AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making it available to your brain for pattern recognition.
Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I don’t think it’s related to patterns, it’s the methodology.
Sure, there’s some groundwork that needs to be memorized in different fields, but this is like learning your first words. These are necessary so that we can communicate with each other, and they serve as building blocks upon all rest is built upon.
Everything else we are mostly taught by learning how some old guy came up with an answer, making clever use of the tools that we also have.
After a while it sort of clicks that there’s a method to the madness, you build up and up until you get to the moon, and you get this feeling that anything can be explained logically - we might not know how yet, but surely it will be at some point.
Unless it’s quantum physics, fuck that.
It feels like there’s a lot of people who skipped these building steps, maybe they were just memorizing stuff to get by the exams without exercising their brains on the methods to reach those solutions, or were simply never taught, and now they just don’t have the tools to make sense of what’s around them, and will blindly follow a monster that assures them that they’ll be ok as long as they do this or that…