Writing the above also reminded me of Steve Yegge’s self-description from his classic rant Done, and Gets Things Smart:
Squaaaaawk
So we all think we’re smart for different reasons. Mine was memorization. Smart, eh? In reality I was just a giant, uncomprehending parrot. I got my first big nasty surprise when I was in the Navy Nuclear Power School program in Orlando, Florida, and I was setting historical records for the highest scores on their exams. The courses and exams had been carefully designed over some 30 years to maximize and then test “literal retention” of the material. They gave you all the material in outline form, and made you write it in your notebook, and your test answers were graded on edit-distance from the original notes. (I’m not making this up or exaggerating in the slightest.) They had set up the ultimate parrot game, and I happily accepted. I memorized the entire notebooks word-for-word, and aced their tests.
They treated me like some sort of movie star — that is, until the Radar final lab exam in electronics school, in which we had to troubleshoot an actual working (well, technically, not-working) radar system. I failed spectacularly: I’d arguably set another historical record, because I had no idea what to do. I just stood there hemming and hawing and pooing myself for three hours. I hadn’t understood a single thing I’d memorized. Hey man, I was just playing their game! But I lost. I mean, I still made it through just fine, but I lost the celebrity privileges in a big way.
Having a good memory is a serious impediment to understanding. It lets you cheat your way through life. I’ve never learned to read sheet music to anywhere near the level I can play (for both guitar and piano.) I have large-ish repertoires and, at least for guitar, good technique from lots of lessons, but since I could memorize the sheet music in one sitting, I never learned how to read it faster than about a measure a minute. (It’s not a photographic memory—I have to work a little to commit it to memory. But it was a lot less work than learning to read the music.) And as a result, my repertoire is only a thousandth what it could be if I knew how to read.
My memory (and, you know, overall laziness) has made me musically illiterate.
This was also memorably interesting to me, because teenage me was a maxed-out parrot like young Yegge: I had stupendous short-term recall without commensurate deep understanding. I used to read history textbooks overnight and perfect-score multiple-choice question exams the next morning (right before crashing from sleep deprivation). I also happened to be good at high school math & physics. So people who overindexed “smarts” on recall of narrow facts and math+physics were invariably confounded by their later realisation that I was nowhere near as off-the-charts in other cognitive domains.
Writing the above also reminded me of Steve Yegge’s self-description from his classic rant Done, and Gets Things Smart:
This was also memorably interesting to me, because teenage me was a maxed-out parrot like young Yegge: I had stupendous short-term recall without commensurate deep understanding. I used to read history textbooks overnight and perfect-score multiple-choice question exams the next morning (right before crashing from sleep deprivation). I also happened to be good at high school math & physics. So people who overindexed “smarts” on recall of narrow facts and math+physics were invariably confounded by their later realisation that I was nowhere near as off-the-charts in other cognitive domains.