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CronoDAS comments on My mind must be too highly trained - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: PhilGoetz 20 February 2015 09:43PM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 22 February 2015 07:08:03AM *  4 points [-]

Thinking along the lines of the in-progress Math Ability sequence, I think some people (including myself) are so reliant on being able to quickly derive and compute things in our heads that we have allowed our facility of memorization and memory-recall to atrophy. The prospect of learning, for example, all the individual notes on a guitar fretboard feels so agonizing to me that I still just "derive" the notes when I need them, even though this is terribly slow, after many years of playing the instrument.

I have a horrible problem with foreign language vocabulary for a reason very similar to this: there's no way to derive the word for "green" from a list of every other color word except "green"...