Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice

Re:Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice by bithive123 on Sunday December 02, 2012 @05:03PM (#4862712)

I don't understand your tone. I never said memorization is "bad" or that I "love" critical thinking skills.

I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.

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Re:Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice by kiba on Sunday December 02, 2012 @06:08PM (#4862975)

I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids".

Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.

The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.

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Re:Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice by scott_s on Sunday December 02, 2012 @11:06PM (#4863895)

Rarely, however, does one need to spend extra time memorizing things. Memorization happens naturally as you solve problems, and see and use the same things over and over.

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Re:Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice by kiba on Monday December 03, 2012 @12:17PM (#4866493)

So what? It's still more efficient to just memorize your multiplication tables.

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