, but there is no need to do more and no reasons to do less.
Rote learning is difficult, and unnecessary. Your brain already automatically memorized places, faces, and novel things. If you can imagine Elvis in a wizard robe holding a block of cheese on your front porch, you have a one item memory palace. That's the level of difficulty a memory palace requires - it's a hack of built in automatic functions your brain is already performing.
Elite memory athletes who memorize the order of thousands of cards, or tens of thousands of digits of pi, or a travel dictionary, or any other assortment of things - these people are often average intelligence, otherwise normal folks who just practice a neat trick.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of "advanced" memory, mnemonics, or method of loci primers. Get one and develop a superpower.
I like "Memory Improvement" by Ron White - you can grok it in an afternoon, but it's structured into 30 daily exercises, and captures all the important features without fluff or filler. The audiobooks is great, 4 hours long. A motivated person could master the skill over a weekend with nothing but the audio.
Seriously. Method of loci is a basic human skill that gets attributed to genius characters like Sherlock or Tony Stark or Einstein level intellects, or to shamans and druids and mystics. It's a default feature that comes in every install - it's how your brain wants to work. Every single person can do it, and should.
Also, probable typo:
> A second example: at the time of the writing of this article, Russia is a month into an invitation into Ukraine.
invitation => invasion? I don't think anyone invited Russia in Ukraine.
Agree. That was my first thought even when they invaded Crimea.
> invitation => invasion? I don't think anyone invited Russia in Ukraine.
Could be a tongue-in-cheek? I understood that as being said in a sarcastic tone.
Crimea's fresh water supply came from a canal originating in Ukraine. After Russia's annexation, Ukraine retaliated by blocking the water flow with concrete so Crimea was running out of water. Deep link to explanation: https://youtu.be/If61baWF4GE?t=16m27s
So it was no surprise that on the 2nd day of the invasion, Russian soldiers used explosives to blow up Ukraine's dam to to re-open the canal: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/313jB_tLSxQ
Crimea residents' (many pro-Russian) reaction a week later on March 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBJmnMqH8S4
Also, Russia controlling Ukraine's land and coastline from Donbass through Mariupol and down to north Crimea means they have a more viable "land bridge" for supplies than the tiny man-made bridge that links southern Crimea with Russia. Ukraine becoming allied with NATO (or a defacto "NATO ally" via EU membership instead of a Russia puppet) means that tiny bridge over the Kerch strait becomes a vulnerable chokepoint that threatens Russia. Deep link to that explanation: https://youtu.be/l5KXeFdpyaE?t=7m22s
From Russia's point of view, there are many desirable military objectives for them to take over southeastern Ukraine.
EDIT reply to: >, because a naive look at the map suggests that even without Crimea, Russia already has coastline onto the Black Sea between its borders with Ukraine and Georgia... there must be a strong reason in favour of invading another country rather than developing ports on the land they already have,
Russia's existing coastline with the Black Sea (e.g. Sochi, etc) has no deep water ports that connect to their major navigable rivers. The 2nd video I linked illustrates that. You can also see on the wikipedia diagram that the Russia's existing Black Sea coastline around Sochi doesn't connect to Russia's main river system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Deep_Water_System_of_E...
When Ukraine had pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, the Crimea chokepoint wasn't as big of a threat. With the 2014 regime change to pro-NATO presidents Poroshenko & Zelenskyy, that mindset changed.
This video is fascinating and explains a lot. Many thanks for this!!
Which one? https://www.linkedin.com/in/pearlleff/ only shows internships at Tumblr, Amazon and LinkedIn.
This sounds like those contrived morality tales that people write on LinkedIn to prove their point.
Recently just for fun (I have a job that (perhaps unfortunately) does not require any advanced math), I started taking math MOOCs from top universities. I discovered that, when I looked into how the formulae is derived (starting from elementary math), I find it substantially easier to keep in mind the formulae. Or even if I don't remember the formulae, I know how to derive them.
I now feel like I've understood certain concepts much better, even though if there's a timed test I might end up being worse off than others who memorized. But then again, I'm learning for fun and is not preparing for any test :)
What I'm trying to say is, for math atleast understanding the underlying concepts work better for me, even if at a given point it's beyond your grade.
(Thank goodness MOOCs exist. I should probably donate.)
In school, my dad had to memorize a lot of dates with precision down to the day. That seems mostly-useless to me. Just knowing the decade is sufficient for most analysis. To take the article's example, the putative link between "Row v. Wade (1973) → Downswing in crime since the 1990s" only really requires that you know that the ruling occurred sometime in the 70s.
I think the strategy, then, should be to memorize things that are likely to generate insights and to the level of precision that will likely be necessary to do so. You should probably commit to memory that Andrew Johnson was the president after Lincoln in 1860s -- but you probably don't need to remember that Millard Fillmore succeeded Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850.
Sometimes when I have a very difficult problem, I will memorize all the information related to the problem and then go to sleep. Many times, I have woken ip in the middle of the night with a solution to the problem.
- https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2019/why-we-forget
Al Franken can draw the United States map from memory! (He claims it was for a bar bet.)
Al Franken and Tom Davis visit Late Night with David Letterman, 8/20/87. Al draws a map of all 48 contiguous states in under 2 minutes.
There is no point in memorizing a readily available fact that virtually has no effect on your life.
Mentioning Muslims who learn by heart the Quran as a means to illustrate how memorization makes the message penetrating deep inside us, is something totally wrong. VERY wrong.
There is no single Muslim in the world (and in the history of Islam, including Muhamad himself) who knows the meaning of Quran. One of the obvious reasons you may understand is that a large amount of the Quran vocabulary is not Arabic (even the word "Quran" itself, is not Arabic). Basically you can pick up any random Quranic text and you will not find one single Muslim in the world who knows at least the meaning of certain words. If you read the Islamic resources which explain the Quran, you will find dozens, and sometimes hundreds of explanations for the same text just because some words are not even Arabic. So memorizing the Quran by heart does not help you in anyway to understand its message.
I could have said similar things about other examples you mentioned. But the point of my comment is that between programmers we should stick to programming concepts when we try to explain something instead of picking examples from fields which are beyond our knowledge and which approach is merely a waste of time and confusing at best.
Also do not try to overthink a concept. It's easy to be quickly off-topic.
And from a personal perspective, it (memorization) has proved highly effective for my learning.
> Russia is a month into an invitation into Ukraine.
Probably should read 'invasion'.
your memory is the DDR and cache, we all know the more the better.
muscle memory is cache, it has the fastest access.