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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 :/
Most of us turn out like the rescued exotic bird which turns out to be a seagull covered in curry.
but you can also favorite comments for your own hall of fame, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=andybak&comments=t
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.
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.
Yeah mine didn't have it. And the teachers fought every attempt to do so because it hurt their metrics (who gets stuck with the lower class average).
Are you by chance part of the PMC and your local school district is of similar demographics?
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.
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.
The idea was to reduce stress on students..
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 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.
And it fits on your phone.
No idea if this would work.
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.
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!)
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."
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.
That's why computer science suits me so well. I'd probably make a terrible doctor, though, since medicine involves remembering a huge amount of information.