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How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught

ltbarcly3 5y ago
If you have taken upper level college STEM, or Philosophy courses, literally this is what they are trying to teach you.
- jmeister 5y ago
  1. The article quotes a famous essay by an Ivy League humanities prof lamenting that students aren’t taught to think any more. 2. STEM thinking doesn’t carry over well to social systems. Hayek devoted his career to this problem. I recommend reading his Nobel speech, “The Pretense of Knowledge”.
  - halpert 5y ago
    Hayek had a belief that society couldn't be engineered through knowledge, but that's far from a settled fact. With the rise of MMT, it may be that Hayek was largely wrong. Critical thinking would indicate that, while his argument is compelling, there isn't enough evidence to have a definitive opinion either way.
    - jmeister 5y ago
      That’s one implication he drew out of this thinking. But his broader project, along with his close friend Popper’s, was grappling with the questions —- What is science? what is “social science”? What are the limits of rationality? —- partly in response to the popularity of the theories of Freud and Marx in prewar Vienna.
      - halpert 5y ago
        I think the broader point still stands: Hayek, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't really know the limits of rationality.
  - ltbarcly3 5y ago
    STEM thinking is the only kind of thinking that works at all, for anything, on anything, at all. Humanities thinking is just combining words together in complicated and memetically convincing ways and declaring victory without even having a way to check if anything works. The humanities is and always will be isomorphic to the Catholic Church in 1250, just dressed up in today's clothes. Hayek wasn't advocating some way of thinking that is better than scientific quantification or another kind of Positivist analysis involving mathematics and some form of the scientific method, he was saying that the complexity made such a quantification hopeless. He wasn't saying the English Department could centrally plan an economy, he was saying nobody could do it!
    - dgb23 5y ago
      It’s baffling that this response is unchallenged. Maybe because it is self-defeating, since it is in of itself a philosophical assertion?
      - ltbarcly3 5y ago
        It's not a philosophical assertion, it is very much a falsifiable claim. We can find problems where there was a scientific solution and a non science based solution and see which was more effective. The problem is, without statistics most solutions cannot even be evaluated in anything but the most ludicrous, angels dancing on pins ways.
      - jccalhoun 5y ago
        agreed. It is a strawman argument.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      It depends on what you mean by "works". Humanities thinking is very effective at convincing other people of some claim, or otherwise exercising power and influence. If that's the goal, it works well.
      - dooglius 5y ago
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    > I recommend reading his Nobel speech, "The Pretence of Knowledge". https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay... Some excerpts, since I found it to be a riveting read: > ...failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed." > And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes. > ...the social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. Competition, for instance, is a process which will produce certain results only if it proceeds among a fairly large number of acting persons. > ..."phenomena of organized complexity" with which we have to deal in the social sciences... [where] the character of the structures showing it depends not only on the properties of the individual elements of which they are composed, and the relative frequency with which they occur, but also on the manner in which the individual elements are connected with each other. In the explanation of the working of such structures we can for this reason not replace the information about the individual elements by statistical information, but require full information about each element if from our theory we are to derive specific predictions about individual events. Without such specific information about the individual elements we shall be confined to what on another occasion I have called mere pattern predictions – predictions of some of the general attributes of the structures that will form themselves, but not containing specific statements about the individual elements of which the structures will be made up. > I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences. > ...I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking. It is indeed true that, in contrast to the exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our profession are not always prepared to accept this. Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them. > The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science. > A theory of essentially complex phenomena must refer to a large number of particular facts; and to derive a prediction from it, or to test it, we have to ascertain all these particular facts. Once we succeeded in this there should be no particular difficulty about deriving testable predictions – with the help of modern computers it should be easy enough to insert these data into the appropriate blanks of the theoretical formulae and to derive a prediction. The real difficulty, to the solution of which science has little to contribute, and which is sometimes indeed insoluble, consists in the ascertainment of the particular facts. > A simple example will show the nature of this difficulty. Consider some ball game played by a few people of approximately equal skill. If we knew a few particular facts in addition to our general knowledge of the ability of the individual players, such as their state of attention, their perceptions and the state of their hearts, lungs, muscles etc. at each moment of the game, we could probably predict the outcome. Indeed, if we were familiar both with the game and the teams we should probably have a fairly shrewd idea on what the outcome will depend. But we shall of course not be able to ascertain those facts and in consequence the result of the game will be outside the range of the scientifically predictable, however well we may know what effects particular events would have on the result of the game. This does not mean that we can make no predictions at all about the course of such a game. If we know the rules of the different games we shall, in watching one, very soon know which game is being played and what kinds of actions we can expect and what kind not. But our capacity to predict will be confined to such general characteristics of the events to be expected and not include the capacity of predicting particular individual events. > Of course, compared with the precise predictions we have learnt to expect in the physical sciences, this sort of mere pattern predictions is a second best with which one does not like to have to be content. Yet the danger of which I want to warn is precisely the belief that in order to have a claim to be accepted as scientific it is necessary to achieve more. This way lies charlatanism and worse. To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought not to discourage the over-confident because their experiments may after all produce some new insights. But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. > If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals. Lessons for System Design practioners in there somewhere.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    > an Ivy League humanities prof ...whose most popular professional contribution appears to be lamenting his own irrelevance from the comfort of an ivory tower with an endowment whose safe withdrawal rate is larger than many country's GDPs. > STEM thinking doesn’t carry over well to social systems 1. Apparently is does. Otherwise the newspapers full of humanities folks would've won the advertising wars. 2. What the hell is "STEM thinking"? 2a. Is Philosophy "STEM thinking? OP mentioned philosophy, right? Although I can't pretend surprise at the notion that ignoring 1 of 2 examples counts as close reading these days in humanities departments. 2b. Is Geometry "STEM thinking"? Geometry has certainly been included in the western definition of liberal art for longer than Economics has been a science. Or a field. Or a word. 2c. Are esoteric prognostications on the nature of transubstantiation "STEM thinking"? What about (other) extremist propaganda that flames religious violence (today instead of far long ago)? > Hayek Even hard core leftist scientists would probably agree with Hayek's critique of the social sciences, none of which fall under the STEM umbrella. Also, have fun with the ensuing flame war this is sure to trigger. My contribution: Hayek always struck me as a very crisp thinker, but in terms of intent more of a high brow propagandist than a public intellectual. The Google ad engineers don't really give a shit about how you perceive various humidifiers, but do sincerely want you to click the ad. Hayek was the google ad engineer of his age, and was quite good at his job. Which isn't to say he didn't care. He did care. A lot. He was just a bit of a tool. But, crisp thinker. Good tool. Comfy life from it, too, and well-deserved. No judgement here.
- checkyoursudo 5y ago
  My bachelor's degree was in philosophy. We were taught almost nothing besides how to think, which ironically perhaps made it a bit harder to find jobs right out of college. I knew a successful commercial real estate broker who once told me (socially), "Someday I'm going to figure out how to make real money off of philosophy majors." Me too, man, me too. [Narrator: He never did.]
  - pitspotter2 5y ago
    Philosophy (as I regard it) is a sort of history of very clever but confused thinking, thinking which didn't lead anywhere. Thinking which did lead somewhere got relabelled science or something-else-not-philosophy. Thus what little philosophy I have read (mainly Popper) has helped me to tolerate confusion. Paradoxically my ability to think has been improved by this ability to be confused, I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxa1gLt5YKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxa1gLt5YKI For instance, I've noticed that most people refuse to see problems. They either want the answer straight away, or they want to pretend that the question or task is invalid or not needed. It takes a real thinker to put a confusing thought on one side and then pick it up later.
bern4444 5y ago
I would have expected this to go into ways of thinking. Understanding first and second order effects of decisions, means of analyzing situations - who's involved, what are my goals, what are my peers' goals, how can I push them in the direction I want, etc This is fairly straightforward though.
- elbear 5y ago
  If you're not familiar with the site that has this blog, it teaches mental models, so it goes through the things you mentioned. I guess the author assumed the readers would be familiar with his work, so he didn't feel the need to link to those pages.
throwawaygh 5y ago
I guess we can at least take shallow pleasure in the irony of an article entitled "How To Think" written with the style and substance of LinkedIn Spam.
- nefitty 5y ago
  Can you recommend something on the topic? I'm asking sincerely because I'm currently working on my personal study plan.
  - ngcazz 5y ago
    This was posted a few months ago: https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-clearly-to-improve-understanding-and-communication https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-clearly-to-improve-und...
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    Study something deeply under the direction of an expert critic. Repeat at least once. This is difficult to find -- even most colleges/unis don't provide it. Mastery takes years. Best to do this in your youth. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Without criticism, at least a couple times to mastery, it's extraordinarily difficult to differentiate confusion from clarity. (Programming is a wonderful field because reality is such a harsh critic and experiments are free... your code either works or it doesn't, and the most expensive input to the compiler is measured in human heart beats. But the field is exceptionally rare in that respect.) But also, as a general heuristic, it's safe to avoid 4 minute reads that promise to tell you something as grand as "How To Think".
- meimo 5y ago
  This style (and linkedin posts) remind me of one of Edward Tufte's observations, that business presentations and toddler's books have around the same words per page.
quocanh 5y ago
How to think: think longer.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  "I have spent endless nights thinking about who killed JKF. Surely, now, I know how to think clearly on the subject. Please come down to my basement where I have a special room dedicated to all the thinking I've done on this subject. And I have thought longer on this subject than anyone else, so clearly I know how to think on this subject."
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I have a bulletin board with a network of yarn stretched between pinned up pictures, clippings, drawings, and notes for you to study.
amznbyebyebye 5y ago
For solving leetcode style problems: (1) try the problem, meaning get to the logic for the solution and then (2) implement your solution at least once (3) read the solution (4) scrutinize incredibly heavily why you got it wrong or why your code wasn’t as efficient as the ideal solution <- this post mortem step is the secret sauce to getting better at these problems, but you have to go really really deep. At this step you will uncover some key learnings. (5) build a map of the key learnings, Rinse and repeat on new problems.
- socratees 5y ago
  Can you kindly elaborate on steps 4 and 5? How do you do that post-mortem? I can agree, let's say if the problem is 'pick top k elements', and you already know what needs to be done, you can hone in on what went wrong. But in cases where you don't know how to come up with the steps, how do you go about that? Thanks!
- deleted 5y ago
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Jensson 5y ago
> Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking They do in the decade they spend trying to teach each kid math. It mostly fails though, but not because they aren't trying, teaching how to think to people who don't think well is really hard simply because they don't think well and therefore can't easily pick up what you try to teach them.
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  Strong disagree, at least in the US. With the possible exception of a proof-based geometry course, almost all of US math education is memorizing and applying rules and procedures with minimal emphasis on how to think about problems. Most math teachers themselves don't really know how to think about problems.
trabant00 5y ago
How to think, the reality: - be born smart - grow around smart succesful people - discard all self improvement and "how to" material
SamPatt 5y ago
This claim that the best writers write slowly is suspicious at best. Many of the best writers out there were prolific. And there are innumerable bad writers who barely write at all. Writing is an iterative process. I'm skeptical of advice about slowing down writing intentionally. I've found writing more and editing more improves my writing more than slower, more deliberate writing, particularly since it's less likely to happen.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  This is suspicious to me as well. I write professionally and I know many others who do as well. My experience tells me that people have some sort of innate writing capacity to them - some are waterfalls, some are little trickles, but you cannot judge the quality of the water just by size of the stream.
  - sturza 5y ago
    I think the main point was not about a mechanical process to write as little as possible. At least i did not understand it that way. I got that the "final" sentence or piece of text is hard to come by, and "good" writers iterate a lot, that's why their output comes so slow - one paragraph per month, for example. Another signal why i think this was the correct interpretation - throughout the article, they present slow thinking and not stopping to an impulsive idea, and considering it the input to the bigger text (that authors write).
- abernard1 5y ago
  > Writing is an iterative process. To take liberties with your statement, I'd paraphrase this as "writing is work." I too agree with your skepticism of the article, and I'd argue it's because the platonic ideal of thinking before acting isn't actually how humans think. Humans fundamentally do, and this action provides the ingredients from which to construct thought. Good writers produce lots of bad writing which allows them to reflect on their mistakes or identify the special subset of their writing that was good.
- Archer6621 5y ago
  I also don't believe in this claim, or at least in it being a generally applicable thing. There's a point at which slowing down gives diminishing returns in my experience. I'm a music composer and I had to learn that the hard way. Sometimes my first ideas end up being good enough already, or even better than previous/future ideas that I had iterated a lot on. I also found that working for too long on a piece can potentially make it worse than previous iterations eventually.
keiferski 5y ago
This is such a huge topic that any answer shorter than a book will be inadequate. But I've found two things to be helpful for learning "how to think." 1. Study philosophy. While defining philosophy precisely is difficult/impossible, it's essentially the study of thought. But, it's very important to study philosophies outside of your normal frame of reference. Read books from different eras, languages, countries, and viewpoints that are alien to your current way of thinking. If you're from the modern secular West, that likely means you should read premodern, religious, non-Western writings. The idea is to peek into a different world and see how human minds operated. A good method for this is: pick an idea that you are 100% sure is true. Not "the Earth is round" but "X value is good." Then search for people who disagree. Trying to understand how an intelligent person could come to an opposite conclusion will improve your thinking ability. 2. Study formal logic. Especially symbolic logic, as it helps you focus on abstract structures and not on their content. The feeling of mental clarity that comes from this is hard to describe, but I really recommend it.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > "X value is good." Thinking that this can be true or false is itself a category error - values are more like the axioms you put into a system, and can only be "good" or "bad" with respect to .. other values.
  - lg 5y ago
    seems you've got the idea that you 100% believe is true, now search for people who disagree :)
- akelly 5y ago
  Any books you recommend on these topics?
  - keiferski 5y ago
    Sure, for 1, Nietzsche is always a good choice if you want someone to challenge modern assumptions. René Guenon if you're looking for a mystical, metaphysical approach to religion, especially Hinduism and Islam. I also really love the Tao Te Ching and think it's a totally different approach to Western ones. For 2, I used Virginia Klenk's Understanding Symbolic Logic in a course and recommend it.
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cable2600 5y ago
Schools and colleges need to teach this: https://www.criticalthinking.org/ https://www.criticalthinking.org/ instead of how to feel emotions and think with emotions.
Lapsa 5y ago
> The best way to improve your ability to think is to actually spend time thinking. dooooooooh
nathias 5y ago
Thinking is not one skill, it is the totality of your cognition and its uses. There are no shortcuts to take, learn philosophy, science, art, but before you can do that you have to learn how to doubt yourself and to make yourself receptive to arguments.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated. wow, my reflexive screw you kicked in so hard just then I should go check my blood pressure.
toolslive 5y ago
You can also limit yourself to a very small universe to make it easier to think correctly. However, results might be disappointing. Take for instance the game of chess. It's embarassing that we humans are not very good at thinking correctly and we're not very good at thinking deeply neither. It turns out we're better at using shallow pattern recognition, instincts, gut feeling and gambling.
veritascap 5y ago
Check out the book Maxims for Thinking Analytically. Then read Power vs. Force by David Hawkins to get the other side. Even better skip both and read Iain McGilchrist’s new 3000 page 2 volume work: The Matter With Things.
passion__desire 5y ago
https://www.citatum.org/book/Intuition_Pumps_and_Other_Tools_for_Thinking https://www.citatum.org/book/Intuition_Pumps_and_Other_Tools... You can`t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can`t do much thinking with your bare brain. - Bo Dahlbom, quoted by Daniel Dennett in his book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 (talk by Daniel on Google Campus)
codingdave 5y ago
> Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking. Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do. There is definitely a financial problem with the cost of college, I don't want to diminish that fact. Our higher educational system needs a refactor for a plethora of valid reasons... But how to think - how to deconstruct, compare, contrast, and reconstruct into something new - this is exactly the basis for traditional liberal arts education. It is why they have you study a broad set of topics -- to apply that thinking both into your own areas of expertise, and across broad subject matters. To build you up with T-shaped knowledge and the ability to expand it further. I feel the understated problem in our educational system is that people are being encouraged to think of it as a place to get job skills to get your first job, and thereby people don't even realize the underlying lessons that it really teaches. Maybe the ideal answer would be to get some of that pushed down to earlier levels of school.
- thisoneistheone 5y ago
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- danaris 5y ago
  > Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do. This is the ideal. Sadly, reality rarely actually measures up. What liberal arts colleges most commonly do in practice is assign lots of work that assumes that students can think critically in all the ways you describe, and expect that either they've already learned it, or they will learn it in order to be able to actually complete the work. There are certainly individual professors at most liberal arts colleges who take it upon themselves to explicitly teach such things, and there are a few that even have a robust enough "core curriculum" that it includes at least one class explicitly focused on those skills, but by and large, there is no formal, explicit teaching of skills like critical thinking in higher education.
- padastra 5y ago
  I am not aware of any data that colleges--liberal arts or otherwise--teach much in terms of critical thinking. Rather their value seems to derive primarily from their ability to select talented students and provide them with a network of similarly talented peers. That and they get "credit" for the learnings of students as they age from 18 - 22/26, when that's a pretty ripe time for maturing thought with or without the classroom. Moreover, it's clear that most colleges agree with my viewpoint. For example, if Harvard's product was an amazing curriculum, they could expand that to many, many more students than their current class size and charge for it (instead, their actions are rational when their product is exclusivity and high-talent networks).
DantesKite 5y ago
Claude Shannon had some interesting thoughts about this. I summarized them below: 1. Reduce the problem to its most essential parts 2. Find related problems that have already been solved 3. Restate the problem in as many different ways as possible 4. Generalize a solution to as many problems as possible. See where it can apply again. 5. Break large gaps between a problem and solution by solving a bunch of smaller problems (sometimes even in a roundabout way) and gradually piece yourself bit by bit towards the solution. 6. Invert the problem and solution http://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html http://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Is it there that he describes being highly lazy and multitasking ? Having numerous projects started and working on them when inspiration kicks
- pjm331 5y ago
  Reminds me a lot of the list in a book I just started reading - G. Polya’s How to Solve It 1. Understand the problem 2. Devise a plan 3. Carry out the plan 4. Look back In particular when talking about devising the plan: “If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem?...” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It
- throw10920 5y ago
  These are steps for solving a problem, which is very different from thinking. The former isn't very useful if you don't have a good idea of what the problem is or what the constraints on the solution are, both of which usually require thinking in order to get or refine. Moreover, the linked article isn't saying that problem-solving isn't being taught, or widespread - in fact, the authors probably thought that there was too much problem-solving and not enough thinking going around.
wildermuthn 5y ago
It isn’t hard to learn how to think: practice increasingly complex levels of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools actually do a fair job of this, especially at advanced stages. It’s trendy to criticize social media these days, and I’m not fully on that bandwagon, but there’s something to the criticism that social media and most of the internet is making us dumber with its relentless race to the bottom of reading/writing complexity. Most web content is now a cliff-note, at best. We used to learn most things by reading books. Now it’s too easy to gloss over understanding by googling the answers we need immediately. This is a generalization, and the pattern can be avoided by the disciplined, but we shouldn’t forget that tools dictate patterns of thought and behavior by what they make easy vs. what they make hard.
ncmncm 5y ago
> When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated. Not true. Thinking is a grab bag of heuristics. Each topic favors a different mix. The best thinkers apply several to each problem, one after the other. They collect, curate, and refine them, and discover their range of usefulness. Experience helps winnow the clinkers. Some of the best seem unpromising.
tboyd47 5y ago
Human beings learn by example. This is no different. If students are finding it hard to think, then perhaps it's because they have no examples around them of people thinking. Principle of parsimony. There's also a character aspect to it. Making decisions based on your own evaluations (not an authority figure's) takes courage and confidence. To listen to others' input and re-evaluate your own decisions requires humility. To act rationally in the face of strong emotions requires tranquility of mind. Do students find in their role models the traits of courage, humility, and tranquility, or do they find the opposite; cowardice, self-righteousness, and panicky over-reaction? If all the adults in the room are freaking out over every little problem, shaming and blaming each other, and waiting on someone higher-up to make all their important decisions for them, how can you possibly expect students to learn critical thought from them?
0xBABAD00C 5y ago
I am not stating anything profound here, but I found that learning math and science (college level and up) has had a huge impact on my quality of thinking. I agree with other posts emphasizing that early life nature/nurture experiences can have a strong effect, but learning and doing math and science gives you the ability to acquire mental models and thought patterns honed over many generations of top minds of humanity. It's one thing to be "street smart", raw IQ + grit + right attitude, and it's another thing altogether to be able to distill systems, structures, and predictable interactions in an otherwise chaotic observed reality. To me the latter is what determines quality of thought. Anecdotally, I've met people who were far smarter than me on the raw intelligence scale, but haven't gone the math/science route, and you can just feel how poor their toolkit is for modeling different aspects of everyday reality. A very crude analogy would be the hardware you have and the OS and software you're running on it: studying STEM subjects is akin to installing useful software, developed by generations of brilliant engineers that you wouldn't be able to reproduce on your own in 100 lifetimes.
avgcorrection 5y ago
> Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking. This “schools should teach X” is quite the meme. Most of the things I learned in school were fast forgotten. So when someone says “X should be taught in school” my first thought is “we should promote X to become easily forgotten…”. :)
watoc 5y ago
I'm pretty sure you can find convincing articles that would explain that overthinking leads to bad decisions and that you should be more spontaneous. Some of the best/well known books have also been written in less than a month.
thunkshift1 5y ago
> ‘I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.’ Spot on
Tycho 5y ago
I think the more pressing problem is how to concentrate. According to a Times article the other day, 20% of university students are using “smart drugs” to help with this.
mif 5y ago
Reading books and having meaningful conversations is a good start.

If you have taken upper level college STEM, or Philosophy courses, literally this is what they are trying to teach you.

jmeister 5y ago
1. The article quotes a famous essay by an Ivy League humanities prof lamenting that students aren’t taught to think any more. 2. STEM thinking doesn’t carry over well to social systems. Hayek devoted his career to this problem. I recommend reading his Nobel speech, “The Pretense of Knowledge”.
- halpert 5y ago
  Hayek had a belief that society couldn't be engineered through knowledge, but that's far from a settled fact. With the rise of MMT, it may be that Hayek was largely wrong. Critical thinking would indicate that, while his argument is compelling, there isn't enough evidence to have a definitive opinion either way.
  - jmeister 5y ago
    That’s one implication he drew out of this thinking. But his broader project, along with his close friend Popper’s, was grappling with the questions —- What is science? what is “social science”? What are the limits of rationality? —- partly in response to the popularity of the theories of Freud and Marx in prewar Vienna.
    - halpert 5y ago
      I think the broader point still stands: Hayek, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't really know the limits of rationality.
- ltbarcly3 5y ago
  STEM thinking is the only kind of thinking that works at all, for anything, on anything, at all. Humanities thinking is just combining words together in complicated and memetically convincing ways and declaring victory without even having a way to check if anything works. The humanities is and always will be isomorphic to the Catholic Church in 1250, just dressed up in today's clothes. Hayek wasn't advocating some way of thinking that is better than scientific quantification or another kind of Positivist analysis involving mathematics and some form of the scientific method, he was saying that the complexity made such a quantification hopeless. He wasn't saying the English Department could centrally plan an economy, he was saying nobody could do it!
  - dgb23 5y ago
    It’s baffling that this response is unchallenged. Maybe because it is self-defeating, since it is in of itself a philosophical assertion?
    - ltbarcly3 5y ago
      It's not a philosophical assertion, it is very much a falsifiable claim. We can find problems where there was a scientific solution and a non science based solution and see which was more effective. The problem is, without statistics most solutions cannot even be evaluated in anything but the most ludicrous, angels dancing on pins ways.
    - jccalhoun 5y ago
      agreed. It is a strawman argument.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "works". Humanities thinking is very effective at convincing other people of some claim, or otherwise exercising power and influence. If that's the goal, it works well.
    - dooglius 5y ago
- ignoramous 5y ago
  > I recommend reading his Nobel speech, "The Pretence of Knowledge". https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay... Some excerpts, since I found it to be a riveting read: > ...failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed." > And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes. > ...the social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. Competition, for instance, is a process which will produce certain results only if it proceeds among a fairly large number of acting persons. > ..."phenomena of organized complexity" with which we have to deal in the social sciences... [where] the character of the structures showing it depends not only on the properties of the individual elements of which they are composed, and the relative frequency with which they occur, but also on the manner in which the individual elements are connected with each other. In the explanation of the working of such structures we can for this reason not replace the information about the individual elements by statistical information, but require full information about each element if from our theory we are to derive specific predictions about individual events. Without such specific information about the individual elements we shall be confined to what on another occasion I have called mere pattern predictions – predictions of some of the general attributes of the structures that will form themselves, but not containing specific statements about the individual elements of which the structures will be made up. > I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences. > ...I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking. It is indeed true that, in contrast to the exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our profession are not always prepared to accept this. Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them. > The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science. > A theory of essentially complex phenomena must refer to a large number of particular facts; and to derive a prediction from it, or to test it, we have to ascertain all these particular facts. Once we succeeded in this there should be no particular difficulty about deriving testable predictions – with the help of modern computers it should be easy enough to insert these data into the appropriate blanks of the theoretical formulae and to derive a prediction. The real difficulty, to the solution of which science has little to contribute, and which is sometimes indeed insoluble, consists in the ascertainment of the particular facts. > A simple example will show the nature of this difficulty. Consider some ball game played by a few people of approximately equal skill. If we knew a few particular facts in addition to our general knowledge of the ability of the individual players, such as their state of attention, their perceptions and the state of their hearts, lungs, muscles etc. at each moment of the game, we could probably predict the outcome. Indeed, if we were familiar both with the game and the teams we should probably have a fairly shrewd idea on what the outcome will depend. But we shall of course not be able to ascertain those facts and in consequence the result of the game will be outside the range of the scientifically predictable, however well we may know what effects particular events would have on the result of the game. This does not mean that we can make no predictions at all about the course of such a game. If we know the rules of the different games we shall, in watching one, very soon know which game is being played and what kinds of actions we can expect and what kind not. But our capacity to predict will be confined to such general characteristics of the events to be expected and not include the capacity of predicting particular individual events. > Of course, compared with the precise predictions we have learnt to expect in the physical sciences, this sort of mere pattern predictions is a second best with which one does not like to have to be content. Yet the danger of which I want to warn is precisely the belief that in order to have a claim to be accepted as scientific it is necessary to achieve more. This way lies charlatanism and worse. To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought not to discourage the over-confident because their experiments may after all produce some new insights. But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. > If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals. Lessons for System Design practioners in there somewhere.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > an Ivy League humanities prof ...whose most popular professional contribution appears to be lamenting his own irrelevance from the comfort of an ivory tower with an endowment whose safe withdrawal rate is larger than many country's GDPs. > STEM thinking doesn’t carry over well to social systems 1. Apparently is does. Otherwise the newspapers full of humanities folks would've won the advertising wars. 2. What the hell is "STEM thinking"? 2a. Is Philosophy "STEM thinking? OP mentioned philosophy, right? Although I can't pretend surprise at the notion that ignoring 1 of 2 examples counts as close reading these days in humanities departments. 2b. Is Geometry "STEM thinking"? Geometry has certainly been included in the western definition of liberal art for longer than Economics has been a science. Or a field. Or a word. 2c. Are esoteric prognostications on the nature of transubstantiation "STEM thinking"? What about (other) extremist propaganda that flames religious violence (today instead of far long ago)? > Hayek Even hard core leftist scientists would probably agree with Hayek's critique of the social sciences, none of which fall under the STEM umbrella. Also, have fun with the ensuing flame war this is sure to trigger. My contribution: Hayek always struck me as a very crisp thinker, but in terms of intent more of a high brow propagandist than a public intellectual. The Google ad engineers don't really give a shit about how you perceive various humidifiers, but do sincerely want you to click the ad. Hayek was the google ad engineer of his age, and was quite good at his job. Which isn't to say he didn't care. He did care. A lot. He was just a bit of a tool. But, crisp thinker. Good tool. Comfy life from it, too, and well-deserved. No judgement here.
checkyoursudo 5y ago
My bachelor's degree was in philosophy. We were taught almost nothing besides how to think, which ironically perhaps made it a bit harder to find jobs right out of college. I knew a successful commercial real estate broker who once told me (socially), "Someday I'm going to figure out how to make real money off of philosophy majors." Me too, man, me too. [Narrator: He never did.]
- pitspotter2 5y ago
  Philosophy (as I regard it) is a sort of history of very clever but confused thinking, thinking which didn't lead anywhere. Thinking which did lead somewhere got relabelled science or something-else-not-philosophy. Thus what little philosophy I have read (mainly Popper) has helped me to tolerate confusion. Paradoxically my ability to think has been improved by this ability to be confused, I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxa1gLt5YKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxa1gLt5YKI For instance, I've noticed that most people refuse to see problems. They either want the answer straight away, or they want to pretend that the question or task is invalid or not needed. It takes a real thinker to put a confusing thought on one side and then pick it up later.

I would have expected this to go into ways of thinking. Understanding first and second order effects of decisions, means of analyzing situations - who's involved, what are my goals, what are my peers' goals, how can I push them in the direction I want, etc This is fairly straightforward though.

elbear 5y ago
If you're not familiar with the site that has this blog, it teaches mental models, so it goes through the things you mentioned. I guess the author assumed the readers would be familiar with his work, so he didn't feel the need to link to those pages.

throwawaygh 5y ago

I guess we can at least take shallow pleasure in the irony of an article entitled "How To Think" written with the style and substance of LinkedIn Spam.

nefitty 5y ago
Can you recommend something on the topic? I'm asking sincerely because I'm currently working on my personal study plan.
- ngcazz 5y ago
  This was posted a few months ago: https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-clearly-to-improve-understanding-and-communication https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-clearly-to-improve-und...
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  Study something deeply under the direction of an expert critic. Repeat at least once. This is difficult to find -- even most colleges/unis don't provide it. Mastery takes years. Best to do this in your youth. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Without criticism, at least a couple times to mastery, it's extraordinarily difficult to differentiate confusion from clarity. (Programming is a wonderful field because reality is such a harsh critic and experiments are free... your code either works or it doesn't, and the most expensive input to the compiler is measured in human heart beats. But the field is exceptionally rare in that respect.) But also, as a general heuristic, it's safe to avoid 4 minute reads that promise to tell you something as grand as "How To Think".
meimo 5y ago
This style (and linkedin posts) remind me of one of Edward Tufte's observations, that business presentations and toddler's books have around the same words per page.

quocanh 5y ago

How to think: think longer.

throwawaygh 5y ago
"I have spent endless nights thinking about who killed JKF. Surely, now, I know how to think clearly on the subject. Please come down to my basement where I have a special room dedicated to all the thinking I've done on this subject. And I have thought longer on this subject than anyone else, so clearly I know how to think on this subject."
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I have a bulletin board with a network of yarn stretched between pinned up pictures, clippings, drawings, and notes for you to study.

amznbyebyebye 5y ago

For solving leetcode style problems: (1) try the problem, meaning get to the logic for the solution and then (2) implement your solution at least once (3) read the solution (4) scrutinize incredibly heavily why you got it wrong or why your code wasn’t as efficient as the ideal solution <- this post mortem step is the secret sauce to getting better at these problems, but you have to go really really deep. At this step you will uncover some key learnings. (5) build a map of the key learnings, Rinse and repeat on new problems.

socratees 5y ago
Can you kindly elaborate on steps 4 and 5? How do you do that post-mortem? I can agree, let's say if the problem is 'pick top k elements', and you already know what needs to be done, you can hone in on what went wrong. But in cases where you don't know how to come up with the steps, how do you go about that? Thanks!
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Jensson 5y ago

> Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking They do in the decade they spend trying to teach each kid math. It mostly fails though, but not because they aren't trying, teaching how to think to people who don't think well is really hard simply because they don't think well and therefore can't easily pick up what you try to teach them.

CrazyStat 5y ago
Strong disagree, at least in the US. With the possible exception of a proof-based geometry course, almost all of US math education is memorizing and applying rules and procedures with minimal emphasis on how to think about problems. Most math teachers themselves don't really know how to think about problems.

trabant00 5y ago

How to think, the reality: - be born smart - grow around smart succesful people - discard all self improvement and "how to" material

SamPatt 5y ago

This claim that the best writers write slowly is suspicious at best. Many of the best writers out there were prolific. And there are innumerable bad writers who barely write at all. Writing is an iterative process. I'm skeptical of advice about slowing down writing intentionally. I've found writing more and editing more improves my writing more than slower, more deliberate writing, particularly since it's less likely to happen.

inglor_cz 5y ago
This is suspicious to me as well. I write professionally and I know many others who do as well. My experience tells me that people have some sort of innate writing capacity to them - some are waterfalls, some are little trickles, but you cannot judge the quality of the water just by size of the stream.
- sturza 5y ago
  I think the main point was not about a mechanical process to write as little as possible. At least i did not understand it that way. I got that the "final" sentence or piece of text is hard to come by, and "good" writers iterate a lot, that's why their output comes so slow - one paragraph per month, for example. Another signal why i think this was the correct interpretation - throughout the article, they present slow thinking and not stopping to an impulsive idea, and considering it the input to the bigger text (that authors write).
abernard1 5y ago
> Writing is an iterative process. To take liberties with your statement, I'd paraphrase this as "writing is work." I too agree with your skepticism of the article, and I'd argue it's because the platonic ideal of thinking before acting isn't actually how humans think. Humans fundamentally do, and this action provides the ingredients from which to construct thought. Good writers produce lots of bad writing which allows them to reflect on their mistakes or identify the special subset of their writing that was good.
Archer6621 5y ago
I also don't believe in this claim, or at least in it being a generally applicable thing. There's a point at which slowing down gives diminishing returns in my experience. I'm a music composer and I had to learn that the hard way. Sometimes my first ideas end up being good enough already, or even better than previous/future ideas that I had iterated a lot on. I also found that working for too long on a piece can potentially make it worse than previous iterations eventually.

keiferski 5y ago

This is such a huge topic that any answer shorter than a book will be inadequate. But I've found two things to be helpful for learning "how to think." 1. Study philosophy. While defining philosophy precisely is difficult/impossible, it's essentially the study of thought. But, it's very important to study philosophies outside of your normal frame of reference. Read books from different eras, languages, countries, and viewpoints that are alien to your current way of thinking. If you're from the modern secular West, that likely means you should read premodern, religious, non-Western writings. The idea is to peek into a different world and see how human minds operated. A good method for this is: pick an idea that you are 100% sure is true. Not "the Earth is round" but "X value is good." Then search for people who disagree. Trying to understand how an intelligent person could come to an opposite conclusion will improve your thinking ability. 2. Study formal logic. Especially symbolic logic, as it helps you focus on abstract structures and not on their content. The feeling of mental clarity that comes from this is hard to describe, but I really recommend it.

pjc50 5y ago
> "X value is good." Thinking that this can be true or false is itself a category error - values are more like the axioms you put into a system, and can only be "good" or "bad" with respect to .. other values.
- lg 5y ago
  seems you've got the idea that you 100% believe is true, now search for people who disagree :)
akelly 5y ago
Any books you recommend on these topics?
- keiferski 5y ago
  Sure, for 1, Nietzsche is always a good choice if you want someone to challenge modern assumptions. René Guenon if you're looking for a mystical, metaphysical approach to religion, especially Hinduism and Islam. I also really love the Tao Te Ching and think it's a totally different approach to Western ones. For 2, I used Virginia Klenk's Understanding Symbolic Logic in a course and recommend it.

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cable2600 5y ago

Schools and colleges need to teach this: https://www.criticalthinking.org/ https://www.criticalthinking.org/ instead of how to feel emotions and think with emotions.

Lapsa 5y ago

> The best way to improve your ability to think is to actually spend time thinking. dooooooooh

nathias 5y ago

Thinking is not one skill, it is the totality of your cognition and its uses. There are no shortcuts to take, learn philosophy, science, art, but before you can do that you have to learn how to doubt yourself and to make yourself receptive to arguments.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated. wow, my reflexive screw you kicked in so hard just then I should go check my blood pressure.

toolslive 5y ago

You can also limit yourself to a very small universe to make it easier to think correctly. However, results might be disappointing. Take for instance the game of chess. It's embarassing that we humans are not very good at thinking correctly and we're not very good at thinking deeply neither. It turns out we're better at using shallow pattern recognition, instincts, gut feeling and gambling.

veritascap 5y ago

Check out the book Maxims for Thinking Analytically. Then read Power vs. Force by David Hawkins to get the other side. Even better skip both and read Iain McGilchrist’s new 3000 page 2 volume work: The Matter With Things.

passion__desire 5y ago

https://www.citatum.org/book/Intuition_Pumps_and_Other_Tools_for_Thinking https://www.citatum.org/book/Intuition_Pumps_and_Other_Tools... You can`t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can`t do much thinking with your bare brain. - Bo Dahlbom, quoted by Daniel Dennett in his book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 (talk by Daniel on Google Campus)

codingdave 5y ago

> Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking. Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do. There is definitely a financial problem with the cost of college, I don't want to diminish that fact. Our higher educational system needs a refactor for a plethora of valid reasons... But how to think - how to deconstruct, compare, contrast, and reconstruct into something new - this is exactly the basis for traditional liberal arts education. It is why they have you study a broad set of topics -- to apply that thinking both into your own areas of expertise, and across broad subject matters. To build you up with T-shaped knowledge and the ability to expand it further. I feel the understated problem in our educational system is that people are being encouraged to think of it as a place to get job skills to get your first job, and thereby people don't even realize the underlying lessons that it really teaches. Maybe the ideal answer would be to get some of that pushed down to earlier levels of school.

thisoneistheone 5y ago
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danaris 5y ago
> Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do. This is the ideal. Sadly, reality rarely actually measures up. What liberal arts colleges most commonly do in practice is assign lots of work that assumes that students can think critically in all the ways you describe, and expect that either they've already learned it, or they will learn it in order to be able to actually complete the work. There are certainly individual professors at most liberal arts colleges who take it upon themselves to explicitly teach such things, and there are a few that even have a robust enough "core curriculum" that it includes at least one class explicitly focused on those skills, but by and large, there is no formal, explicit teaching of skills like critical thinking in higher education.
padastra 5y ago
I am not aware of any data that colleges--liberal arts or otherwise--teach much in terms of critical thinking. Rather their value seems to derive primarily from their ability to select talented students and provide them with a network of similarly talented peers. That and they get "credit" for the learnings of students as they age from 18 - 22/26, when that's a pretty ripe time for maturing thought with or without the classroom. Moreover, it's clear that most colleges agree with my viewpoint. For example, if Harvard's product was an amazing curriculum, they could expand that to many, many more students than their current class size and charge for it (instead, their actions are rational when their product is exclusivity and high-talent networks).

DantesKite 5y ago

Claude Shannon had some interesting thoughts about this. I summarized them below: 1. Reduce the problem to its most essential parts 2. Find related problems that have already been solved 3. Restate the problem in as many different ways as possible 4. Generalize a solution to as many problems as possible. See where it can apply again. 5. Break large gaps between a problem and solution by solving a bunch of smaller problems (sometimes even in a roundabout way) and gradually piece yourself bit by bit towards the solution. 6. Invert the problem and solution http://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html http://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html

agumonkey 5y ago
Is it there that he describes being highly lazy and multitasking ? Having numerous projects started and working on them when inspiration kicks
pjm331 5y ago
Reminds me a lot of the list in a book I just started reading - G. Polya’s How to Solve It 1. Understand the problem 2. Devise a plan 3. Carry out the plan 4. Look back In particular when talking about devising the plan: “If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem?...” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It
throw10920 5y ago
These are steps for solving a problem, which is very different from thinking. The former isn't very useful if you don't have a good idea of what the problem is or what the constraints on the solution are, both of which usually require thinking in order to get or refine. Moreover, the linked article isn't saying that problem-solving isn't being taught, or widespread - in fact, the authors probably thought that there was too much problem-solving and not enough thinking going around.

wildermuthn 5y ago

It isn’t hard to learn how to think: practice increasingly complex levels of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools actually do a fair job of this, especially at advanced stages. It’s trendy to criticize social media these days, and I’m not fully on that bandwagon, but there’s something to the criticism that social media and most of the internet is making us dumber with its relentless race to the bottom of reading/writing complexity. Most web content is now a cliff-note, at best. We used to learn most things by reading books. Now it’s too easy to gloss over understanding by googling the answers we need immediately. This is a generalization, and the pattern can be avoided by the disciplined, but we shouldn’t forget that tools dictate patterns of thought and behavior by what they make easy vs. what they make hard.

ncmncm 5y ago

> When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated. Not true. Thinking is a grab bag of heuristics. Each topic favors a different mix. The best thinkers apply several to each problem, one after the other. They collect, curate, and refine them, and discover their range of usefulness. Experience helps winnow the clinkers. Some of the best seem unpromising.

tboyd47 5y ago

Human beings learn by example. This is no different. If students are finding it hard to think, then perhaps it's because they have no examples around them of people thinking. Principle of parsimony. There's also a character aspect to it. Making decisions based on your own evaluations (not an authority figure's) takes courage and confidence. To listen to others' input and re-evaluate your own decisions requires humility. To act rationally in the face of strong emotions requires tranquility of mind. Do students find in their role models the traits of courage, humility, and tranquility, or do they find the opposite; cowardice, self-righteousness, and panicky over-reaction? If all the adults in the room are freaking out over every little problem, shaming and blaming each other, and waiting on someone higher-up to make all their important decisions for them, how can you possibly expect students to learn critical thought from them?

0xBABAD00C 5y ago

I am not stating anything profound here, but I found that learning math and science (college level and up) has had a huge impact on my quality of thinking. I agree with other posts emphasizing that early life nature/nurture experiences can have a strong effect, but learning and doing math and science gives you the ability to acquire mental models and thought patterns honed over many generations of top minds of humanity. It's one thing to be "street smart", raw IQ + grit + right attitude, and it's another thing altogether to be able to distill systems, structures, and predictable interactions in an otherwise chaotic observed reality. To me the latter is what determines quality of thought. Anecdotally, I've met people who were far smarter than me on the raw intelligence scale, but haven't gone the math/science route, and you can just feel how poor their toolkit is for modeling different aspects of everyday reality. A very crude analogy would be the hardware you have and the OS and software you're running on it: studying STEM subjects is akin to installing useful software, developed by generations of brilliant engineers that you wouldn't be able to reproduce on your own in 100 lifetimes.

avgcorrection 5y ago

> Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking. This “schools should teach X” is quite the meme. Most of the things I learned in school were fast forgotten. So when someone says “X should be taught in school” my first thought is “we should promote X to become easily forgotten…”. :)

watoc 5y ago

I'm pretty sure you can find convincing articles that would explain that overthinking leads to bad decisions and that you should be more spontaneous. Some of the best/well known books have also been written in less than a month.

thunkshift1 5y ago

> ‘I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.’ Spot on

Tycho 5y ago

I think the more pressing problem is how to concentrate. According to a Times article the other day, 20% of university students are using “smart drugs” to help with this.

mif 5y ago

Reading books and having meaningful conversations is a good start.