michael_nielsen

Are books for memorising things? Aren't they already far better at that than their readers? Each (good) book has a purpose that isn't memorisation, and for each purpose there is a right length.

I agree. But it’s a false dichotomy to suppose that memory and understanding are completely different things. In many cases they’re closely related.

A striking instance of this is de Groot and Simon’s work, where they estimated that expert chess players typically have internalized 25,000-100,000 different types of piece configuration. This lets them understand the board in ways completely inaccessible to beginners.

OK good point. Still, I don't think that's the generic case. And even with chess, you get to recognise configurations if you love analysing games.

Incidentally, & anecdotally, until pretty recently I thought of understanding and memorizing as rather more separate. After I started experimenting with memory systems, I was shocked by how much faster I started to understand things.

My eventual conclusion was that I had earlier greatly underestimated the role of memory in understanding. (This is much less true in areas I’m already an expert in; the effect is strongest for areas a little apart from things I know well.)