<story><title>The Expert Mind [pdf] (2006)</title><url>https://personal.utdallas.edu/~otoole/CGS2301_S09/15_expert.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyberax</author><text>One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an expert.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s not fun, it&amp;#x27;s boring, and it takes up a lot of your time. You can&amp;#x27;t really train your memory with a nice Youtube video, and it&amp;#x27;s incompatible with the &amp;quot;learn while playing&amp;quot; concept.&lt;p&gt;So schools in the US tend to sideline it by handwaving that &amp;quot;they teach how to think&amp;quot; instead. And I think we&amp;#x27;re now seeing the result, with the ever-declining test results. The NAEP scores in the US peaked in 2014 and have been declining ever since: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nationsreportcard.gov&amp;#x2F;ushistory&amp;#x2F;results&amp;#x2F;scores&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nationsreportcard.gov&amp;#x2F;ushistory&amp;#x2F;results&amp;#x2F;scores&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also interesting that there&amp;#x27;s no similar decline in China, where rote memorization is unavoidable because of the writing system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dhc02</author><text>As a second-career middle and high school math teacher, I have a working theory.&lt;p&gt;In previous eras in the US, we taught primarily procedure and facts, and assigned lots of practice work. The average kid did _all_ the practice work, for societal reasons that have eroded but are still present in other cultures.&lt;p&gt;In the course of grappling with all the practice work, the human brain couldn&amp;#x27;t help but recognize patterns and start to make broader conceptual connections, which led to deep understanding.&lt;p&gt;Today in the US, teaching facts and procedure first doesn&amp;#x27;t work, because very few kids get enough practice to start to draw deeper connections. So we are teaching conceptual understanding first, and then layering procedure on top.&lt;p&gt;But I don&amp;#x27;t think this is worse. There is some research showing that it works better than the alternatives, and in my experience the top 10% of students (the ones who would have learned well the old way) are still doing quite well and honestly just getting to the &amp;quot;math is fun and interesting&amp;quot; part of the journey a lot earlier in their school careers.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Expert Mind [pdf] (2006)</title><url>https://personal.utdallas.edu/~otoole/CGS2301_S09/15_expert.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyberax</author><text>One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an expert.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s not fun, it&amp;#x27;s boring, and it takes up a lot of your time. You can&amp;#x27;t really train your memory with a nice Youtube video, and it&amp;#x27;s incompatible with the &amp;quot;learn while playing&amp;quot; concept.&lt;p&gt;So schools in the US tend to sideline it by handwaving that &amp;quot;they teach how to think&amp;quot; instead. And I think we&amp;#x27;re now seeing the result, with the ever-declining test results. The NAEP scores in the US peaked in 2014 and have been declining ever since: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nationsreportcard.gov&amp;#x2F;ushistory&amp;#x2F;results&amp;#x2F;scores&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nationsreportcard.gov&amp;#x2F;ushistory&amp;#x2F;results&amp;#x2F;scores&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also interesting that there&amp;#x27;s no similar decline in China, where rote memorization is unavoidable because of the writing system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>godelski</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;gt; One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an expert.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Has this ever been in question?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think any serious expert in ML that is pushing against LLMs is making a claim that memorization and&amp;#x2F;or compression isn&amp;#x27;t a necessary part of intelligence. Rather that there&amp;#x27;s more to it.&lt;p&gt;Too much memorization is a bad thing, it&amp;#x27;s called over fitting. Bringing up schools is a good example. I&amp;#x27;m sure many here have met people who can answer questions really well when in specific contexts but not in others. People who do well on tests but not in the lab. The difficulty of word problems is a meme, but are just generalization.&lt;p&gt;If you ask me, what makes humans and animal brains special is the fuzziness. It&amp;#x27;s this seemingly contradictory nature of well defined understanding through rules (such as physics) but also understanding that resolution is far from perfect. In our quest to become more precise it is recognizing the impossibility of precision and finding balance.&lt;p&gt;What I&amp;#x27;d say is wrong with both the US and China is failing to teach how to think. The truth is that this is exceptionally difficult to test, if not impossible. It&amp;#x27;s difficult to distinguish from memorization when the questions are not clearly novel. But how do you continually generate sufficiently novel questions when not teaching at bleeding edge?</text></comment>