People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!
Somewhat tangential, but this reminds me of when I took a certain Microbiology midterm in college. I hadn't put much effort into that class leading up to it, as I had some tough CS classes that consumed my focus that semester (also was admittedly not a great student in general). So when I finally went to take the midterm, after cramming like mad before the exam, I quickly realized I basically didn't know the answer to most of the questions, even what I crammed was only a small portion of the material.
The exam was huge, at least over 10 pages, and even when we technically ran out of time, the professor was kind enough to move the remaining exam takers to the neighboring lecture hall to continue taking it. I recall I spent a total of 2 hours on that exam.
Now mind you it was mostly short answer or multiple choice questions. The multiple choice questions were pretty sharp too, lots of traps and false but sounds right answers mixed in. But if it had been purely essay questions, I would have been screwed.
However with such a huge corpus of information in front of me, I ended up basically learning all the material on the spot. I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
In the end I got B+ in the exam (which was curved to an A), and walked out understanding the material better than I did walking in.
Reflecting in the experience years later, I've wondered if a hypothetical LLM which was ignorant of microbiology could do the same thing if fed that exam. In some respects the traps they placed in the multiple choice questions actually were what helped me refine my understanding the most. Made me appreciate information theory more.
> I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
This strategy saved my ass on so many tests from high school through college that I did not study properly for.
I think it would certainly be possible to write a test such that this strategy doesn’t work at all, but lucky for me no one did in any meaningful way.
There was a couple famous papers from a few years ago asking why computer science students, sorted by ability, seemed to form two clusters.
In one of the studies they got incoming CS students to fill out a multiple choice exam on programming, before the class had even started. Then they looked for hints in their exam results to see if they predicted the end of semester grade.
Turned out following this strategy was an incredibly strong predictor of success in computer science. Some students somehow got 0 (or close to it) in the multiple choice test. But the researchers looked at their answers, and could see that the student was forming hypotheses about the questions. Even if they got all the answers wrong, they answered all of them with a consistent idea of what the computer programs might have meant.
Weak students just answered each question individually based on vibe, without using what they learned (or figured out) from other questions.
> I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
I used to do something somewhat related during exams: I could never find contradictions/mistakes while working forwards, because somehow my brain would make the same mistakes consistently every time I go through something in the same direction, no matter how slowly and methodically I would do it.
So I worked as fast as possible in the forward pass and then reversed the problem in my head and worked backwards just as fast. Except this time I would often find the expected inputs would no longer match the actual inputs, so it helped me identify a lot of mistakes.
Same. I have bad "factual" memory, but very good "conceptual" memory. I might not remember exactly what someone told me, but I probably gathered a keyword, and a feeling and idea of what they told me. Almost like it takes what they said then compresses it into my mind in a nice little multi-key lookup table.
Oh man, I have that too. I am always told by my best friend "well, you go it right, but entirely wrong words" -- or something to the effect I got the feeling, notion, or concept right, but the wrong words.
This has affected me a lot though, I know what is going on in songs, but can't ever remember the right words, but still some how end up sining stuff that means the same thing :/
Yes. "Weak detail recall but strong fluid reasoning, conceptual/gist memory, and adaptive problem-solving" is how GPT sums up what I feel. And "high fluid intelligence" is a label it gave that I won't be using anytime soon... But I like the sound of it.
Most people come in for educational or career guidance, but I think it's best used as a way of understanding how your mind works, especially in relation to others'. The on-the-flying reasoning isn't pitted against good memory (there also isn't a single "memory", but we have different strengths for remembering words, stories, ideas, shapes, faces, numbers, melodies, and rhythms), but against a more methodical and well-prepared presenter. The on-the-fly reasoners are also quicker to see patterns and make connections among disparate data. It's great for trial law, but not so great (or distracting at best) for tax law, where you can't just wing it.
For me it's one step removed from that: I'll remember exactly what I was told or what I read, but not at all who told me or where I read it. My brain does not care about sources.
In my, admittedly extremely small sample set, concept-focused memory is common for people with any degree or kind of dyslexia. I used to struggle with understanding how people couldn't understand things, now that I'm more mature it makes sense how people struggled with me not being able to spell things :).
Yep, terrible speller -- bad at pronunciation too (by the way I just autocorrected that word) -- and I often wonder how people, who are much more intelligent than me on paper, can't figure out random tasks that just seem obvious.
I do not have dyslexia. I’ve been reading since I was a little kid. I don’t easily recall words or things that I’ve heard. But I’ve got a very good visual memory, especially remembering patterns. And I can easily visualize things too, even the somewhat abstract concepts.
So if I put a visual bend on something I can quickly understand it and remember it, but that bend has to be mind (even when helped by an image on a book). If it’s someone else’s, I’ll be very hard pressed to remember it (but I can easily remember where it was).
So at school, when I had to cram, I fill my head with images and things like that. And with the help of the exams (written) and memory of the classes, I worked out the answers.
Thanks for sharing, I am absolutely fascinated with the differences in people's internal experiences.
For me, I have the bad "factual" memory and good "conceptual" memory but unlike you, I also have aphantasia: a completely "dark" mind with no visuals.
I've always used the metaphor that my brain has really good "compression". Once I learn something it gets compressed into my worldview. I don't know how or why I know it but I can apply it. If academic achievement is any benchmark, I can apply it with above average aptitude.
We sort kids into the smart and non-smart labels when they are young, and those labels tend to stick, even when what we're measuring isn't raw intelligence but just variance in childhood development that wash out in the long term. I don't think either group is well served by this.
No we don't. Public schools are incentivized not to help high performers. It actually hurts their metrics and budget. The widespread gifted/talented experience in public school ended in the late 90s.
The actual intelligence segregation is self-selected. PMC parents live together in the same neighborhoods. Whether you believe in genetic or social factors, the smart kids come from here.
In the 80s and 90s there was an educational culture that believed in finding overlooked geniuses regardless of where they are from. That narrative is completely dead. All institutions expect kids to come prepared with a resume from their youth, and have few avenues for identifying talent that doesn't meet their mold.
> No we don't. Public schools are incentivized not to help high performers
This is actually true.. in my country we used to have 3 different tiers for Mathematics like 416, 426, 436, etc for high school students. You would get the right class for how good you were.
They dropped this and made a simple "sciences" vs "humanity" path. Then they also removed percentage grades and replaced with alphabets A, B, C, etc. There used to special awards for high performers with medals and gifts and the end of year, those events also got the shaft.
I have a 1st grader. The public school did tag testing in kindergarten and then the children in the program have a special class on Mondays for the more challenging work. Is this not talented and gifted? They call it TAG.
De Blasio tried to phase out G&T, and Mamdani has advocated for the same. There is an ideological push that views these accelerated tracks as fundamentally inequitable.
Yeah that sucks, as far as I found NYC is unique in having this truly merit based top end to their system (would love to hear of others if they exist). We have a tentative plan to move there if my kids need it.
Most other places water it down with lotteries, preference based on class or race, etc.
NYC is big enough that they can do what they do, which is have the very top end pure merit, then a tier lower that pulls people up from underrepresented groups. Best of both worlds. One of the top tier high school has numerous Nobel prize winners in the sciences. It's good for humanity to have these places.
Seattle public schools is a district of and for PMC. I'm sure you find all kinds of advanced programs in SCV too. There is an incentive to appease local parents by providing services they want to enroll their kids in.
In areas where parents aren't demanding advanced classes, there is no program for the government to identify and separate top performers from the general student population.
I don't know where you're getting that from. The sorting of students into "gifted" and "non-gifted" categories is very common. You don't need to look further than your local school district for proof.
Same. I don't remember most things including my childhood. I have to relearn everything all the time just in a few months time. Maths, code, etc if I don't use it in 1 or more month, I have to relearn it though its always easier to relearn it. Comparing myself to others its extreme. What I find is the process of constantly relearning instead of relying on memories (which are in a way similar to assumptions) can lead to different ideas (often unique) than other people because everything even basic concepts is a open question. This however is tortuous in job interviews when people ask about problems solved in previous work or about a concept so there are trade offs.
That brings up an interesting quesiton - do you need a good memory to be "smart"? DO you need a good memory to do well in an IQ test (as far as they prove anything)? I'd say no.
I'm interested in AI though no expert, though would find it interesting to see an llm (until a "real" AI architecture can be created, ie that can learn on the fly and have more "real" intelligence) that:
Rather than being trained on billions on words, it instead has a grasp of logic, physics and spatial reasoning beyond any human, with little common knowledge, that could be fitted in a few billion parameters, that could then be run by a mobile phone.
Perhaps, for questions needing "knowledge" ie most of them, it would have well structured depots of knowledge it could quickly access to gain a quick understanding on a topic for a question (eg biology --> DNA structure for a highschool project), or C++ coding, then it can search the internet (with a list of "better" sources to try first).
SO, it would be like having an alien that has come to earth that is super intelligent, however know nothing/little of humans and the earth, and you ask it questions.
I can relate to this, but always explained it away in the opposite direction: I never trained my memory very much because I was able to work things out on the fly. Who knows, maybe there isn't much of a link between the two at all.
> I never trained my memory very much because I was able to work things out on the fly
I actually always thought it was the opposite for me – I had to figure out how to work things out from scratch because I could never remember anything.
I’m very similar. Poor memory, good on-the-fly pattern recognition. I would say reasoning but it’s not really reasoning, it’s just identifying patterns plus some quick hacky heuristics reasoning. I’ve always performed well on tests as a result, but in the real world I need to use A LOT of tools to do my job. I write everything down, notes for everything.
Same. I often feel like my brain is a Ferrari which has a 1 L fuel tank and all the windows are blacked out except for a thumb-sized bit in the passenger side rear window.
My digit span is roughly 4 - terrible working memory. And I have trouble remembering even important things like where and how my wife and I met - terrible long term memory.
I have compensated over the years with complex systems of note taking and journals and in spite of all the above I managed a PhD, but I every day of my life feel hampered.
Yeah same! This is why foreign languages are simultaneously easy and hard for me. I can memorize patterns and concepts easily but when it comes to arbitrary rules and vocabulary, I need flash cards for that. I end up needing to make up my own "rules" to remember things.
I used to think I wasn’t very good at math, because I struggled to route memorize formulas and the like. Then I had a calculus professor in class that took a bunch of time explaining how to derive the formulas we were using and it unlocked everything for me. I’m much better at deriving from core principles than trying to remember a bunch of formulas and algorithms for solving problems.
I'm in a similar boat. I end up re-learning the same things over and over again.
I found a solution recently. "Critical mass." If I just don't see something frequently enough, my brain keeps deleting it.
So, if there's a fact you have trouble remembering, try memorizing it 100 times in one day. That's "inefficient", as far as memory goes, but it'll do the trick! And I like solving problems once and then moving on.
(Anki, conversely, is designed for efficiency, which means it's designed to be as painful and unrewarding as possible, but that's a rant for another time... suffice it to say if you design your software so that I constantly want to stop using it, your efficiency drops to zero!)
I find my memory is very selective. I wanted to get in touch with a coworker from five years ago: I had to look up his name on linkedin. My wife texted me "Hotlips died" and with no effort I texted back, "Oh no, Loretta Swit or Sally Kellerman?" Mind you, I haven't watched MASH the TV show in forever, and I haven't seen MASH the movie since my parents took me when it first came out. I have zero reason to remember Loretta Swit, let alone Sally Kellerman, but my brain hangs onto that like it matters; but a guy I worked with for two years five years ago, that my brain will drop like it's radioactive.
Isnt that kind of like older memories get a strong imprint -- as you get older there are so many memories in the database that the imprint isn't as powerful as earlier ones. I think it works kind of as a function of kind of sensory component of memory implying that new memories aren't new to you therefore less powerful (obviously high variance and person dependent).
Yeah this matches my experience too. I noticed this in Anki. Some cards are effortless, some take a bit of practice, and some I fail over and over again no matter how many times I practice them.
Anki kept flagging my relatives birthdays as "leeches!"
I found it kind of hilarious and infuriating that the software I used to remember things tells me "this thing is hard for you to remember so you should just give up."
Well, it was originally created for language learning. With vocabulary there really is so much of it that you're better off learning the stuff that sticks and moving on from the handful of items that just don't. In some other fields you really do need to memorise the whole set of items, but that's just never going to happen for second language vocab.
The other thing about leeches is that they're a sign that you probably want to try to change something about the way you're trying to learn them, because what you're doing now is obviously not working for those things.
I relate to this; there are some things I remember very well, but in many areas I think my talent for improvisation stems from a ~mid long-term memory.
You maybe work things out on the fly by matching against abstract patterns. Could this be an indication not of lack of memory but of specialisation in abstract memory?
"Working out on the fly" - I do the same thing, I try to find the minimum I can get away with memory-wise, and try to connect everything else to that in a way I can retrace my steps easily. When I was in school/uni, my notes started out as say 10 pages per lecture, and got thinned down over the months until I only had one page or half a page to memorize on exam day, and everything else could be decompressed from that nugget.
