Those are not opposite activities. Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak; and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.

Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers learn them by repetition. You can't be serious advocating "just go read stuff" as a way to learn a language. Some foundation, acquired by explicit learning, is required to even start reading.

> Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.

That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what's going around him (including language) at least 16 hours per day, every day. An adult has much less time for that.

Also it takes a surprisingly long time for children to learn language. I used to think it sorta-kinda happened over a year or two, but having children myself revealed how wrong I was.

I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. My oldest rarely contributes individual words to this dictionary anymore, but he still improvises expressions and idioms.

Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand, not merely memorize.

They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they also remember the word sounds attached to the associated concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those words as well). All the while commiting to memory all kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name and the ABC.

Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a generalized concept -- then again nobody said understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective in being able to use and think with not just the concepts but also the relevant facts related to them).

I could usually see why my little ones combined them that way.

"No, I want whole and whole!"

I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure selection bias.

I also read in a second language acquisition textbook a while back (so, decent chance of being out of date, also decent chance of my memory of what I read being less-than-perfect) that the strongest predictor of how native-like an accent someone develops isn't actually the age at which they started learning the language, it's the lag between when they started learning it and when they started socially integrating into a community of native speakers. And it happens to be the case that, for all sorts of practical reasons, there's a strong correlation between this lag period and age. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to the critical period hypothesis - there is - but when we're talking about children it's difficult-to-impossible to root out selection bias effectively enough to permit even a convincing stab at partial identification of causal effects. Which creates a risky situation for the purposes of drawing firm conclusions, because our prejudices love to helpfully answer the questions that science won't.

In grad school I had a social science textbook that dubbed these kind of questions "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions" in the first chapter, and in subsequent chapters simply described them as "FUQ'd".

Right—not simply memorizing what's happening around them. Those are fundamentally different activies. That is the gist of the parent comment's point.

They've also acknowledged expressly that rote memorization techniques are "valuable" and "have a place."

I've tried this for years with Japanese kanji and never really got very far. Just didn't work well, they largely were just a big blob of lines.

Then I found an Android app (Kanji Study) that mixes this in with informational screens that break down kanji into radicals and puts them alongside a bunch of multi-kanji words and uses them in sentences so we can see them in context, and it's actually been working.

For example, 語 being composed of 言, 五, and 口 reduces it down to 3 things instead of 14 strokes. This is an easy one since the parts are distinct, but plenty aren't nearly as obvious, like the left side of 教

And plus, general recommendation is to learn words elsewhere and just put them into anki to not forget.

Some people like it, but it is not the only or the most recommended way to learn speak and write.

This isn't actually a settled matter. I did a literature dive a while back and found that drilling vocabulary flashcards shows the highest benefit on artificial recall tasks (like multiple choice tests), and over relatively short time scales (days to weeks). Studies that looked at longer time scales (months to years) and more organic tasks generally showed mixed results. Which I generally interpret as a sign that the literature in question is highly susceptible to the file drawer effect.

And that in turn suggests that the magnitude of flashcarding's value for this kind of thing has a lot to do with your goals. In a nutshell, are you more interested on the science on how to develop communicative proficiency over the long run, or are you more interested on the science on how to get a good grade in class?

I'm studying Chinese right now, and I do use flashcards, but it's not because I believe it's the best way, per se. It's because it's a convenient option for reviewing characters and words that don't appear often in the reading material I have. When they do appear often in my reading material, I find (anecdotally) that it takes a lot fewer organic repetitions to get the character or word to stick in my head than it does with flashcard repetitions.

It's also worth mentioning there's no particular reason to assume Chinese and Japanese schools are any less likely than schools elsewhere in the world to cling to inefficient pedagogical techniques out of a sense of tradition. So one can't necessarily assume that the way they are doing it is the way they ought to be doing it.

Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write.

> You can’t be serious advocating “just go read stuff”

True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it.

> even native speakers learn them by repetition

No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger.

> life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult

True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating.

> An adult has much less time for that

I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies.

There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.

You need the 'flashcards' before you can read, listen or talk. Go try reading a book where you don't know most of the words. Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first. Try reading a text where you haven't learned the writing system.

> Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1.

Because they can't read.

> They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.”

Obviously you aren't a parent. You think a child magically decides one day to say mama? Or do you think it's the mother constantly saying 'mama' to the child until the child 'remembers it' and repeats it?

> They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body.

What? Complex statistical inferences about the world?

I've a toddler who can read 3 paragraphs of 3 sentences each, and then tell you the details of the story he read[1]. He is 4y6m, right now. He has never learned the alphabet or the names of the letters (A,B, C, D, etc). He has only learned the sounds a letter or sequence of letters make for certain patterns.

You most definitely do not need to memorise the alphabet in order to learn to read!

Teaching children the alphabet before teaching them reading makes it a lot harder for them to learn actual reading.

[1] I've seen kids as old as 7 get confused by a book with no pictures, and he sails right on through because I taught him to read (using the DISTAR alphabet), and made sure none of our daily lessons had even a single picture in it.

Or maybe we just don't want to coddle them. When has learning anything been easy, and why do you expect people to be able to acquire new knowledge and skills without putting in the effort? It shouldn't be grueling, not for its own sake, but yeah, you might have to stare at a compiler error for a few hours or even a few days before you figure out what's broken. Truly, how else are you supposed to learn if you don't, eventually, do it yourself?

I'm so sick of this anti-expert, anti-knowledge attitude. It's why we have bootcamp juniors being thrown into otherwise-senior roles, with laughably predictable consequences for the field.

I’m all for hard work; learning is usually very hard work. I also think we need expert guidance.

But let’s make the difficulty useful/effective rather than counterproductive.

Also, to answer your questions in a very simple way: the entire reason you even became an expert is because another expert somewhere along the way gave you an easy in to the knowledge, they coddled you. This is why you can "stare at a compiler error for a few hours before figuring out what's broken". Without that expert, you wouldn't even understand what a compiler even is.

Sure there is a natural repetitive process that leads to base learning like L1 you mention.

On the other hand no one adds or multiples enough in daily life for natural memory formation. Humans consider the skill vital enough that we have developed methods to memorize them. Same for spelling, especially for infrequently used words.

Flashcards used with Spaced repetition isn't cargo cult, it is a well studied, and pretty good method of inducing memory formation.

To most people I’d wager “memorize” has a strong connotation for the synthetic version only, with an emphasis on a stripping-out of context.

I recognize that stripping away context can be valuable—-drilling a tennis serve over and over outside the real-time context of a game is extremely helpful.

Flashcards are rarely valuable in the same way. For semantically oriented tasks, an impoverished context is usually not very helpful. Receptive skills like letter and character recognition might be an exception. But even then you’ve got to make the leap to reading at some point.

> no one adds or multiplies enough in daily life for natural memory formation

To the contrary, there’s a fascinating study of children in South America who had very fluent mental math skills for making change because they sold fruit on the side of the road. They couldn’t solve the exact same problem in story problem format in a classroom, though. Synthetic contexts usually don’t transfer well to real life.

I think in common usage the word "memorize" very strongly implies that it's the lossless storage and retrieval of some highly specified sequence of information. No amount of studying American Civil War history would be referred to as "memorizing the Gettysburg Address" unless you could recite the speech word for word.

Isn't that kind of the point for the other side?

Nobody memorizes the answer to 212+457. There are no flash cards for every possible addition up to infinity.

In my experience, the more people think that math is something to memorize, the worse they are at math.

it is to be noted that math isn't numeracy though. I have dyscalclia which hurt me with numbers but at the college level there are fewer numbers and more conceptual thinking. ended up with a math minor, though that's due to the CS degree requiring so many classes.

    V = I * R
    I = V / R
    R = V / I

If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are you going to remember the concept?

> It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!)

I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer.

BTW, one of the tests fighter pilots go through is they are blindfolded, and then have to put their hand on each control the instructor calls out.

I also have some written tests for certifying pilots. There are questions like max takeoff weight, fuel burn rate, max dive speeds, etc. Stuff a pilot had better know or he's a dead pilot.

But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers. When people talk about memorization they talk about remembering the words without understanding the concepts, such a person is no better off than the person carrying around a text note with the concept written down.

When you understand these concepts you will remember those formulas, but memorizing the formula doesn't make you understand it. Therefore creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, there is something else there.

The ability to memorize opening moves may lead you into a stronger mid game, but it's not creativity. Creativity is searching for patterns where they can mate in three, or spotting positions where the bishop can attack two pieces at once in two moves.

No it doesn't, understanding a concept doesn't come from memorizing N facts, if it did we could easily make everyone understand math in school but we can't.

Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula.

> You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board.

That is just a theory, there is little behind that. Much more likely you become a chess master by training a board state evaluator in your hand that is really good at evaluating board states, not by memorizing lots of board states. Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it.

That board state evaluator allows you to also remember board states easily, but you don't build that by memorizing board state patterns.

> Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula.

Sure, you can wing it at a primary or high school level if your teachers are impressed by your understanding. But you will never become a math expert if you don't remember the specific formulae, and many other more complex things. Even if you are fully able to deduce the theorems from scratch, you won't be able to function if you have to invent and then prove every single theorem you want to use.

> Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it.

No, it is precisely the other way around. DeepBlue is deducing how good a board state is by trying to calculate all possible follow-up moves up to a depth of 13 or something. In contrast, AlphaGo has memorized patterns occuring in billions of games (in a lossy archive format, of course) and basically can recall games that are close enough to the current game and what you need to do to win from the current position. And this is exactly how chess masters mostly work as well, to the extent that it has been studied, and based on their own reporting. They just recognize positions or certain aspects of a position, and can recall how the game works from that position.

You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up.

Yes at some point you build up experience so you never really think of it but for it to become intuitive it needs to be learned by rot repetition

But I learned Ohms law without learning any formula, or memorizing any picture. I just internalized that electricity are electrons that gets pushed by a force against a resistance, so it is obvious that the amount that gets pushed through is force divided by resistance. I couldn't write down the formula for that, because I don't remember which symbol represents what, but I understand the concept as good as any expert and I never need to look that up because my intuition instantly solves any related problem.

Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized.

If you mean by rote learning and just remembering information in an arbitrary manner, then that's memorization. I doubt that such a person have even acquired the knowledge, except maybe for the simplest case such as multiplication tables.

I know how multiplication works actually, but I never used them. Instead I go for the memorized answer.

But all knowledge a person have is based on memory. How you acquire it is up to you, preferably in the most efficient way possible so that we actually retain the information and don't have to "study" as often.

No it isn't, tacit knowledge isn't based on remembering something it is based on having made a model that parses something. That is what you want to build, memory itself is mostly redundant compared to those models, as those models lets you easily rediscover information but memory doesn't let you parse problems.

Memorizing something implies there is a piece of information you can later recall. If there is nothing to recall such as with tacit skills then you don't learn it by memorizing, you learn it by practice and thinking and theorizing until it "clicks".

A computer can remember everything trivially, but it hasn't built any models based on the information so all that information is useful. The same happens in our head, the value isn't in the memory it is in the structures you built as an answer to that memory. The memory itself is a red herring, don't chase it, chase the understanding.

So for example, I have made a model in my head that parses electronic circuit problems for me, with that I don't need any formulas as it does the work. There is no memory tied to that model, it just solves things, there is nothing to recall, nothing to write down etc, it isn't a piece of information it is an active skill I have built. Saying otherwise is like saying that you memorize how to move your arm, no that is you building up intuition and reflexes, that isn't what we call memorizing.

You can call that a pattern matcher, you can't recall one of your heads pattern matchers. Pattern matchers can be tied to recall, but pattern matchers can also solve problems for you by themselves without ever invoking any memory. Pattern matchers are much more powerful than memories since they can solve a whole slew of similar problems while memories just solves one thing, so there is no need to go memory -> pattern matcher, you can go instantly to pattern matcher without ever commiting anything to memory.

Otherwise we're arguing semantics.

So you call practicing a serve etc memorizing" excercises? That makes you very strange.

> Otherwise we're arguing semantics.

You have the strange definition here, most people don't all sorts of brain updates "memorizing". Memorizing is when you commit something to memory for later retrieval, people do not include all brain updates under this word.

Anyway, then we can agree that committing facts to memory to retrieve them later is not the main way to become more creative. Instead it is better to do other form of brain updates that doesn't involve storing exact information in the brain.

I doubt you could ace the MIT first electronic circuits final without taking the course.

> internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization

Internalizing it is memorizing it.

Yes, you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests. Don't underestimate how far mindless pattern matching can take you, you can get pretty high up in international competitions just by dumb pattern matching and very little broader understanding, tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level compared to that.

But of course such an engineer can be useful to solve constrained problems, but I wouldn't call them good since they don't really connect to the larger picture so they need a lot of oversight.

Of course. But the issue is can you be a good engineer if you flunk the tests?

> tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level

That's a nope.

You don't want a pilot who is creative when it comes to max takeoff weight.

Obviously there are good reasons to memorize certain things, creativity just isn't one of them.

In certain combat situations, or when smuggling coke across South and Central America, you certainly do.

Until you get to those, you'd be surprised how far some creativity with weight distribution, getting rid of unneeded cargo or even plane parts, using stuff to your advantage, and a little daring to push the plane to its limits, goes...

Way beyond what the "by the book" pilot who isn't creative can achieve in times of need.

But you don't want CIVILIAN pilots to get too creative, though. Running out of runway with a 747 is no joke.

BTW, bombers in WW2 were routinely overloaded on takeoff, at high risk to the crews. If one of the 4 engines wasn't delivering the max power, the result was crashing inside a planeload of fuel and bombs.

You most certainly can be creative without remembering the facts.

I've seen enough episodes of "Aviation Disasters", each of which dissects a crash or an averted crash, to not buy that.

There was once a 727 that suffered an autopilot failure, which rolled it over into a steep dive. The speed exceeded them max speed, and due to separation the controls could not "bite" into the air. The creative pilot thought he might increase the drag by lowering the landing gear in flight, which is a giant no-no. But he had nothing left to lose, and lowered it. The landing gear doors were ripped off and the gear was bent back, but it slowed the airplane enough that he regained control and saved everyone's life.

I know of another case with an F-80. That was the first US jet fighter, and it had straight wings and a powerful engine. They found out that if you overspeeded the airplane, which was too easy with its engine, it would violently pitch up and tear the wings off.

One day, in the Korean War, an F-80 pilot had a Mig on his tail that he couldn't shake. So he thought, I bet the Mig couldn't follow me in a pitchup, and so he rammed the throttles forward. The F-80 did pitch up, and the wings stayed on, and he shook the Mig.

When he landed, the wings were visibly bent up, and the airplane was scrapped.

I know about this because my dad flew F-80s in combat in the Korean War.

Most of the time memorization is a key role for creativity, the easier you can jump between ideas the more combinations you can explore (seems like the brain is constrained by some cache bottleneck in a way).

This is just confirmation bias. Either you're in a field where you must have a degree, so everyone who couldn't pass tests simply never became an engineer (eg EE) and whether or not the test is a good measure is irrelevant because it nonetheless gates your sample

OR you're in software engineering and the people who struggled on tests work beside you, but they don't tell you about their past performance on tests because you have a chip on your shoulder and they don't want you to look down on them.

I failed a lot of tests in college and now I'm a great software engineer.

Many engineers manage to avoid using any of the tools (such as math) they learned in school and just wing it. You can often get things to work that way, but they'll be inefficient and more expensive.

I remember an EE who was trying to reduce the noise in a circuit. He tried adding random parts for days, with no success. Finally a real engineer looked at it, did a calculation, stuck the right capacitor in and solved it.

This is not mere memorization. The GP's point that not everything that makes you remember this is simply "memorization", and certainly all of those things contribute differently to creativity.

> I also have some written tests for certifying pilots.

Yes, piloting is one of the tasks where you absolutely need lots of random information memorized. You should also not do a lot of "creativity" in it.

It's a linear relationship. An exponential relationship could also go up and down, but is very different from linear.

> If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are you going to remember the concept?

You touch upon the different levels of knowing it. Yes, having to carry a card with the formulas on it shows no knowledge. But, if you have to memorize the formulas, your knowledge is still not adequate. You're just regurgitating a formula that you memorized so you can plug in numbers. You don't understand the "why" of Ohm's law. Of course voltage is equal to current times resistance, it's obvious by what these things are! It should be as self-evident as "Of course distance is equal to speed times time!"

Another example: You can have the Lorentz transformation formulas memorized but still not really understand the "why" of Special Relativity.

I never said it was. I said that being competent required that knowledge, not that that knowledge was sufficient.

...I mean, I didn't even go to that great of a college and no one would have made it past the second year of EE without memorizing 10x more formulas than that.

I'm just completely lost on how it's even possible to have an EE degree and needing a card. Signal processing classes required math 100x more difficult than that. I had to know quaternions by my second dsp class.

Amazing, isn't it? The word "cheating" comes to mind.

The mnemonic to remember V = I * R is as a triangle with V at the top and I, R on the second row, the same way you remember the relation Distance = Speed * Time or Mass = Density * Volume in high school. Or any other triangular multiplicative relation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/mv19kv/my_teach...

Also, [Mechanical] Work = Force * distance [through which the force acts], [Electrical] Power = Voltage * Current, etc. etc.

“To me” is not what defines what something is.

They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?

>The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization

It still is a kind of memorization, just not a voluntary one. And such learning is still is a very important function of mental development and evolutionary fitness, that shouldn't just be shunned "because trauma".

>Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself

Well, I see your cargo cult and I raise you tried-and-true.

"Absorbing the concept itself" might take more effort (including personal, for logistical reasons, not everything can be tailored to the individual learner, who might not even care enough for learning compared to all kinds of diversions, and have zero passion for the subjects, even if a clone with the teaching skills of Feynman with the presentation skills of Tonny Robbins, and the passionate conviction of Jean D' Arc was to present it to them.

But absorbing the concept is not enough, there needs to be instant recall, or at least fast enough recall) of all kinds of facts and factoids and tables, and also this "absorbing" also needs to encompass boring concepts, that are nonetheless crucial, if one is to be succesful in anything technical or scientific, or generally creative in any sort of organized way that combines concepts and information (not just Jackson Pollocking away).

To memorize means to commit to memory. It is an action. But memories are created by not just actions, but experiences. Experiences can create memories without you having committed them; without you having memorized anything.

There is no action of "commiting to memory". It's not an action we do, it's a process that results in that.

The actual action we do (when we consciously try to remember something) is e.g. to read, repeat, and so on.

Mental notes are a pretty commonly known concept; not that I'm claiming everyone can make them easily, or at all, but they don't typically require focused studying. I'd consider them an example of committing something to memory intentionally. Sure, studying is another way of committing things to memory. You can read something repeatedly and completely ignore it just as much as you can read something repeatedly with the intention of remembering it. You can also make mental remarks without them becoming mental notes. But it is certainly possible to create a memory on purpose. It's just that studying an entire subject requires you to train your understanding quite a bit in order to build a good memory of it, as opposed to memorizing a single simple idea or lesson that you already intuitively understand.

A good example of committing something to memory on demand is making a mental note. I don't know if everyone has this ability, but it's a pretty commonly known concept. You don't have to study the subject of the note in order to remember it; it's often something simple like "do this tomorrow" that you already understand, so it's easy to memorize.

I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can use your example of a child learning their first language. They will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to conjugate, and how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest. But it’s all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of it. If that’s the case, we can’t explain it in words.

Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.

You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.

I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My students would ask things like “what’s the best way to structure this program?” And I would say “I don’t know. Let’s brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try writing it like that. Figure it out in code.” I think you become great at programming by licking all the programs you can find. Same with music and art and languages (go have conversations with native speakers).

There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.

I doubt I will ever gain this feeling (for lack of a better word) with another language. I mean how could I? Everything sounds weird and "off" when you're a beginner, right? For example: el bano, el agua, la naranja, la sillas. You're constantly suppressing warning signs flashing in your head.

For example, I remember being forced to memorize the multiplication tables. I doubt we do that in schools anymore. I feel like all that time could have been better spent learning something else.

You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.

This is such a weird and amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing it! I don't know if I've ever heard this concept explained in quite this way before.

Actually, I don't agree with that. If I look around the room I'm in now, there are a LOT of different objects, and I can imagine what they'd feel like on my tongue, even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects. To give a couple of examples: a partly used candle, the "lighting" side of a matchbox, guitar strings, lightbulbs, new bike inner tube. The reason I can imagine how they would feel, despite never having actually licked them, is that in our early years we're just exploring the world and building a mental model. We stop licking everything quite early when we figure out the class of things that's generally food, but by that point we've learned how to correlate the sense of feelings we get from our tongue with the sense of feelings we get from our fingers, because we also touch all those items a lot with our fingers. With enough examples, we become pretty good at pattern matching across senses, so e.g. I can look at an object, from the shadows see that it's bumpy, and have a pretty good idea what it'd feel like if I rubbed it with my fingertips or even licked it, or if it's glass, plastic, metal, fabric, I'd know it'd produce different feelings ranging from differences in friction, thermal conductivity, etc.

That's quite a lot of text, but the TLDR is that we don't need to lick everything to have a pretty good idea of how it'd feel on the tongue, just enough to have a general idea of the properties of different classes of materials. Given that most babies stop licking/chewing everything before they've reached nursery age, it's clear that for objects we encounter in later life it's not the licking per-se that matters for this "skill", but whether we've learned to associate the senses.

I guess taste is a bit different, but my default would just be to assume that most objects are tasteless unless they also have an odour.

Are you sure you never licked those materials as a child?

I'm not sure when my earliest memories date from any more — some of what I thought were memories turned out to be dreams of things that never happened, others have mutated with each re-recollection — but one thing I can be sure of is that I don't remember any of the "stick random things in mouth" stage of my life.

When I look around my room, I find there are indeed things I cannot imagine what it would be like to lick them, but they're all made of materials I didn't have access to as a kid: soft touch rubber.

But yeah, materials like the rubber in my inner tube... I'm pretty sure my parents wouldn't have allowed such stuff near me as a baby, likewise I wouldn't have been allowed near boxes of matches etc. I also can't imagine I'd ever have decided as an older child that I should try licking a bike tube or the striking surface of a matchbox. And so, I'm about as confident as I can be that I'd never have licked an inner tube in my life, but I can make a good guess from feeling it with my fingers what it'd likely feel like on my tongue.

There's very little where I'd go as far as to say "I cannot imagine what it'd be like", except maybe for things that would involve a chemical reaction, and where I might have some idea from extrapolation with foods - e.g. fizzing, an exothermic reaction, etc., but wouldn't necessarily be able to guess from looking or feeling with my fingers what the result might be. Most of the interesting ones are turned into food anyway, e.g. sherbert dip or sour sweets.

I definitely have had some surprises in later life - I remember first having ox-tongue when I was in my 20s and finding the texture quite uncomfortable, and since high single-digit ages, I've never been able to correlate the texture of liver with something that's edible.

I guess another example is with unfamiliar "exotic" fruits - there are some that would surprise everyone with their taste, but you can guess most of the texture characteristics of a fruit just by looking at it and cutting it into pieces, and you might be able to have a guess at taste from its smell.

And I actually disagree with you. My son went through a period where he put nearly everything in his mouth, bugs, bottle caps, spices, food, phones, credit cards, toys, rocks. Pretty sure we all did that at some point.

I’m learning piano at the moment, and it is taking me a lot of playing to build up those generalisations you’re talking about. I’ve only been at it for 2 years at this point and I still feel like a beginner.

How much programming do you need to do to build an intuitive sense of all the programs? I’ve been programming for 30 years and I’d say I started to have a usable intuition around 10 years in.

I’m not sure what “a lot” means to you, but a decade of practice seems like a lot to me. It’s a lot more effort than most people are willing to invest in their hobbies and, in many cases, their careers.

My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts. How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore.

So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on.

Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?

There's being taught and then there's exploring and practice. It's the exploring and practice that is often missing today, IMO because we all want everything to happen so quickly.

In my sport of choice, jiujitsu, there's been a shift happening in teaching. Traditionally the teacher would show a move or two then have the class drill the move. The shift now is more conceptual where the teacher might say the goal is get chest to chest and then have the students operate at 20% figuring it out on their own. While there are some pretty vocal camps on both sides, I think having both methods is the best to learn from. Being taught a solution to a problem a student discovered on their own during discovery is when learning really takes hold IMO.

Finally, the best way to really learn that I have found is to teach something.

Over time, the regular drilling makes recognition of context a great deal faster, and the conceptual pieces make improv at that point start to look creative or magical, but it's not - it's just all that drilling, and familiarity, and interconnected understanding in gestalt that enables "creativity".

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22show+me+wax+on+wax+off%22&iax=v...

No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship. It's just not compatible with the educational institutions people actually pay for.

> I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.

This is not contradictory. If your idea of teaching is just lecturing at people and occasionally verifying specific knowledge, obviously they're not going to learn very much. Your job as a teacher is to facilitate a growth curve of increasingly more difficult and unwieldy problems to solve.

Apprenticeship is hard, there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice, if it was easy people wouldn't be so picky who they want to teach.

Well, they're now only offered through unions, too. I suspect there's a great demand for such opportunities.

Never listen to the grownups, everything they say is a lie.

They actually are, thou. Small kids are repeated the same things over and over, hundreds of times. They watch the same Bluey episodes dozens of times, get them read the same books dozens of times, listen to the same songs dozens of times.

They drill in their own ways, but they drill.

I reject you rejection. You need to provide a reason something learned via pain is fundamentally different from something learned without pain. We used to beat school children for not learning their lesson.