C how to understand things
https://nabeelqu.co/understanding
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802645
Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it. X link not tracked
Moreover, I have noticed that these ‘hardware’ traits vary greatly in the smartest people I know -- some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators, readers, whereas others are ‘slow’. The software traits, though, they all have in common -- and can, with effort, be learned. X link not tracked
It’s also so easy to think that you understand something, when you actually don’t. So even figuring out whether you understand something or not requires you to attack the thing from multiple angles and test your own understanding. X actively seeking out disconfirming information
competent thinker will be reluctant to commit himself to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands -- he will lack ‘the will to think’ -- unless he has the conviction that something worthwhile will be done with the results of his efforts x link not tracked
This quality of “not stopping at an unsatisfactory answer” deserves some examination. X link not tracked
What this means is that you can internalize good intellectual habits that, in effect, "increase your intelligence". 'Intelligence' is not fixed. ^intelligence-not-fixed-habits-can-improve-it
That ^ is like a link not tracked
This quality of "not stopping at an unsatisfactory answer" deserves some examination. ^not-stopping-at-unsatisfactory-answer
Related to this is honesty, or integrity: a sort of compulsive unwillingness, or inability, to lie to yourself. Feynman said that the first rule of science is that you do not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. It is uniquely easy to lie to yourself because there is no external force keeping you honest; only you can run the constant loop of asking “do I really understand this?" (This is why writing is important. It’s harder to fool yourself that you understand something when you sit down to write about it and it comes out all disjointed and confused. Writing forces clarity.) x link not tracked writing forces clarity writing to think
The physicist Michael Faraday believed nothing without being able to experimentally demonstrate it himself, no matter how tedious the demonstration. X link not tracked
Most people are not willing to do this -- looking stupid takes courage, and sometimes it’s easier to just let things slide. It is striking how many situations I am in where I start asking basic questions, feel guilty for slowing the group down, and it turns out that nobody understood what was going on to begin with (often people message me privately saying that they’re relieved I asked), but I was the only one who actually spoke up and asked about it. X link not tracked
My countervailing advice to people trying to understand something is: go slow. Read slowly, think slowly, really spend time pondering the thing. Start by thinking about the question yourself before reading a bunch of stuff about it. A week or a month of continuous pondering about a question will get you surprisingly far. X link not tracked
The best thing I have read on really understanding things is the Sequences, especially the section on Noticing Confusion. X link not tracked
The point of both of these parables: nothing beats direct experience. Get the data yourself. This is why I wanted to analyze the coronavirus genomedirectly, for example. You develop some basis in reality by getting some first-hand data, and reasoning up from there, versus starting with somebody else’s lossy compression of a messy, evolving phenomenon and then wondering why events keep surprising you. X link not tracked
There are some link not tracked it can be helpful to ask as you’re thinking through things. Some examples: But what exactly is X? What is it? (h/t Laura Deming’s post )... Why must X be true? Why does this have to be the case? What is the single, fundamental reason? ... Do I really believe that this is true, deep down? Would I bet a large amount of money on it with a friend? X these questions are very similar to link not tracked, like the ones in link not tracked where he asks himself about the similarities and differences, parts and wholes, etc.
And you'll have a semantic mental 'framework' (Gordon edit: knowledge schema) in your brain on which to then hang all the great things you learn from your reading, which makes it more likely that you'll retain that stuff as well. I read somewhere that Bill Gates structures his famous "reading weeks" around an outline of important questions he's thought about and broken down into pieces. e.g. he'll think about "water scarcity" and then break it down into questions like "how much water is there in the world?", "where does existing drinking water come from?", "how do you turn ocean water into drinking water", etc., and only then will he pick reading to address those questions. ^pre-questioning