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Comment by throwuxiytayq | Hacker News Reader

> And perhaps at the very top of this hierarchy is memorizing just generic problem solving strategies/learning strategies.

I'm not sure this counts as memorization. I don't even think you can really "memorize" high level learning and problem solving strategies, even when explained by an expert. You kind of have to re-discover them internally. And then, there are people who "memorized" the explanation and are completely unable to put it into practice because to them it's just a word sequence, instead of an internalized change to the way you perceive and work with problems.

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You absolutely can. I remember struggling with some problems on AOPS and then reading in a book "always consider smaller $n$ when dealing with a problem that is difficult because of large $n$" and ever since then that habit has stuck. Whenever I have a problem thats hard and involves numbers and i'm stuck I just remember to ask "what if the numbers were smaller? what do we do then?"

If that isn't memorizing something and making a new habit as a kid then I don't know what memorizing means.

Said another way, the ability to remember to "____" when dealing with a problem of type "___" is what I mean by "memorize".

> Whenever I have a problem thats hard and involves numbers and i'm stuck I just remember to ask "what if the numbers were smaller? what do we do then?"

I think you underestimate the amount of internalized understanding of the "unblock yourself on a difficult problem by solving a simpler version of it" strategy that you possessed or unlocked at learn-time which allowed you to notice its effectiveness. Isn't the sentence more of an easily-retrievable mnemonic for a concept that's much more complicated (than just the information transferred by language) and requires a particular background to recognize how useful it is?

They’re called heuristics in problem-solving literature. Both heuristics and meta-heuristics have been used in planning software. Heuristics from one system are sometimes reused in another system. So, you can memorized generic, problem-solving strategies.

I don’t know how much human brains do in that area vs non-memorization approaches. Ive read about how practicing rational, problem solving in specific domains to bake those heuristics into one’s intuition for faster responses. Most of us have done that, too. Any type of intuitive, problem solving probably involves memorization for that reason.

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