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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Maybe mastery, but enjoyment?

Einstein is quoted as "Never memorize what you can look up in a book."

In my experience it's impossible to enter "flow" in a task unless I've practised to a certain level of automaticity. After that it becomes effortless and very rewarding.

It's not so much about memorising facts for recall (boring!) but training the mind for automatic action. Like offloading the grunt work to a subconscious co-processor and letting you focus on the bigger picture.

In my experience, I just find things enjoyable. I stumble through them. Then, because it's enjoyable, memorization of common tasks is just a byproduct of me partaking in something that I enjoy.

Why would entering "flow" be a criteria for something to be enjoyable?

If indeed he said this, Einstein was wrong, he didn't understand, or think about computational complexity. To see how wrong, just consider the special case of guitar playing. In this instance what Einstein amounts to is: "never memorize chords when you can look up how to play them in a book".

You should memorize if the memorization cost divided by the number of uses over the lifetime of the memorization is less than the information retrieval cost for a single use (e.g. multiplication tables). You should also memorize if the retrieval latency is too high for your needs (e.g. guitar chords).

But I think Einstein would be a fan of web searches for a lot of memorizable information, as am I.

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