You left out discussion of domain specific intelligence, and I’d like to know why that is. Maybe it was intentional, maybe not. Because of this reason, I suggest your early misconceptions could have just as easily stemmed from misunderstanding what intelligence is (it’s not like even the experts understand it well).
For example, it’s easy to think you’re the best at everything if you really are prodigiously talented just at math and merely very talented in other things like language. On top of this, consider the fact you’re more likely to seriously compete in the domain you’re best at. Getting perfect grades in other subjects doesn’t count, because that’s relatively easy.
acquiring domain expertise requires a certain minimum level of intelligence, which varies from field to field. It’s only once you get beyond that minimum that more intelligence doesn’t help as much as expertise.
I think you could have phrased this better. Whatever relevant intelligence you have, specific or G, helps you learn from experience faster. It always helps to be smarter than your competitors, no matter what the minimum entry level of the field is. I suggest the people who won the math competition were both the smartest and the hardest working.
I think it’s possible in most cases there is no minimum entry level intelligence in other sense than time becoming the limit really fast.
A big example of this for me (which I left out because it didn’t seem to fit naturally into the flow of the piece) was that I’ve always hated memorization. And maybe some other people have a knack for memorization that I lack—in college, I had a friend who insisted that memorizing genetic pathways was easy, which baffled me. But my hating memorization may just be a product of the fact that, outside a few savants, rote memorization is always labor-intensive no matter how smart you are, and finding other things so easy made me resent having to put in the effort to memorize things, and maybe never learn certain study skills very well.
It is true that, up through the end of high school and beginning of college, I saw myself as a math person above all else. In retrospect, I think I was mainly drawn to math because there were clear right and wrong answers which made it easy to demonstrate my intelligence. (There’s a great quote about this that I can’t seem to find at the moment...)
In middle school English, for example, I got an assignment to write a an essay with a very specific structure which, from reading newspaper op-eds, I was pretty sure nobody actually used in real life. I wrote my essay about why the assignment was stupid. But rather than making me think, “Hey, I know a hell of a lot about writing for someone my age,” the experience mostly made me hate English. It wasn’t until college that I started to really see myself as having a talent for writing.
Have you tried Spaced Repetition Software, like Supermemo or Anki?
I used to hate memorieation (who enjoys being forced to repeatedly dona boring task?), but eventually I realized that I could memorize some stuff just fine, and that if I had just memorized some stuff already (like german grammar rules) instead of whining I would have saved time in the long run.
Eventually I started relying on Anki and now memorization is more like my secret weapon...
There are more and less labor-intensive ways to handle rote memorization.
When I started doing a lot of amateur theatre, I developed the practice of recording my lines on my phone and listening to them over and over as a background task, which allowed me to learn them with relatively little effort. It’s a very inefficient way to learn lines if I’m measuring time-spent, but I would much rather spend three times as long memorizing lines if I can play video games or go on long walks or do push-ups while I’m doing it.
Given how many people easily memorize the lyrics of popular music and commercial jingles without even meaning to, I suspect I could make it even less effortful by setting them to music, though of course that would create some difficulties when it came time to deliver the lines… that would work better for something I wanted to memorize but not necessarily declaim.
It and the Method of Loci were the main memorization methods, from what I know of i.e. Ancient Greece. And measured by total duration of recital of content memorized, I doubt we have that much larger stores of information considered important worth memorizing.
And measured by total duration of recital of content memorized, I doubt we have that much larger stores of information considered important worth memorizing.
How would you estimate something like that? Who’s we? What kinds of people are you comparing?
I’m comparing a modern generalist to Ancient Greek professional thing-knowers, which is to say their court bards, who memorized weeks length of poetry and song.
Now that I think more carefully, I agree that any estimation is probably far off the mark.
rote memorization is always labor-intensive no matter how smart you are
I don’t think this is true. I think people vary in the number of repetitions they need to be able to recall something. (conclusion formed via anecdotal evidence only)
The answer of course was that most of the other people playing online had played a hell of a lot more Starcraft than me.
Hyporational’s “domain specific intelligence” refers to when two different people put in the same amount on effort and knowledge on two different tasks, and person 1 performs better on task A and person 2 performs better on task B.
Meaning, someone could be better than you not because they worked harder and not because they are more knowledgeable and not because they’re just smarter in general for every dimension, but because they are smarter in the dimensions relevant to the task.
If you attribute someone beating you because they worked harder (memorization) or were more knowledgeable (starcraft) then you effectively don’t attribute their better performance to intelligence. The idea behind bringing up “domain specific intelligence” is to make it harder to exclude the hypothesis that they are better at activity X because they are smarter at activity X based on the fact that they were clearly dumber when it came to activity Y.
I think it makes sense not to include this in the post, though...it seems like a rather different topic.
But my hating memorization may just be a product of the fact that, outside a few savants, rote memorization is always labor-intensive no matter how smart you are
This sounds like rationalization. Ease of memorization is a spectrum, and none of my interactions with humans suggest otherwise. It varies between domains too, different people find different things difficult to memorize. I find memorization of language quite effortless for example. Other things vary from easy to difficult, but Anki helps with that, which is a bit ironic since it was initially developed for memorization of language.
I wouldn’t call myself a language prodigy, merely natively very good. My childhood development didn’t make the news or anything.
It’s almost 10 years since high school when my proficiency at languages was tested, and I never used flashcards back then. Memorizing vocab lists mostly happened minutes before the exam in the hallway. I didn’t just read through the words but also minimally tested myself for the more difficult words. I learned Swedish, English, and German this way, but have forgotten most of the Swedish and German vocabulary because I never use them.
Grammar and pronunciation I just somehow absorb by listening and reading, in almost all the cases I couldn’t name the rules I’m using and never tried to explicitly learn them. Verb conjugation in Finnish, my native language, is pretty complicated so me being good at that in other languages wouldn’t tell you much. I’m pretty sure I don’t forget grammar with time like I forget vocabulary.
These days I only need Finnish and English, and if I encounter an unfamiliar English expression, I check it in the English wiktionary, and rarely forget it. I suppose medical language for my work as a doctor counts too, but that’s mostly just simple vocabulary, and I can’t say I’ve put much effort into learning that either, although it’s thousands of words. I started learning to speak Russian for fun a couple of years ago using an audio program, but found the program too slow and repetitive and got bored.
I know I make mistakes in my English, and wish people would correct me more often. It’s difficult to judge your own proficiency and I find I’m the laziest at improving in stuff I find easy, so pointing out a few stupid mistakes might motivate me to improve a lot.
A couple of mistakes I know I make consistently: I forget which prepositions I should use with certain verbs, and probably use commas more often than I should.
By the way, I think my episodic memory is also pretty good. To your previous post I replied with the people forgetting discussions thing. For some of those discussions, I also remember exactly where we had it, what our physical positions were, and what we were doing at the time. Of course, that could be mere retrograde reconstruction, and can’t be tested without documentation.
Memorizing vocab lists mostly happened minutes before the exam in the hallway.
Holding a list of vocab words in my head for an hour based on a few minutes of study is something I might be able to do too, depending on the length of the list. Terrible approach for long-term retention, though.
Grammar and pronunciation I just somehow absorb by listening and reading, in almost all the cases I couldn’t name the rules I’m using and never tried to explicitly learn them. Verb conjugation in Finnish, my native language, is pretty complicated so me being good at that in other languages wouldn’t tell you much. I’m pretty sure I don’t forget grammar with time like I forget vocabulary.
I can definitely pick up basic grammar (for example the most commonly used very forms) just by getting a lot of experience with the language. But in high school Spanish class (I’m American), we had to know grammar rules explicitly, as well as knowing more obscure conjugations. In more advanced classes, this literally knowing first/second/third person singular and plural for a half-dozen tense-mood combinations for multple irregular verbs. And that kind of thing is very difficult to just pick up naturally, if for no other reason than that you’re unlikely to come across the most obscure verb forms in conversation or media.
Don’t get me wrong, I got As in Spanish. It just required a lot of time with homemade flash cards and time spent staring at a blank sheet of paper, testing myself on how much of the table of conjugations I could write out, then studying the ones I missed extra-hard. I didn’t know anything about fancy spaced repetition software back then.
And I didn’t even hate Spanish all that much. Especially not compared to (English) spelling. English spelling is the worst.
Just sharing data points here, the impressiveness was in your head to begin with :) You said memorization is labour intensive and I don’t find that to be true.
Holding a list of vocab words in my head for an hour based on a few minutes of study is something I might be able to do too, depending on the length of the list. Terrible approach for long-term retention, though.
Well, I didn’t say I forgot them in an hour and those exams did include conjugations. We had bigger exams including grammar on top of those vocab exams, and I didn’t really study for those excluding the classes. Earlier vocabulary was naturally needed for the later classes. The lack of serious initial repetition could be the reason I don’t remember them 10 years afterwards, but I doubt anything can be forever remembered without repetition and long term retention really can’t be called the labour intensive part of memorization.
I have other experiences that suggest initial repetition for a couple of months doesn’t help much in the long term.
English spelling is the worst.
In Finnish you spell it almost exactly the way you say it and I don’t think many languages do that. I’ve always enjoyed English and one of the reasons is the spelling and the pronunciation. Vocal acrobatics was one of the reasons I wanted to learn Russian for fun :)
An example from medicine: I make flashcards in bursts, and sometimes make hundreds of them in a day. At the end of the day I usually remember something like 90% of them on the first try. Should I call memorization difficult?
You left out discussion of domain specific intelligence, and I’d like to know why that is. Maybe it was intentional, maybe not. Because of this reason, I suggest your early misconceptions could have just as easily stemmed from misunderstanding what intelligence is (it’s not like even the experts understand it well).
For example, it’s easy to think you’re the best at everything if you really are prodigiously talented just at math and merely very talented in other things like language. On top of this, consider the fact you’re more likely to seriously compete in the domain you’re best at. Getting perfect grades in other subjects doesn’t count, because that’s relatively easy.
I think you could have phrased this better. Whatever relevant intelligence you have, specific or G, helps you learn from experience faster. It always helps to be smarter than your competitors, no matter what the minimum entry level of the field is. I suggest the people who won the math competition were both the smartest and the hardest working.
I think it’s possible in most cases there is no minimum entry level intelligence in other sense than time becoming the limit really fast.
This is a good point.
A big example of this for me (which I left out because it didn’t seem to fit naturally into the flow of the piece) was that I’ve always hated memorization. And maybe some other people have a knack for memorization that I lack—in college, I had a friend who insisted that memorizing genetic pathways was easy, which baffled me. But my hating memorization may just be a product of the fact that, outside a few savants, rote memorization is always labor-intensive no matter how smart you are, and finding other things so easy made me resent having to put in the effort to memorize things, and maybe never learn certain study skills very well.
It is true that, up through the end of high school and beginning of college, I saw myself as a math person above all else. In retrospect, I think I was mainly drawn to math because there were clear right and wrong answers which made it easy to demonstrate my intelligence. (There’s a great quote about this that I can’t seem to find at the moment...)
In middle school English, for example, I got an assignment to write a an essay with a very specific structure which, from reading newspaper op-eds, I was pretty sure nobody actually used in real life. I wrote my essay about why the assignment was stupid. But rather than making me think, “Hey, I know a hell of a lot about writing for someone my age,” the experience mostly made me hate English. It wasn’t until college that I started to really see myself as having a talent for writing.
Have you tried Spaced Repetition Software, like Supermemo or Anki?
I used to hate memorieation (who enjoys being forced to repeatedly dona boring task?), but eventually I realized that I could memorize some stuff just fine, and that if I had just memorized some stuff already (like german grammar rules) instead of whining I would have saved time in the long run.
Eventually I started relying on Anki and now memorization is more like my secret weapon...
There are more and less labor-intensive ways to handle rote memorization.
When I started doing a lot of amateur theatre, I developed the practice of recording my lines on my phone and listening to them over and over as a background task, which allowed me to learn them with relatively little effort. It’s a very inefficient way to learn lines if I’m measuring time-spent, but I would much rather spend three times as long memorizing lines if I can play video games or go on long walks or do push-ups while I’m doing it.
Given how many people easily memorize the lyrics of popular music and commercial jingles without even meaning to, I suspect I could make it even less effortful by setting them to music, though of course that would create some difficulties when it came time to deliver the lines… that would work better for something I wanted to memorize but not necessarily declaim.
I never quite made this connection, not sure why. Thanks.
Might stop working if you set enough memories to music. Perhaps music works for memorization because it’s rare?
Well, in the days before writing, setting things to music was the standard way of memorizing things.
True, but perhaps it wasn’t the only one, and there were fewer things to memorize.
It and the Method of Loci were the main memorization methods, from what I know of i.e. Ancient Greece. And measured by total duration of recital of content memorized, I doubt we have that much larger stores of information considered important worth memorizing.
How would you estimate something like that? Who’s we? What kinds of people are you comparing?
I’m comparing a modern generalist to Ancient Greek professional thing-knowers, which is to say their court bards, who memorized weeks length of poetry and song.
Now that I think more carefully, I agree that any estimation is probably far off the mark.
I don’t think this is true. I think people vary in the number of repetitions they need to be able to recall something. (conclusion formed via anecdotal evidence only)
Hyporational’s “domain specific intelligence” refers to when two different people put in the same amount on effort and knowledge on two different tasks, and person 1 performs better on task A and person 2 performs better on task B.
Meaning, someone could be better than you not because they worked harder and not because they are more knowledgeable and not because they’re just smarter in general for every dimension, but because they are smarter in the dimensions relevant to the task.
If you attribute someone beating you because they worked harder (memorization) or were more knowledgeable (starcraft) then you effectively don’t attribute their better performance to intelligence. The idea behind bringing up “domain specific intelligence” is to make it harder to exclude the hypothesis that they are better at activity X because they are smarter at activity X based on the fact that they were clearly dumber when it came to activity Y.
I think it makes sense not to include this in the post, though...it seems like a rather different topic.
This sounds like rationalization. Ease of memorization is a spectrum, and none of my interactions with humans suggest otherwise. It varies between domains too, different people find different things difficult to memorize. I find memorization of language quite effortless for example. Other things vary from easy to difficult, but Anki helps with that, which is a bit ironic since it was initially developed for memorization of language.
Fascinating. How effortless are we talking? Do you even need flashcards for vocab lists or complicated conjugations?
I wouldn’t call myself a language prodigy, merely natively very good. My childhood development didn’t make the news or anything.
It’s almost 10 years since high school when my proficiency at languages was tested, and I never used flashcards back then. Memorizing vocab lists mostly happened minutes before the exam in the hallway. I didn’t just read through the words but also minimally tested myself for the more difficult words. I learned Swedish, English, and German this way, but have forgotten most of the Swedish and German vocabulary because I never use them.
Grammar and pronunciation I just somehow absorb by listening and reading, in almost all the cases I couldn’t name the rules I’m using and never tried to explicitly learn them. Verb conjugation in Finnish, my native language, is pretty complicated so me being good at that in other languages wouldn’t tell you much. I’m pretty sure I don’t forget grammar with time like I forget vocabulary.
These days I only need Finnish and English, and if I encounter an unfamiliar English expression, I check it in the English wiktionary, and rarely forget it. I suppose medical language for my work as a doctor counts too, but that’s mostly just simple vocabulary, and I can’t say I’ve put much effort into learning that either, although it’s thousands of words. I started learning to speak Russian for fun a couple of years ago using an audio program, but found the program too slow and repetitive and got bored.
I know I make mistakes in my English, and wish people would correct me more often. It’s difficult to judge your own proficiency and I find I’m the laziest at improving in stuff I find easy, so pointing out a few stupid mistakes might motivate me to improve a lot.
A couple of mistakes I know I make consistently: I forget which prepositions I should use with certain verbs, and probably use commas more often than I should.
By the way, I think my episodic memory is also pretty good. To your previous post I replied with the people forgetting discussions thing. For some of those discussions, I also remember exactly where we had it, what our physical positions were, and what we were doing at the time. Of course, that could be mere retrograde reconstruction, and can’t be tested without documentation.
So now your case seems much less impressive:
Holding a list of vocab words in my head for an hour based on a few minutes of study is something I might be able to do too, depending on the length of the list. Terrible approach for long-term retention, though.
I can definitely pick up basic grammar (for example the most commonly used very forms) just by getting a lot of experience with the language. But in high school Spanish class (I’m American), we had to know grammar rules explicitly, as well as knowing more obscure conjugations. In more advanced classes, this literally knowing first/second/third person singular and plural for a half-dozen tense-mood combinations for multple irregular verbs. And that kind of thing is very difficult to just pick up naturally, if for no other reason than that you’re unlikely to come across the most obscure verb forms in conversation or media.
Don’t get me wrong, I got As in Spanish. It just required a lot of time with homemade flash cards and time spent staring at a blank sheet of paper, testing myself on how much of the table of conjugations I could write out, then studying the ones I missed extra-hard. I didn’t know anything about fancy spaced repetition software back then.
And I didn’t even hate Spanish all that much. Especially not compared to (English) spelling. English spelling is the worst.
Just sharing data points here, the impressiveness was in your head to begin with :) You said memorization is labour intensive and I don’t find that to be true.
Well, I didn’t say I forgot them in an hour and those exams did include conjugations. We had bigger exams including grammar on top of those vocab exams, and I didn’t really study for those excluding the classes. Earlier vocabulary was naturally needed for the later classes. The lack of serious initial repetition could be the reason I don’t remember them 10 years afterwards, but I doubt anything can be forever remembered without repetition and long term retention really can’t be called the labour intensive part of memorization.
I have other experiences that suggest initial repetition for a couple of months doesn’t help much in the long term.
In Finnish you spell it almost exactly the way you say it and I don’t think many languages do that. I’ve always enjoyed English and one of the reasons is the spelling and the pronunciation. Vocal acrobatics was one of the reasons I wanted to learn Russian for fun :)
An example from medicine: I make flashcards in bursts, and sometimes make hundreds of them in a day. At the end of the day I usually remember something like 90% of them on the first try. Should I call memorization difficult?
Hmm, I too have the feeling I use commas more often than I should. I wonder how others would judge themselves in that regard...
I just love commas, can’t help it.