Thinking about thinking
When during your life where you at peak learning rate?
Was it as school? Uni? If so, what did you do differently then? Can you still do it now?
I’ll give few examples that honestly in retrospect are absolutely obvious and yet, few people seem to still do it :
- have a trusted teacher/mentor who can pinpoint your flaw
- do exercises that test your knowledge rather than read and assume you know
- repeat said exercises in with varying context and in increasing difficulty
- take notes (IMHO the biggest) that you gradually structure and index
- use said notes when exercises (which are safe spaces to challenge your understanding) gets tough
- have structured goals, namely you don’t learn about a topic, move on randomly, but rather have 6 months over a topic
- learn regularly, e.g. weekly occurrence on a very specific topic, again and again for months on end
- last but not least, do it as a group, build, grow and sustain a network of helpful peers whom you are learning from but also helping
So… yeah, none of that is secret nor even complex yet most adults seems to leave THE place to learn and somehow forget EVERYTHING they actually learned. It’s nuts.
Also most of that is free. Getting a notepad or a wiki or using documents in a directory on your computer is practically cheaper than a coffee in most places. There is no excuse to note take notes then organize them. Same for regularity and exercises, get a calendar then drill, again.
FWIW that works for pretty much everything, from an abstract field of knowledge, e.g. math, to a physical skill, e.g. welding or ice skating.
Bonus : f*ck noise! Protect yourself when you are learning from distractions. There are myriads of things begging for your attention. Brush them off then in turn shape your environment so that you actually have a chance to learn. Learning is challenging, by definition, so you MUST make sure nothing and nobody gets in the way! Because plenty of people here have a technical side, here is a tool I built as an example https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/online-hygiene/src/branch/master/index.js which gives me daily quota of Websites I can visit, or not, and when.
This might sound a bit simplistic, but try different things. Different people process info in different ways, and you’ll never figure out what you don’t know that you don’t know if you don’t consider different perspectives and techniques.
I have several teammates at work that process information better by having meetings and talking through various projects and concepts whereas I need to throw on headphones, become dead to the world, and focus to achieve my best state for thinking through things. I retain information better by typing or writing it out by hand, which I attribute to growing up with video games.
Do you run real or thought experiments often? I find that very useful whenever i notice a result is off or something parameterizable. Like, what can i tweak to alter the result
I wouldn’t say ‘often’, but I definitely do. My work has a quarterly process meeting where we talk through new things everyone has learned and figure out ways we can add to our procedures and put those thoughts and methods down on paper. It’s not my favorite to talk through things, TBH, but I always learn new things when we have those roundtables.
Your thinking is only as good as your writing
Throw it away and start again
Watching HealthyGamerGG on yt
Wat have you learned from Dr K?
Not to try and problem solve everything when people talk to me about their problems, and just share their emotions and be there with them.
Your brain is inconsistent, use external tools to stay focused on your core thoughts better. Pick some thoughts that you want to stick with long term, I choose metacognition as my primary default thought topic, then if I need to redirect from something unpleasant I switch to that thought track.
Metacognition is a marathon, there isn’t one clear better methodology to improve everything about your thinking process, stay open and curious!
Perhaps an obvious one, but reading books and other types of long form content does wonders for your ability to concentrate and stimulates your reasoning ability.
Yes, and I’d argue to also reflect back on (long form) content, e.g. write down notes on books, critical ones, and if you watch a movie or documentary with friends, chat about it with them, reflect on your understanding of the topic, what was good, what wasn’t, develop a critical sense rather than just “consume” content.
For sure, these kinds of discussions can be really fun because everybody tens to have a slightly different interpretation of the content, or focus on different aspects of it. By talking with each other, you get a more complete shared understanding.
As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?
This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?
And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?
I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.
Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.
