One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an expert.
But it's not fun, it's boring, and it takes up a lot of your time. You can't really train your memory with a nice Youtube video, and it's incompatible with the "learn while playing" concept.
So schools in the US tend to sideline it by handwaving that "they teach how to think" instead. And I think we'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: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
It's also interesting that there's no similar decline in China, where rote memorization is unavoidable because of the writing system.
As a second-career middle and high school math teacher, I have a working theory.
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.
In the course of grappling with all the practice work, the human brain couldn't help but recognize patterns and start to make broader conceptual connections, which led to deep understanding.
Today in the US, teaching facts and procedure first doesn'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.
But I don'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 "math is fun and interesting" part of the journey a lot earlier in their school careers.
I have been doing some work on some lawsuit stuff recently, and I have been told repeatedly that the average juror is absolutely less intellectually capable than they used to be. In the 90's, the writing level to use for expert reports was a 6th-7th grade level. Now, if you are a court expert, you should be writing and speaking at a ~3rd grade level, and I have been recently told that even this level seems to be beyond the average juror.
This is also information from a group of people who are highly incentivized not to lie to you. Unlike school officials who are incentivized to say that students are doing better than they are and clout-seeking education researchers, the question here is how to speak persuasively, and there is no judgment (well, they are lawyers, there is equal contempt for everyone). They also do enough science (mock juries, polling, etc.) to get a decently accurate picture beyond the level of "anecdata."
While the top students are doing fine, they honestly always will do fine. The bottom 90% of students is doing worse in terms of actual education that makes it to their adult life in the current educational model than they were doing before. Whether that is due to a culture shift or a change to new supposedly-evidence-based education methods is not clear to me, but it is very clear that outcomes from schools are getting notably worse.
The way I estimate the situation (and I admit this is not a rigorous scientific conjecture), is the following (for public schools in the US in the average):
Early years: bad pedagogy, bad retention rates (ie, quitting after 5th grade to go work on the farm, bad average results, basically only the top 10% learned deeply and went on to intellectual pursuits
1900s - 1980s: Decent and improving pedagogy (the aforementioned procedure-first style for math), good and increasing retention rates, good parental and societal pressures to perform, great average results, top 50% or more went on to intellectual pursuits.
1980s - 2010s: Same math pedagogy, but with rapidly deteriorating parental pressure to perform, leading to worse results. A truly terrible detour for reading instruction (from phonics to context-based reading) that decimated the average reading level of those currently under 40. Currently being fixed but not yet replaced in all schools. See: "the science of reading".
2020 - 2024: an earnest effort, gaining traction and fast-tracked after the educational disaster that was COVID, to find curricula that actually work with current students.
The concept-first, teach-them-how to think approach for math really is pretty new, and only just now being rolled out in a lot of states.
In reality, a vanishingly-small subset of American students has ever been given an entire education using evidence-based instruction and curricula. Looking at what actually works and trying to synthesize it and scale it up state- or nationwide is truly a brand new experiment, and one the decentralized US education system is sort of designed to prevent. So we'll see.
I understand that you are optimistic about evidence-based instruction and curricula in math, but the disastrous reading curriculum you have discussed was rolled out with much the same "scientific" study and fanfare as "evidence-based" teaching is today. As an example, take a look at all the science that surrounded "whole language" teaching of English. The skepticism you see of "common core math" and a whole new set of math teaching techniques is somewhat rooted in the experience of the same sort of thing happening through the last 20-50 years with mixed results.
As a society, I honestly think we are a little too hooked on scientism. Not science itself (which we don't do nearly enough of), but treating the output of scientific research like a religion. In the few pieces of educational science that are actually proper blind studies, the p-values are abysmal. It's worse than psychology. And yet, every ~10 years, "the science" gives us a new way of doing things that turns out not to be any better than the old way (and plus it's new so nobody knows how to do it). As it turns out, "the science" in education usually means "a small cohort of very good, very enthusiastic teachers tried this, and their outcomes were better than their peers." I assume you can see the problem with that. There is no "phase 2" trial of this stuff or anything controlled, just a rollout of a new method.
I think you're wrong to be honest. Experts have a lot "memorised" but never do memorisation. Chess grandmasters can recall huge sequences of moves from classic games. It's not because they sat down and tried to memorise "1. e4 e5; 2. Nf3..." It's because they understand those games, why the moves were made, why seemingly obvious alternatives weren't made etc etc
I have a PhD in mathematics and some (minimal) claim to expertise. I have also met and worked with several serious experts. What I said about chess holds true here, at least in my opinion.
Every strong chess player I know actually has sat down and memorized the lines in their repertoire. It's also true that they understand the "why" behind the moves but I don't think the memorization is avoidable at a high level. It's not always possible to find tactical compensation over the board, especially when you're running lines that have been tested by an engine, which many people are!
Or for instance see the "woodpecker method", which is basically a technique for rote memorization of tactical patterns used by a lot of strong players.
(I quit my PhD in mathematics so I have less claim to expertise, but I regularly get smoked by >2000 fide chess players in my local club and talk to them about chess a lot)
This is kind of conjecture based on various things I've read over the years, but I feel like there is a strong tie-in between memorization and visualization abilities. I think many great chess players actually have trained their visualization abilities and are great at this. This in turn allows for easier memorization of games, sequences, etc, because it feels like they're only half-memorizing it at this point. It's easier. Some great Chess players utilize the memory palace technique as well, which feels like it ties into their visualization skill abilities.
I think there is often a confusion between memorising and understanding because they often go together.
I'm an amateur chess player and I learned a few lines from a few openings. I never sat down repeating blindly the move to make them stick in my head, I watched lessons that explain every move. But I did that on many openings and understood most. Yet I can only play a few of them because I forgot all the ones I was not actively practicing.
Understanding makes remembering a lot easier but it isn't enough.
> I watched lessons that explain every move. But I did that on many openings and understood most.
People who say this usually didn't understood the lesson at all. When you ask people about the things directly afterwards they can't answer a thing, its just that people overestimate how much they did understand when they first heard it since they don't didn't test themselves on it.
Everyone I know who is 1700 or above has spent a significant amount of time memorizing openings from books, and it would be interesting to see a counterpoint.
> One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an expert.
Has this ever been in question?
I don't think any serious expert in ML that is pushing against LLMs is making a claim that memorization and/or compression isn't a necessary part of intelligence. Rather that there's more to it.
Too much memorization is a bad thing, it's called over fitting. Bringing up schools is a good example. I'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.
If you ask me, what makes humans and animal brains special is the fuzziness. It'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.
What I'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'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?
> Too much memorization is a bad thing, it's called over fitting.
It's not. It's just a skill that might become unused, like playing piano. Children who grow up in religious cults that emphasize memorizing the holy texts (Hasidic Jews, some Muslim sects) do surprisingly well on standardized tests. Even though they receive a fraction of instruction time.
> What I'd say is wrong with both the US and China is failing to teach how to think.
And I maintain that you can't learn how to think without grinding through facts, learning how to organize them in your mind.
This article does not appear to be supporting a point counter to what I said. It is also focused on the opinions on non-experts. In fact, the majority of the article is discussing how schools aren't "following the data."
I would be surprised if the dominant method was "memorize" for reading, as this would mean a curriculum that has little free reading.
I'm not too interested in what non-experts have to say unless there is quite compelling evidence. The average person quire frequently overestimates their confidence in how something should be done.
> It's not. It's just a skill that might become unused, like playing piano
I grew up playing piano and memorizing holy texts. Even participating in scripture competitions as well as music competitions. With the highest confidence I can assure you that no professional in either of these subjects believes that one should memorize without limit. In music they will use the words "without soul" while in scriptures they may say that you know the words but not the meanings.
I'll directly quote from the bible to demonstrate both at once:
> Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.
Mathew 13:13[0]
I suggest reading the chapter in full, as it makes the point more explicitly.
I think both groups understand something important to language (which yes, I will argue that music is _a_ language): that the "words" (sounds) used are only tools to convey what is the deeper meaning inside. In music you seek to draw that out of the listener. In scriptures it is the same. The clearest cases of these may be proverbs, parables, koans, or fables. The words hold only what is at the surface. It is ironic you specifically mention Hasidic Jews, as they are deeply entrenched in the Kabbalah, which is famous for being entrenched mysticism. That there are hidden meanings in the scriptures. This isn't even uncommon in religion in general! I don't think it is hard to see this in music or any art. If you are in any doubt, please go visit your local art gallery and listen to one of the local artists. Even if you believe they are full of hogwash, it still illustrates that they are trying to convey something deeper. If you wish to get this lesson and learn a bit about Jewish mysticism at the same time I'd recommend A Serious Man[1] (a Coen brothers movie)
I must stress that language (of any form) has three key aspects: what is intended to be conveyed, the words and way the words are used (diction), and the way the person receiving interprets this. The goal is to align the first with the last, but there is clearly a lossy encoding and lossy decoding.
> I maintain that you can't learn how to think without grinding through facts
I'm not sure why you thought we were in disagreement. Perhaps you know the words but not the meaning. I hope your head does not feel too heavy from all the things you carry in your mind[2]
> This article does not appear to be supporting a point counter to what I said. It is also focused on the opinions on non-experts. In fact, the majority of the article is discussing how schools aren't "following the data."
In this case, "experts" who thought that "learning by playing" is better were wrong, as proven by data. Schools that use the traditional memorization-heavy approach of learning letter combinations do better.
The example is Oakland's schools, where teachers considered the traditional approach to be "colonizing". Test scores cratered as a result.
> I'm not too interested in what non-experts have to say unless there is quite compelling evidence. The average person quire frequently overestimates their confidence in how something should be done.
If you want to map the political system on more than one axis, you could look at economically liberal/conservative and socially liberal/conservative separately, but in a two-party system, not all quadrants will be equally represented. This particularly annoys libertarians.
If you want to map education politics on more than one axis, one axis could be progressive/conservative in the political sense (Are we 'woke'? Do we teach that some people are gay? Let kids pick their own pronouns? Do we have prayer in school? Base our values on the Bible? etc. etc.).
The other axis is 'progressive'/traditional in terms of methods, e.g. do facts matter and should kids learn by rote?
Again, not all quadrants are equally represented. The 'progressive' side in terms of methods genuinely holds that rote memorization is bad and useless, and even taeching kids to read with phonics is outdated - where that led, is explained in https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ which has been featured on HN before now too.
Unfortunately, most attempts to debate the methods axis online degenerate into fights about the political axis (see also: California math reform).
> What I'd say is wrong with both the US and China is failing to teach how to think.
The problem is, I'd say, that there is no such thing as "how to think". Thinking about environmental policy is very different from thinking about debugging **ing JavaScript callbacks (sorry, having a bad day). You need different degrees, for a start! There will never be a way to teach social scientists generically "how to think" so they can just pick up programming in 30 days, because all you need to do is apply your thinking skills to code! In the same way, we can't just "teach how to think" in a CS class and then expect the graduates to double up as MDs in a pinch, because that's just thinking about the human body!
You can only do "critical thinking" in an area where you have domain knowledge. That's one reason that memorization is required - you need the base of domain-specific facts so you have something to think with.
Other responses are pointing toward this position, but I want to make it explicit:
Memorizing an elegant algorithm is a lot more fun and more broadly useful than memorizing the look-up table for a limited section of the results; but sometimes caching parts of the look-up table in your memory is necessary for expertise.
For example: Many bright kids get frustrated when they have to repeat a section because of calculation errors, when they already get the concept. Even if you know a few good algorithms for multiplication, memorizing "the times tables" for double-digit numbers can be useful.
On the other hand, you don't have to memorize everything. If you can reliably re-derive some result from theorems you know well, and you never need that result in a hurry, it's fine to leave it un-memorized.
I'm not sure how you can link these test results to lack of memorization when so many other factors are likely at play from the worsening parental support many children face with school due to economic decline, to the pittance teachers are paid, to the war on education some states seem to be playing (curiously they are all heavy red states).
The Red states are actually staying fairly steady.
I don't think that the lack of memorization is the main reason, but it definitely is one of the reasons. Mobile phones and tablets in education are also not helping, and their spread is well-correlated with the start of the decline.
I'm not exactly sure what you're arguing here. It more seems like you're pointing to California in 4th grade. Which I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable using California as the prime example given how diverse it is in culture and demographics. Too much noise introduced through aggregation.
When looking at the other grades and varying by subjects it very much looks like the data is noisy. I'm sure there's meaningful analysis to be drawn from here but I'm certain there's no obvious one.
You can look at other states and at the 8th grade. It's the same pattern almost everywhere: achievements peaked in 2014 and have been declining. CA, WA, NY were hit pretty severely.
I like to look at 4th grade because most of the learning by that grade _is_ memorization.
> One thing that is becoming more and more clear, is that memorization is absolutely a required part of becoming an expert.
I'm very interested in this idea, but it doesn't immediately ring true to me, is there some research or other stories you know of that can escalate this from "interesting" to "must do"?
I agree with almost all of that, including that there's no similar decline in China. I wonder whether it's really "because of the writing system" though. As a counter-argument:
- We may have fewer individual symbols (letters) to memorise, but we still need to learn vocabulary in English.
- In European languages with grammatical gender you have to memorise that too (in German, a fork is feminine but a spoon is masculine), same for languages with declensions.
- And when you study something, you have all the technical terms in your field.
- But you don't simply memorise (if you're clever) what inode, tail recursion, ACID, syscall etc. mean, you subconsciously construct a knowledge graph.
- Chinese characters have structures and relationships too so you don't just have to memorise each one individually. For example, the character for "man" (as in "male") is a combination of person+field, I believe; whereas the word for "business" is apparently the compound buy+sell. So the "knowledge graph" argument still applies in China.
- Children in school in China don't need to know all the charaters, they start off with a useful subset and learn (or look up in dictionaries) more as they go along.
I actually learned both English and Mandarin Chinese :)
Vocabulary in English is a problem, but it's much easier to learn than thousands of Han characters. Grammatical gender is not a problem for native speakers, you already know it from speaking the language.
> - Chinese characters have structures and relationships too
Most Han characters can be decomposed into simpler characters. But not all, and you still have to memorize that a character for "branch" (支）consists of "ten" (十）and "again" （又）. And of course, some characters have multiple meanings, and even multiple readings.
In short, you have to memorize a lot.
> - Children in school in China don't need to know all the charaters, they start off with a useful subset and learn (or look up in dictionaries) more as they go along.
Of course. But they still have to learn at least 2-3 thousand by the end of the school.
> it's incompatible with the "learn while playing" concept.
That's definitely not always true.
Even boring things can be turned into a game. Different games are fun to different people.
> schools in the US tend to sideline [memorization]
US education incentives are far more closely aligned with teaching for standardized test than "teaching how to think", whatever their claimed rhetoric. It's been that way since even before W and the NCLB Act, which made things much worse.
Are you sure we're not conflating memorization with repetition, at least in certain domains? These debates focus a lot on early childhood education and core skills like math and literacy – but I think for, say, math competencies expected at an 8th-grade level (which these NAEP scores focus on) like ordering fractions or working with linear equations, I'm not sure "memorization" is more applicable than "repetition" (and, in any case, memorization isn't a significant subgoal – e.g. formulae or rules for determining concavity etc. where remembering them isn't comparable to bulk memorization.)
You could certainly argue that this is more about foundational skills like reading and writing, but it does limit the scope of how we're thinking about things.
(Personal caveat: I was taught elementary school math using a "reform curriculum", so my memory might be faulty.)
> it's incompatible with the "learn while playing" concept
I'm not 100% sure about that. I do believe "learn while play" is less efficient for memorization, and it especially sucks when it comes to somewhat hard-to-see patterns. But you still do get memorization from it. (E.g. in music, you could either learn the circle of fifths, or you spend forever noodling on songs and at some point discover that relationship).
Learn-while-playing is essentially ab initio research, and that only works for an inquisitive mind, with lots of friction added over memorization.
I'd suspect that something like structured play is striking the best balance between being interesting and being useful. It definitely works for kids, based on the research I've read. I'm less clear if it works for adults, but... probably yes? Just nobody's building those structured opportunities?
There is a difference between memorization and rote memorization. In chess, rote memorization of master games or chess positions is not a recognized training method. Chess memory improves as a byproduct of analyzing many positions.
Rote memorization is absolutely a mainstay of learning both openings
and endgames.
It’s usually a part of tactics training as well although not as purely, the polgar sisters for instance were drilled on the same chess positions day in day out in a spaced repetition system. This is going away a bit because chess puzzle databases have so many unique positions that there’s less need for repetition.
Regarding openings, there's a trade-off between chess training and chess results. Rote memorization can improve your results (if you already have good skills), but it won't improve your skills.
Learning endgames is not about blindly memorizing moves in specific positions. You learn tricks that can be used in a large number of positions. Even the seemingly very specific positions can be mirrored left-right (not to mention black-white).
That seems reasonable, but at the same time my understanding is that there’s enormous value in novice and intermediate players to memorizing openings. I wonder if that effect is significant enough to categorize chess as another high-rote-memorisation-affinity task.
Learning openings beyond a very basic level is not going to help the club player very much and it’s generally a good way for them to waste their time, at least from an improving your ELO perspective.
Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a “quarter pawn” ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or equalizing as black. Then if you’re a novice you will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you’ll be a quarter pawn ahead again.
The other problem with learning opening theory against novices is you will learn 30 moves a side of Ruy Lopez opening theory and your opponent won’t get 10 moves without leaving theory rendering your study moot.
There’s far more emphasis on memorizing openings at the grandmaster level because people are playing a tight enough game elsewhere for that slight advantage to really matter, and because of all the pre-game preperation where teams of grandmasters and chess engines will come up with novel moves to throw an opponent off balance while the star player memorizes the lines. To the point of grandmasters like Bobby Fischer complain it ruined the game and inventing variants like chess960. All super grandmasters have outlier memorization abilities.
Generally club players just need to rote memorize not too deeply and understand the broad sweeping ideas and key moves of the openings (when white does that, counter them with this). That should allow them to come up with reasonable moves on the fly which might be the best or third best moves. Memorizing fewer openings at first is probably better. At the more casual level memory is much less important.
> Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a “quarter pawn” ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or equalizing as black. Then if you’re a novice you will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you’ll be a quarter pawn ahead again.
While this is true if you know openings, many openings have a trap or two that make up a very tricky line that puts you 3-5 points ahead. Knowing the traps and how to punish them is a huge material advantage in some games. So while knowing your opening well is "worth" only a quarter pawn in a typical game, it is worth a several-percent increase in win rate from knowing these lines.
Openings like the Jobava London system have 10-20 different trap lines like this, and if you want to play them, you must know the lines.
It is very common for players with your mindset to plateau around 1400-1600, at which point it's time to sit down and start memorizing openings and endgames. Just being good at searching the game tree gets you to that point, but now you need to know the times when the game tree collapses 30 moves later.
There was a guy Michael De La Maza who literally just drilled tactics and broke 2000 USCF and then quit chess, and if you look at his games yes he really really did not understand openings. So 1400-1600 is well before when you’re going to plateau without knowing openings.
1400 yes learning a trap line can improve your results, so if you subscribe to the Eric Rosen school of opening theory you can benefit from openings. I’ve just never thought it’s worth learning much about conventional openings until about 1600.
> When all is said and done, I can’t recommend Rapid Chess Improvement (a book that, in my view, offers a philosophically bankrupt vision of what chess is). It smacks of "the blind leading the blind.” But, as I said earlier, his book might prove useful for some.
Also, a rating improvement from a 1300 start after a long spell of no rated games often means a lot of skill improvement in that gap, and then a corresponding adjustment in rating. Perhaps the guy was a bridge or Magic: the Gathering player and already had a decent intuition for games and needed to transfer that to chess. Disregarding that drilling 1000 tactical problems sounds a lot like a memorization plan to me, he also clearly knows the e4 opening given the game analysis quoted in Silman's review.
> Like many adults, he assumed that he needed to augment his natural skills and intelligence by compiling chess knowledge: he studied openings, endgames, and other "chess knowledge" information. Despite all that accumulation of knowledge, he was getting nowhere.
Huh... did someone study some openings and endgames? His tactical game was likely the weakest part of his game so he remedied that error and got rapid improvement. Not in spite of failing to study openings and endgames, but because he did study them, just out of order.
Sure he didn't know the quarter-pawn-advantage grandmaster lines (which you don't need to know as a 1600), but he knew the traps and how to avoid them.
This can't be more wrong. It's absolutely a training method, and the importance of recognizing certain openings is even more pronounced in professional play.
That is not correct as some of the comments suggest.
Typically experts are designated as persons whose mastery of a craft extends beyond memorization such that they have forgotten the specifics of things learned as confidence and muscle memory have replaced memory recall. They are at one end of the Dunning-Kruger paradigm in that they have forgotten things learned, or avoided things unnecessary or anti-pattern, resulting in gaps of explanation that are not present at time of performance.
It is beginners that are reliant upon memorization because they have not yet achieved the practiced mastery sufficient to perform with immediacy otherwise.
No. If you're willing to not be a fake expert, and wait until you've actually learned the material before holding yourself out as an expert, you don't need to rote memorize.
> The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert—in chess, music and a host of other subjects—sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills?
This is an interesting point. I think our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists. Especially our state schools.
I think there is potential for improvement in producing specialists.
As one example, go to the top universities in Europe, and look at classes in STEM fields. You will find a preponderance of Romanian students, far overindexing their relatively small 19 million population, which is especially surprising considering their relative poverty to other European countries. I would suggest that their specialist schools are the key to this surprising success.
One thing about specialist schools is that selection is necessary. So the public of most Western nations will never accept it.
> the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert—in chess, music ...—sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study...
What's interesting is the subtle shift from saying objective ability can improve to asking if schools can encourage (motivate?) students to engage.
I'm guessing most teachers know that given the right circumstance, students can be made to improve in math/reading. But getting all/most students to engaged in the right "kind of effortful study" is just a different task.
> I think our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists.
schools are proficient in wasting time, and most students would be better off without them
taking the usa as a significant example of 'most of the west', less than 47% of adults can name all three branches of government https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-... (only 24% knew the first amendment guaranteed freedom of religion), only 49% knew that heart disease was the leading cause of death in the usa https://newsroom.heart.org/news/more-than-half-of-u-s-adults..., only 48% of usa college undergraduates in 02012 knew that baghdad was the capital of iraq (which the usa was currently quasi-occupying) https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9, only 42% could name sputnik, only 31% knew moscow was the capital of russia, only 30% could name einstein as the proposer of the theory of relativity, and only 16% knew gunpowder was invented in china
you can guarantee that they were told all of those things in school at some point, but they mostly forgot. and you can't claim these facts are irrelevant to their lives (unlike some others listed in that last survey). a quarter of those surveyed will die from heart disease; all of them are governed by those three branches; all of them are subjected to racist anti-chinese propaganda and interact with chinese-americans; many of them had high-school classmates occupying iraq; all of them face the problem of religion
these are not generalists, who know a little bit about everything. they're dunces, who know virtually nothing about anything, until they get out of school and start getting responsibilities, at which point they learn what they need to learn to handle their responsibilities
it's harder to find good statistics on skills rather than declarative knowledge, but if someone can't name the #1 most likely cause of their own death (let alone #2 or #3), their decision-making about health is going to be seriously impaired, and if they don't know who einstein was, they probably don't know much about physics either. the few statistics on proficiency at skills that i've been able to find also look terrible
if children were being turned into generalists by schools, then children without access to schools would be far behind when they entered the school system, and would remain persistently behind for years. in fact within a year or two they're indistinguishable from the kids who've spent their whole lives being subjected to schooling. examples of such children are immigrants to places with compulsory schooling, ex-homeschoolers, and homeschoolers who go to university
how do schools in the usa, and for that matter everywhere, manage to be so profoundly useless and even destructive to learning? the 02007 rohrer & pashler paper linked yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274602 probably explains a lot. it's well known that schools waste students' time on overlearning, use massed practice rather than spaced practice (across many timescales), reward recognition rather than recall/retrieval, reward recognition or recall rather than performance, reward conformance rather than performance, and are profoundly dysfunctional in many ways. see gatto's famous jeremiad at https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20... and pg's milder 'the lesson to unlearn' at https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
I played Kasparov in 2017, in a setting similar to Capablanca in the ingress of the article. Whilst I managed 50+ moves, he was sometimes struggling in a way I wouldn't have expected for a GM. It so happened that our chess board was turned "upside down" by the organisers (we didn't notice until it was time to start; white was on row 7,8 instead of 1,2), and I have always wondered how much that mattered.
We did notice immediately, but we had the first board to play following a grand speaker introduction, and we just went with it instead of resetting the board with all eyes on us and making the hosts look bad. Speaking for myself at least, I can't believe he didn't notice immediately too.
It made my noting down of the moves quite hard.
> I would have thought it as jarring as a mistuned musical instrument.
This was exactly my thought, how much it mattered to him at his level.
This would be my guess. It's hard to imagine Kasparov didn't notice. There are variants of chess where the pieces are organized differently and obviously as the game progresses beyond the opening you can get into all sorts of positions. I'm sure Kasparov can calculate from any given arrangement of the pieces. The difference would be that moves that he would play automatically because of preparation now have to be thought through deeper.
I'm impressed parent survived that many moves. Must be a good chess player even with the simultaneous game setting.
No, upside-down, or rather rotated 180°. You have rows 1-8 and columns a-h (which are usually written in lower case, as upper case are used for piece value). h1 and a8 are the white corners you mention, with rooks on them initially. White's "home" are on row 1 and 2. These coordinates are usually printed on the board.
In our case black's home was on row 1,2. The king and queen was thankfully positioned "correctly" given this mishap, as normally the white queen are on a white square (and likewise for black queen and square), but not in our case. White still had short castling on his right hand side.
What I wonder is if Kasparov (or any expert) remembers movements from the coordinates, rather than (or in addition to) seeing the pieces on the board, and how much this impacted our game.
That’s interesting. I’ve never played chess on a physical board that had printed row and column ID’s. I’m surprised anyone would care about that while playing, since it’s irrelevant to the rules, but I’m no more than a casual player.
My personal opinion? It seems moderately unlikely that a player as strong as Kasparov, who could have played the entire game against you blindfolded, would have been adversely affected by this. Most strong players' personal chessboards have no coordinates written on them at all. (Mine certainly don't, and I'm not even strong. Identifying squares is just trivial.)
He probably just wasn't putting much mental energy into your game, as he had other simultaneous games to worry about, and then a move you made perhaps caught him by surprise in some way.
(It also seems unlikely coming from Kasparov specifically - he has historically raised quite a fuss, even when on camera, when simul exhibitions were not conducted to his standards. If the board bothered him, I think he would have had it flipped.)
That would've been impressive for sure! A somewhat recent world record[1] I just found shows a blindfolded simul for 48 boards, with 80% win! (All boards correctly turned, I'd expect and hope!)
The games in the article must've been a normal "simul"[2], which was what I enjoyed playing too.
Moves are played by square names, and with the board turned around, the king and queen are on the wrong squares (not to mention all other pieces, at least given their color). I imagine it would be an utter nightmare, but have no experience with it myself.
Well yes but the squares are the same. The king starts on E1 by definition, even if the board is turned around so that the markings would indicate it starts on D8. It might be confusing to the person reading out the move to the blindfolded player, but the blindfolded player would not have to deal with anything out of the ordinary.
Yes, the person would have to both call out and take in corrected squares, or else put the onus on Kasparov (which is what I was somehow imagining they did...).
Article brings up the Polgar sisters. Their father wasn't specifically a chess fanatic; he was more interested in the power of education as a whole. Here's their (rather charming) daily schedule:
4 hours of specialist study (for us, chess)
1 hour of a foreign language. Esperanto in the first year, English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third. At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 – in place of the specialist study – for 3 months. In summer, study trips to other countries.
1 hour of general study (native language, natural science and social studies)
1 hour of computing
1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies (humour lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke-telling)
1 hour of gymnastics, freely chosen, which can be accomplished individually or outside of school. The division of study hours can, of course, be treated elastically.
I find it extremely depressing that people here wish for more experts (i.e. specialists). The greatest minds that have thus far graced this planet were not specialists, they exceeded in a wide pool of areas. They were, as the saying doesn't go - jack of all trades and masters of dozens
Most of us cannot be those "greatest minds that have thus far graced this planet." For many of us, it's more fulfilling to be good at one thing than mediocre at dozens.
I think the core point of being "mediocre at dozens" is that you could connect dots that the experts can't, so at the macro level you can have advantages while the averages turns to specialization.
I suppose there's levels of mediocre. For the vast majority of us, the level of mediocre we could accomplish across many fields may not enable us to do much connecting at all. But I realize this is all very vague and depends on individual traits. I just don't think that what OP points out is "extremely depressing."
I think the key is balance. The people I’ve worked with who are the most effective and successful are really good at one or a short list of things, but have their hands in many other things.
And often they’re really good at the one thing because they have their hands in many things.
Cultivating a breadth of knowledge often isn’t just being mediocre in a bunch of subjects, but about broadening one’s awareness to potential connections and opportunities.
If you can’t go deep on anything, that shallow knowledge may not get you very far.
But if you can go deep on X subject with enough surface level knowledge of a variety of potentially related topics, you’ll be able to accomplish far more interesting things than someone with equivalent but exclusive knowledge of X.
Many people are just interested in expert credentialism and expert theatrical performance for an audience though.
If you really want to know a subject well beyond theater, you obviously would have to know many adjacent subjects and many seemingly unrelated subjects since "subjects" in this context are just imaginary divisions within human knowledge.
If your interest is credentialism though then the unrelated subjects are just a complete waste of time and most likely the adjacent subjects are just a distraction from memorizing your lines for the theatrical "subject matter expert" performance.
It is really a question of the best way to pretend to be a great mind when you are average and that is to specialize to a degree that minimizes the amount of people who know what you are talking about on the subject of interest.
We have built an entire class of society on this method.
The industry wants experts, people shouldn't be so quick to confuse that with what ought to be.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I have a thing that I do. I would like to be better at it. Insight into how worldwide-recognized experts achieved their expertise is of interest to me.
Renaissance-like approach to knowledge and skill acquisition in many ways can be seen as outdated. The rise of specialization in the modern world is, I think, a response to the increasing complexity of many fields.
It doesn't have to be either-or. Narrow specialists lack the intellectual curiosity that would drive them to seek understanding. False generalists lack the drive to become good at anything. True generalists have wide interests and become experts in many things.
You can't be a generalist without being an expert.
Depressing? I think it's natural, and good for the competent generalist. Most people don't have the incentives or the will to invest a lot of time in learning lots of things.
I never thought someone would compare polymaths (let's call it, intellectual or mental power) to people with great athletic ability (let's call it, physical power)
Although thinking about it a bit more right now, I don't see why someone shouldn't be able to be great at a wide range of physical activities to be considered a polymath - as opposed to both physical and mental activities, or solely just intellectual activities
If someone excels in a great deal of, say, a number of sports (which I admit, would be nigh impossible in the current age with all the professional sports leagues and their exclusiveness), one could probably argue that that person is a genius
I do find it baffling the mythos that surrounds "talent" and "meritocracy" in the West. I subscribe to the idea that so-called "geniuses" are made and not born that way. Obviously there are factors into this, like success early on, and a variety of factors that may influence your predisposition to doing a certain thing well.
But, at the same time, I know for a fact that far too many people put way too much weight on "talent" and often tell themselves that they can't do something. Someone may see you do something (like drawing or playing music) and say "wow, you are talented, I could never do that" but what you didn't see was how awful they were when they started and the thousands of hours they put into studying light and practicing constructing form from abstract shapes.
I think that this is a dangerous lie. You, in fact, could get good at drawing... and you could overcome any blocks to that if you put in the effort and work. You just don't want to or are not following through. Some people will naturally be better, sure, but that is no excuse to say you are incapable of doing something. I almost find that notion insulting.
> far too many people put way too much weight on "talent" and often tell themselves that they can't do something
I consider myself a “maker” and a serial hobbyist. I see this in others who seem to be afraid to make things for fear of failing. I love to document and share my own process and that sometimes feels like showing off. Maybe I should share more about my failures. I’ve recently come to the realization that what I really want is to inspire others to explore their creativity, learn new skills, and gain the confidence to make their own projects.
A genius, I am not, and I’m talented in only a few narrow areas, but I love to explore many.
The 'shocking' part was that the main advantage comes in seconds, suggesting a specialized region of the brain that had a fuller development. This is however no longer controversial as cognitive functions have emerged as perfectly reasonable stand ins for many cases thought to need a full generalized intelligence.
What's the point of mastery anyways? If you are a master software engineer, what does that guarantee? is investing in mastery the best use of your time?
I don't know if I'm using the word the same way, but I understand the benefit of mastery to be that you automate and abstract away things and can get to a point where you're just firing off mental routines instead of having to consciously focus on the specific task. This means that in a multi-faceted task I can focus primarily on the elements I haven't mastered, since the things I have mastered come easily and automatically. As a consequence, anything that relies in part on the mastered skill gets easier.
Totally agree. The key idea here is automaticity, the ability to execute low-level skills without having to devote conscious effort towards them. Automaticity frees up limited working memory to execute multiple lower-level skills in parallel and perform higher-level reasoning about the lower-level skills.
For instance, think about all the skills that a basketball player has to execute in parallel: they have to run around, dribble the basketball, and think about strategic plays, all at the same time. If they had to consciously think about the mechanics of running and dribbling, they would not be able to do both at the same time, and they would not have enough brainspace to think about strategy.
That is a much better way of putting it, thank you.
(edit) One thing neither of us directly mentioned in our comments, but which I feel is important is this bit from your article intro:
> Insufficient automaticity, particularly in basic skills, inflates the cognitive load of tasks, making it exceedingly difficult for students to learn
A real-world example for myself was when I was learning a small lick on guitar with an uncomfortable-to-me rhythm. I initially just played it slowly so I could get everything right, trying to speed it up every now and again to check progress. I progressed, but slowly. What ended up demolishing the challenge is the separation of the rhythm element(s) from everything else involved in the lick, and practicing those individually. By themselves they were easy to knock out (matter of minutes), and after those few minutes when I revisited the entire integrated lick I could suddenly knock it out of the park.
Great example. Yeah, I fully agree that in general, the fastest way acquire a complex skill is to focus your practice on the particular components that are giving you the most trouble. That's the main theme behind deliberate practice: find the bottlenecks and concentrate your practice time on them.
I've been surprised to find that this isn't a common viewpoint. In fact, I have a long-term bet with a friend that I'll learn something faster using deliberate practice 'n stuff then he did trying to learn everything at once.
you're not there to make software. you're there to pad out someones headcount and not make any trouble. associate yourself with an enterprise that becomes successful independent of your contribution, and leverage that to get similar roles elsewhere.
But it's not fun, it's boring, and it takes up a lot of your time. You can't really train your memory with a nice Youtube video, and it's incompatible with the "learn while playing" concept.
So schools in the US tend to sideline it by handwaving that "they teach how to think" instead. And I think we'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: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
It's also interesting that there's no similar decline in China, where rote memorization is unavoidable because of the writing system.