They are not the same which is why they are two different words. For example, memorising first 1000 prime numbers is not same as knowing prime numbers. The former person will not be able to figure out 1001st prime number because it's not in their memory bank but the later can calculate it. Sure it takes time to calculate but it's not impossible.
Now, I'm not belittling memorisation. A baseline memory is needed otherwise one'll be wasting time and energy figuring out everything from first principles all the time. This is akin to rainbow tables saving time. But as with all things in life finding right balance is key. As you pointed out, it's useful to memorise things at work to save time and energy.
You can memorize things like "Definition of prime number" or "Main application of prime numbers". I think memorizing concepts is much more important than memorizing raw data
Knowing is not the same as understanding though. For example, I do not see any value of winning the spelling bee in real life applications. This is actually widely accepted as the downrisk in Asian education systems - the emphasis on rote learning vs practical application.
I live in Taiwan and this is a constant presumption by other immigrants here - oh, the taiwanese aren't good at critical thinking, their schools just have them memorize everything, there's no imagination, they have no ability to self start or self direct.
There's some grains of truth to aspects of the culture resisting individualism (which isn't inherently negative I don't think, as distasteful as that may sound to Americans), but not only is this a mischaracterization, it's also missing the upsides of having a population that all has stashed in their heads a whole shitload of math and science that enables them in all sorts of interesting ways.
For example, on a construction team, any single member is capable of more geometric reasoning than the same team in the usa (in my limited experience working with construction in both countries), making for faster, more accurate, and cheaper builds. Or, when bringing a software engineer up to speed with a new framework or whatever, I find they retain mundane details remarkably quickly, probably by having a well honed memorization method. That's really nice for when you're trying to think of how to implement something and basically the entire library documentation is just at hand in the noggin.
> For example, I do not see any value of winning the spelling bee in real life applications.
You might if you were an editor. I guess your job probably doesn't have much to do with that so you see it as pointless but there is a different sphere of knowledge where having various things committed to memory would save you time. For instance, if we're interested in learning a new programming language, I guess most of us can understand a sentence like "a string is an immutable sequence of characters," quickly read it, and move on. If you weren't familiar with the concepts in that sentence you'd burn a lot more time before making heads or tails of it.
> “I guess most of us can understand a sentence like "a string is an immutable sequence of characters," quickly read it, and move on.”
Can we? In the context of learning a new unfamiliar programming language… is it saying there is a string type or is it telling you that there isn’t a string type but only a sequence of characters? Like APL a string is an array of characters not its own type but in C# [string] is a thing and if you iterate it you get [char] type. In Prolog a string is traditionally a linked list of ASCII code numbers, there isn’t a string type or a char type … but there is still a string to chars conversion function. So is the sentence telling you that there is a char type? In Python a string is iterable but you get strings of length one for the characters rather than chars. But wait what about Unicode and surrogate pairs and glyphs, where does “sequence of characters” fit on those things in this language?
What does ‘sequence’ mean in this unfamiliar language - is it saying strings are an array or a list, or that sequence is a trait or behaviour which generalises over many types? What is immutable specifically, sequences or strings or characters or all data? What are the consequences of that? In APL you can assign into an array even though they are immutable (it will be copied behind the scenes) so it seems like it is an implementation detail you can ignore but wait that means dropping one character from the front copies the rest of the string in memory (slow) whereas in other languages trying to change a string at all is an error - compile time or runtime? You might think Prolog can do it if strings are linked lists but surprise, Prolog lists are immutable.
So if you read that sentence and move on, what have you really learned about the new language? In the context of this thread how would you Anki-fy the concepts immutable or sequence or string?
Do you think all those questions are someone who looks at the sentence and has no idea what it means would even think to ask? I don't know how you'd convert the knowledge to flash cards most effectively; my point is you have a ton of knowledge committed to memory about programming concepts and that allows you to more easily assimilate new knowledge, because you aren't having to spend time wrestling with the basics to make heads or tails of the topic you actually meant to learn about. It's a kind of yak shaving for the mind that you get stuck doing otherwise.
The context was about whether rote learning was helpful, and I read your comment as suggesting that it was - not just that background knowledge helps but that rote learning without understanding can help someone gain understanding later. By asking about Anki flashcards I was wondering what someone might rote memorise without understanding which would then help with learning about that programming sentence (I can't quickly think of anything but maybe you had something in mind).
And I'm also saying that rote learning and background knowledge can hinder progress and require time unlearning, like the beginner needs to spend time learning. e.g. a mathematical sequence like "even numbers" can be infinitely long and the sentence probably doesn't mean that strings can have infinite characters in them. I guess, if you don't know the meaning of the words the sentence doesn't help you, if you know the words from a different context but don't know the programming language then the words don't help you, and if you already know the language then the words add nothing for you. Learning is impossible, Q.E.D ;-)
I don't agree that there is a meaningful distinction between these types of learning. To understand a topic you must simply commit a lot of details about it to memory. If you wanted to make flash cards perhaps you could do terms and definitions.
You are completely correct. It is very rarely worth memorising information you do not understand, doubly so if it's information divorced from the rest of your knowledge (e.g. memorising the first ten digits of pi is useful perhaps in extreme niche cases, but is vastly more useless if you've done it without even knowing what pi actually is). The creator of Supermemo notes this: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Do_not_memorize_before_you_under...
On the other hand, memorising things you do understand is a time saving measure at the point of memory access as well as something that allows you to play with concepts/ideas/facts in your head while doing anything else, which I've found to be quite useful. You do have to be selective about it, and software like Anki shouldn't be used to build memories for everything (for one, it can be so boring that you'll be turned off of SRS entirely if you overuse it).
Memorisation is adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge
Understanding is efficiently arranging and coordinating those nodes in an efficient path for most situations
Wisdom is knowing in which contexts to actually apply that path of nodes
Tacit knowledge is similar to wisdom just it generally lacks memorisation
There's not a perfect mapping in English between Memorisation, Understanding and Wisdom and their most pragmatic corresponding analogues in nature, but I have found this distinction between terms useful in the whole memorisation v understanding debate
> Memorisation is adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge
Adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge is learning facts. Memorization is making the nodes persistent. Both are important, but they're not equivalent. You need to do both.
You can learn without memorization (you can learn a lot and forget everything you've learned by the next day). You can memorize without learning the subject matter (for example, you can memorize a counting song in Mandarin Chinese without knowing that what you've memorized are numbers).
Flashcards can be used for learning, but they are optimized for memorization. We shouldn't expect them to be the best tool for learning, because that's not what they're designed for. One might get better results learning from another resource, and then using flashcards to memorize the concepts they've learned.
Learning facts, understanding how they correlate and memorizing both the facts and the correlations are all different steps. Memorization is useful and necessary, but it's not equivalent to learning and to understanding. Each step helps with the other steps. They can happen at the same time, but not necessarily.
I don’t believe them to be the same. I have friends who repeat words to me GPT style, that I know them to be imprecise in the spirit of the discussion.
Nonsense. Memory is a necessary component to acquire knowledge and mastery. But knowledge is not memory.
I am fluent in three languages. Learning words is the easy part, fluency unlocks when you are able to think, or feel, in that language. When you have thoughts that you cannot losslessly translate back to your native language.
Knowing Spanish words is not knowing Spanish. Memorization is the first and easiest 5% of the whole process.
Yes, memory is a necessary but not sufficient component of learning. "Piano playing" seems like a really poor example to argue against the value of memorization.
The post I was responding to said "Memorization is the same as knowing". I specifically chose a counterexample to suggest that knowledge is deeper than memorizing some facts about the world.
In fact, I would argue that most of the forms of knowledge that are truly valuable are exactly the kinds that aren't amenable to memorization. Think about any skill that's in high demand and takes decades to master. You're not going to get there by studying Anki cards.
Do you think it's possible that knowing more information that is amenable to memorization will help you cultivate knowledge that isn't amenable to memorization better or faster?
At some point in our education we have to memorize the rules for manipulating algebraic formulas, trigonometric identities, etc. It would be hard to learn calculus without being able to do these things unconsciously.
On the other hand, what a professional mathematician does is create new tools for proving theorems. This can't be memorized because, by definition, the knowledge didn't exist. It's true that they draw on previous experience having solved similar problems. But it's not clear to me that this knowledge is most efficiently gotten by drilling the same problems over and over.
I think this idea of using Anki for learning everything is misguided because it attempts to reduce complex topics and pragmatic know-how to a set of trivia questions. An example from the article: the author wanted to understand the AlphaGo paper, and some example flashcards were "who plays first in Go" and "where did AlphaGo get its training data". They probably could have acquired a much deeper understanding by playing a few games of Go and implementing a reinforcement learning algorithm for tic-tac-toe. Incidentally, that also sounds a lot more fun and motivating to me than studying flashcards.
Learning to play a song or to play from sheet music is, itself, a task that is well suited for rote learning. There's really no way out of repetitive practice if your goal is to learn to play a musical instrument.
I don't personally use this method, but it seems to me like this would help with all the cases where you search for something on stackoverflow, use the solution, and 3+ months later you encounter the exact same issue. You remember that you already had this issue, and you remember that you searched on SO and found a solution, but you don't remember what it was.
If you wrote a flash-card and learned it, you'd have that knowledge available immediately.
Or, let's say you're learning a new language/framework that you want to use professionally, but don't use frequently yet. So you start a project in that language/framework, learn some of the things that make it different, and every time something surprised you or you had to search for a solution, you write a flashcard. Then you can learn these aspects separately from having to work on a project, and once you do have a use for it, you have the knowledge available.
I think this could be less likely if you're very specialized, but if you're a consultant or freelancer and have to work with lots of different technologies, locking down the differences and unique aspects for each could save a lot of time.
There are (arguably) better ways to handle this, though. When you get enough cards, you won't conceivably review them all within a reasonable enough timespan to encounter concepts often enough to really remember.
The use case you mention is more suited to a personal knowledgebase with good search capabilities and/or networking, like Obsidian, Tana, Roam, org-mode, whatever. That way you have the knowledge somewhere, you can search it (of course, this can be lossy - like writing good cards this requires writing good notes), and you can build up all the context you need.
I think the article misses the mark on the dichotomy here - it's not search vs. flash cards, it's owning your knowledge vs. relying on external, potentially ephemeral sources. Flash cards and spaced repetition are great for certain use cases (Anki is incredibly popular among language learners for a reason), but not for all of them.
In problem solving there can be a balance between creativity and knowledge. Creativity can help you link different domains to create novel solutions, and knowledge can help with avoiding blind spots. Knowledge can also be a blunt force for problem solving, it is most likely the case that someone has already encountered your problem, and knowing even a bit about that solution is very helpful.
