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.
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.