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i'm looking for a phrase... it's something in the vicinity of "pattern-matching", "decoding", "brute-forcing". trying to describe how someone might practice taking tests and even ace them, without any real understanding of the subject matter. using a memorized set of Q&A's
the phrase is very close to "decoding". or maybe it IS decoding, and I'm missing some other component that captured the emotional vibe of "skilfully performing a fairly complicated task with no idea what it means". gah I wish I wrote this down somewhere...
this isn't exactly it, I think, but it's the closest anyone's gotten... it captures that sense of trial-and-error calibration, like trying to tune a radio without knowing what a radio is, or what the knob does, or what frequencies are, etc https://t.co/YXkXLddGUK
currently I am here https://t.co/jWTuBKjJJ0
it also had maybe a sense of "reverse-engineering", like you're reverse-engineering the question to derive the answer. you are _____-ing the question? 🤔 reverse-searching? no... deconstructing? no, that's colder not warmer
several ppl have mentioned the chinese room, which is conceptually correct, but in a delicious meta, it won't mean anything to anybody who doesn't know what the it's referring to googling around I think "decoding" is probably what I'm looking for but it's incomplete on its own https://t.co/mJM9y1o5As
so maybe I'm remembering something like "students can get really good at decoding the answers to tests without understanding the subject at all"... yea... that seems right... I feel a little underwhelmed tho I feel like I recall something with searing aesthetic resonance
yea this is basically the idea of what's going on, and I feel like there is a phrase for "guessing the password" that's conveys how it's actually quite clever (moreso than ~random~ guessing), but a different thing than actually learning the material https://t.co/3bcGVdzTui
just noticed I'm approaching 1 hour of persistently trying to solve this puzzle lmfao. and they said I lack focus another way to approach it this might be... how do we describe playing the memory matching card game? "it's just a game of match... you gotta... _____"
ahaha not exactly the phrase I'm looking for but amazing supplementary media here thx https://t.co/3d9J0RNtd3
@visakanv “Chinese room” thought experiment by Searle is close; a system (man in a room with a book of rules) that can answer questions written in Chinese, in Chinese, without understanding Chinese. (It’s a largely philosophical argument about AI and pretty boring.)
@visakanv But you can definitely “Chinese room” e.g. a test intentionally. My brother, who was genuinely good at foreign languages, took almost perverse levels of joy in reverse engineering exam instructions/rubrics and then scoring maximum points for minimum effort.
@visakanv (Including, perhaps ironically given the context above, his Chinese exams, where e.g. one gets points for cultural competence as measured by contextually appropriate use of four character sayings and he memorized 12 that are applicable to extremely wide contexts.)
@patio11 there are interesting contexts where something similar to this is the Smart Practitioner thing to do, for eg there are patterns on the guitar neck you can learn and get good at that make you effectively indistinguishable or even better than a "learned guitarist", and, uh-oh...