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The comment that the link leads directly to is devastatingly good. If you don't want to do a lot of reading, just skip the main article and read that comment.

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No it's not, it's narcissism. Look at me, I'm a computer engineer, I solve math problems all day, so I must be much smarter than everyone else.

You think consultants don't have to think about the needs of their client? You think salesmen don't have to think about how to make the deal go through? You think lawyers don't have to think about how to make their case? You think doctors don't have to think about their patients problems? You think wall street traders don't have to think about how to beat the market? You think managers don't have to think about the thoughts and emotions of their employees and customers? (ok, here lies a real problem) You think real estate agents don't need to be creative to stay afloat?

I've never seen these stupid people everyone keeps talking about, but I have a huge suspicion it's a case of projection.

He's probably right in that the American culture / schooling seems to favor memorization, but the distinction between "problem solving" and doing things by recall is fuzzier than he implies. A lot of problem solving can be cast as examining details to find a match and looking up how to proceed. (That's not a terrible description of Prolog, come to think of it.) The reverse is true, as well.

Is a sysadmin troubleshooting an erratic network and starting with checking DNS doing what he calls problem solving ("my experience says checking this will narrow down several potential causes") or working off memorization ("many cross-cutting issues are caused by DNS, check there first")?

Devastatingly good? Meh. It's okay, until it runs off the tracks and starts making massive over-generalizations, and ends up mired in populist propaganda (i.e. "carpenters" being problem-solvers, whereas "academics" are not). By that point, it's rubbish -- a victim of the same sort of lazy, pattern-based thinking that it's trying to critique.

I think the hypothesis proposed might have some merit: most people can (and do) get by without the need for strong analytical skills. Beyond that, I think it's probably a stretch to try to match those skills to certain professions, when it's far more reasonable to expect that any random sample of people (taken from any profession) will fall on a continuum of analytical prowess (just as with any other metric). For all we know, "problem solving" is the trait that distinguishes the top performers in any field from the rest of the crowd.

> a victim of the same sort of lazy, pattern-based thinking that it's trying to critique.

Over generalization based on incomplete data or biased vision of the world has nothing to do with the problem solving/memorization dichotomy the author is speaking about. In fact, (and this is a big generalization) problem solvers have a tendency to reduce every problem to its simplest forms in order to find new ways to analyze it. I'd agree that when it is applied to human/social world, it often leads to partially or even totally wrong hypotheses though.

I'd also like people to stop just dissing over generalizations where in fact we just use these all the time. This comment is not meant to be a "end of discussion by scientific proof" about anything. But it's doing an extremely good job opening a new interresting way to see the world we have around us as intellectuals. And that's what generalizations are for.

It's an extremely insightful post! But even he is still stuck in "memorization" as shown by this little footnote:

> *true, in America shocking number of people can't tell you the name of their congressman or the capital of North Carolina.

Both of those things are utterly useless things to know. Someone once asked Einstein how many feet in a mile, and he replied that that's what almanacs are for.

Almanacs: the internet of the early 20th century.

I think the reason he points this out is to illustrate the idea that the memorization isn't even necessarily directed towards information which has an direct impact on that person's life and decision making ability

He does have some good points, but they're drowned in nonsense. For example, he suggests that memorization is taught in lieu of problem solving because this is what society thinks is a smart person. Memorization is taught in lieu of problem solving, but it's because we haven't yet figured out a good way to teach problem solving. It's not some vast conspiracy; the outcome we actually want is just a really hard one.

I don't think that the author was implying the existence of a vast conspiracy to keep people dumb; rather, the author was suggesting that society is operating in a manner which he believes is suboptimal.

Let's say memorisation is taught in lieu of problem solving for the reasons you stated, then consequently the people who are good at memorisation become thought of as smart, since they do well academically. This, in turn, influences the education system to focus more on memorisation (though, of course, this is all hypothetical).

Interestingly, "smart" is only equated with memorization in artificial situations (like academics and trivia shows). Case in point: if you ask people who's presently the smartest person in America, they might say the jeopardy guy (I actually suspect a lot of them would say Hawking). If you ask who's the smartest person in American history, the overwhelming response will probably be Einstein (except a few who will say Hawking, or -- very rarely -- Tesla). Einstein was a notorious problem-solver. Certainly, if you asked someone if they'd prefer their child to grow up to be like Einstein or like the Jeopardy guy, they'd probably pick Einstein.

Likewise, I don't think the author was implying any sort of conspiracy. I probably used the wrong word. I should have said that there's no real effort on anyone's part to promote memorization over problem-solving. Memorization is more prominent in these artificial situations because it's easier to train and test, rather than because people think it's superior.

FYI: Hawking is British and teaches at University of Cambridge in England. :-)

Right. Silly me. s/U.S./world/g, or go back in time 30 years or so and use Feynman.

We most certainly do know how to teach problem solving. I do it all the time in my Boy Scout troop. Of course, exactly none of the methods I use would work in the context of a school classroom, but that's as much a critique of our schooling methods as it is of my teaching methods.

I agree to some extent, though I interpret "haven't yet figured out a good way to teach problem solving" as "haven't yet figured out how to quantify the unquantifiable." In other words, problem solving -- in the sense of creatively overcoming new challenges and not just plugging values into memorized formulas -- is probably impossible to measure and standardize.

I believe you really can teach things like analytical thinking, lateral thinking, creativity, etc... (I have a number of books on these subjects) but how do you measure them via standardized tests? You can't. And so our educational system measures what can be measured: recall, application of rote formulas, etc...

Even the ostensibly freer essay portion of the SAT suffers from this problem: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200403/katzman

Umm, yeah. Just to save people some time, he sums up by saying that doctors don't solve problems but football players do. So, you know. Bullshit.

I mean, his central thesis is: MY job requires problem solving, whereas everybody else's job requires more memorization than football does (which, you know, is a sport that consists largely of continual drilling.)

He didn't say doctors don't solve problems. He said they "don't do much problem solving". He wasn't talking about the result at all. He was talking about the method: mere recalling, or (re)discovery?

Like ahpeeyem said below, this is a lot like mappers and packers. Here is the link he provided: http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-th...

point in fact, I was intentionally linking to that particular comment. It does a wonderful job of spelling out a lot of ideas which are not ordinarily articulated very well, if at all!

A handshake and a medal to anybody who can define "devastatingly good."

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