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Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

I typically have a low opinion on rote memorization, I remember years ago at university my roommate swore by his note cards (physical index cards at the time) while I strongly maintained the need to build up intuition around the math and physics I was doing. He was in med school and I was in engineering, but I felt that the memorization while successful at least for him, was limiting in terms of potential innovation.

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I was listening to a podcast with someone who went from BS/Mechanical Engineering => MD. He had to give up his "first principles" style of engineering-thinking and just accept that rote memorization was the way to go, at least for the majority of his courses.

I disagree that rote memorization limits innovation in the medical field. Biology has complex problems, and "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong". There's a reason why so many clinical trials fail, and it's not for a lack of technical innovation.

I feel like the medical _system_ as a whole needs systematic/organizational disruption, not technological disruption. For example, CGMs are a technology that have been around for decades and only now are we seeing usage in non-diabetic populations. The system (they require a prescription) is preventing the innovation.

Likely each successful strategies for the different specializations.

Yeah med students seem to be unique in the amount of stuff they need to remember, at least in terms of users Ive worked with. The amount of things medical students need to memorize to pass their USMLE exams is insane. I designed and built a learning tool at a startup for med students using picture mnenomics and spaced repetition quizzing that seriously helped those students and lead to the startup being acquired.

The ability to link image-metaphors/mnemonics to concepts is something that really should spread to other (non-medical) domains.

An example of a picture mnemonic for others: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/202...

Article: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/usc-dornsife-alumnus-r...

If you're comfortable saying, did your startup/acquirer have any interest in developing products for other domains?

I'm not the one you're asking, but I surprised you don't think that mnemonic isn't used in other domains.

It typically doesn't look like a fully fleshed out pizza shop, but I distinctly remember explaining an cell scaffold that I had synthesized like a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs to some of the undergraduates I was mentoring..

I never felt that other domains didn't address the natural inclination to use abstraction as a way to convey concepts/processes.

To be clearer, I'm talking about explicit integrative pictures like the one I linked. I know simple ones like this exist

https://www.build-electronic-circuits.com/wp-content/uploads...

but I'm _surprised_ that complex metaphorical images like the one in the parent haven't spread to other domains. As you said, we often make verbal metaphors when teaching, but explicit visual metaphors are _relatively_ rare. I'm talking about literal political cartoon as mnemonic device. How often do you see visual metaphors in textbooks? They're usually more interested in correctness.

Perhaps AI will make generating these images easier, if the difficulty in creating the graphics was the sticking point. Or maybe the problem is in sharing them, which is a problem that I'm working on.

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