Two interesting observations from this week, while interviewing people about their metacognitive practies.
@Garrett Baker said that he had practiced memorizing theorems for linear algera awhile back, and he thinks this had (a side effect?) of creating a skill of “memorizing stuff quickly”, which then turned into some kind of “working memory management” tool. It sounded something like “He could quickly memorize things and chunk them, and then he could do that on-the-fly while reading math textbooks”.
@RobinGoins had an experience of not being initially able to hold all their possible plans/goals/other in working memory, but then did a bunch of Gendlin Focusing on them, and then had an easier time holding them all. It sounds like the Gendlin Focusing was playing a similar role to the “fast memorization” thing, of “finding a [nonverbal] focusing handle for a complex thing”, where the focusing handle was able to efficiently unpack into the full richness of the thing they were trying to think about.
Both of these are interesting because they hint at a skill of “rapid memorization ⇒ improved working memory”.
But, like, even if “rapidly memorize math proofs” didn’t generalize to anything other than memorizing math proofs, it feels plausible to me that this could at least help with situations where that particular skill is useful, and might be worth it even without domain transfer.
And I could imagine that there’s something of a skill of “learn to rapidly chunk content in a given domain”, which doesn’t automatically translate to other domains, but which makes it easier to learn to chunk new types of domains, similar to how learning one language doesn’t let you speak all languages but makes it easier to learn ones.
Two interesting observations from this week, while interviewing people about their metacognitive practies.
@Garrett Baker said that he had practiced memorizing theorems for linear algera awhile back, and he thinks this had (a side effect?) of creating a skill of “memorizing stuff quickly”, which then turned into some kind of “working memory management” tool. It sounded something like “He could quickly memorize things and chunk them, and then he could do that on-the-fly while reading math textbooks”.
@RobinGoins had an experience of not being initially able to hold all their possible plans/goals/other in working memory, but then did a bunch of Gendlin Focusing on them, and then had an easier time holding them all. It sounds like the Gendlin Focusing was playing a similar role to the “fast memorization” thing, of “finding a [nonverbal] focusing handle for a complex thing”, where the focusing handle was able to efficiently unpack into the full richness of the thing they were trying to think about.
Both of these are interesting because they hint at a skill of “rapid memorization ⇒ improved working memory”.
@gwern has previously written about Dual N Back not actually working that well at improving IQ. It seems like history is littered with corpses of people trying to improve IQ or g, so I’m not too optimistic here. My current assumption/guess is that the Dual N Back stuff trained a particular skill that turned out not to transfer to other domains.
But, like, even if “rapidly memorize math proofs” didn’t generalize to anything other than memorizing math proofs, it feels plausible to me that this could at least help with situations where that particular skill is useful, and might be worth it even without domain transfer.
And I could imagine that there’s something of a skill of “learn to rapidly chunk content in a given domain”, which doesn’t automatically translate to other domains, but which makes it easier to learn to chunk new types of domains, similar to how learning one language doesn’t let you speak all languages but makes it easier to learn ones.