In drawing parallels between the systems I work with and my own life, I’ve started noticing “imitation” as all that exists more and more. This notion though is not new to me, I’ve had this idea as well, for quite a long time now and it comes back every now and then. Let me write it chronologically.
I’ve witnessed truly smart people, people who just instantly grasp it, what takes me hours of refining and questioning to develop the intuition. It is to a large degree natural intelligence, but I’ve also noticed a tendency of an insane recall among these people; not all, some are geniuses after all. But the point that I want to highlight was that in the end, the outcome for both of them is quite close, as 99% of all work is nothing “unique”, we’re and will be solving the same problems over and over and over again. Something “novel” is a breakthrough after all, you can’t expect that to happen all the time
These people as I would call them “imitators” do put time and effort into it, same as the geniuses, but they make up for their lack of raw reasoning capabilities purely through an insanely good recall.
Now both reasoning AND recall can be trained, I believe the later more than the former but I’ve always been somewhat good at recall so might be my bias; this trait is what I do intend to exploit though and which is the point of this whole essay.
True reasoning and intuition can take me a VERY long time as I break apart things and rebuild them, learning more and more and more each time, however, just a LITTLE bit of stuff left on recall can augment that reasoning infinitely more. This is very much the same as working with an assumed “base” and then reasoning on top of it. It’s a sure way to “limit” your ceiling, but can be very very fast and imitate 99% of what someone with more truer understanding can do.
Let me put two examples; there can be many. I was trying to cover some stochastic models, with end goal of understanding black scholes and it’s variants. What I’ve noticed is how deep the whole thing can go if you start from the very basics of BM, GBM, then Ito and then BS; this is even when I skip stochastic calculus’s other branches and general ideas to cover that broadly. And yet, of the people I know at work, I don’t they would be able to derive it all the way, even when they do, they’ll use “tricks” and reasonings that are not mathematically rigorous, were not part of the original proof ( simply because that sort of reasoning came LATER once people tried to connect the maths with real world and started to “reason” about the individual terms ), and frankly, do not offer a very satisfactory explanation provided you question enough; and this is assuming they’re able to prove it at all, and I don’t blame them, it’s hard problem after all, took years and is still the core of things after so so many years. What they have is a “working knowledge”, assuming I “know” this and this holds, how do I use it and work on top.
Another one is imitating “experience”. What someone accumulates organically over a long period of time — experience, especially crystallised intelligence ( anything else is definitely harder and not worth it ), or ability to work with certain complicated systems, can be “imitated” to a very good degree, provided I remain focused and not am able to identify and filter out high signal work.
Such imitations are of course, imitations and do not compare to the real thing, a raw higher fluid intelligence is no match for if we are comparing absolute limits, but most tasks are not at limits, and fluid intelligence is hard to train for, I don’t want to waste away my recall “skills” ( can I even call them that, is it even a skill in this age ) if they can provide me with some advantage.
An “imitation” especially a focused imitation where I know perfectly what I’m doing ( so there’s no delusion of any kind otherwise you always have that nagging feeling at the back of your mind of not “intuitively” understanding things ). Even when you’re not trying to imitate, intuition always comes after; I’ve used and applied stuff for years just fine when one day it just “clicks” and I realise I never understood it well enough in the past. Such true “intuition” is often a fleeting state of mind for me.
So let’s not lie to ourselves, and call it what it is, mangle and exploit it, for what you assume as “base” relying on recall, allows you to build glass castles in the sky, and if I can do it well enough, I can at least have “some” castle.