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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
by 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 agoseems you've got the idea that you 100% believe is true, now search for people who disagree :)
- akelly 5y agoAny books you recommend on these topics?
- keiferski 5y agoSure, 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.
- marttt 5y ago+1 for René Guenon. I would point out his book "Crisis of the Modern World". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Gu%C3%A9non https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Gu%C3%A9non
- oldsecondhand 5y agoNigel Warburton: Philosophy - The Basics
- tgv 5y agoFormal logic isn't special in helping you think. It doesn't offer any tool that you can use in real life. You might just as well study chess or engine design deeply. It's the studying and problem solving that trains thinking.
- keiferski 5y agoI found that studying symbolic logic, especially in a philosophical (language-based) context, helped me clarify my thinking. In other words, it helped me differentiate between concepts, trace arguments, and determine if something actually made sense. It’s not so much about solving problems, more about “organizing” the way you think.
- wildermuthn 5y agoAgreed. Even if all you learn is the difference between validity and truth, this is an especially worthwhile difference to hammer into your brain. A lot of poor thinking comes not from invalid reasoning, but from hidden assumptions that are untrue. Conversely, the identification of contradiction is a skill that can be practiced with formal logic, and most invalid and convoluted arguments are easiest to unravel by finding those contradictions.
- barrenko 5y agoMontaigne's essays did the trick for me.
- ignoramous 5y ago> Trying to understand how an intelligent person could come to an opposite conclusion will improve your thinking ability. I don't think you can term flat-earthers intelligent. That's a dangerously low bar. > 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. This is a neat trick (does it have name?), but the true value is in realising their fallacies to hone your own thought process, not why / how they convinced themselves through deliberation, and contemplation, and divine knowledge, and self-enlightenment, and what have you. > Study philosophy. Study formal logic. Philosophy ranked as the highest form of knowledge among the polymaths in the Islamic Golden Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsafa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsafa The encyclopedia of Ikhwan al-Safa and other such massive bodies of work are representative of Philosophy's central role among the scholars at the time: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ikhwan-al-safa/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ikhwan-al-safa/
- runald 5y agoI don't have any numbers on this, but I'm certain lots of "flat-eathers" are just trolls that enjoys annoying people who tries to act smug and smart, but in actuality failed to get the humour behind the flatness of earth. Anyone who is seriously trying to argue with flat-earthers have a very low bar for intelligence. Which is not to say that there aren't actual dumb people who actually believe the earth is flat, but I reckon those people are far below the minority.
- sammalloy 5y ago> I'm certain lots of "flat-eathers" are just trolls that enjoys annoying people That was true up to the late 1990s, but it became a real phenomenon, particularly among religious people in the 2000s with the rise of YouTube.
- MrPatan 5y agoAnd you can find videos with ex-flat earthers saying "I was wrong, it's round". Now look for the same kind of videos in other categories. Which I'm not going to name here so as not to offend HN's sensibilities, but yeah, that one.
- 0xBABAD00C 5y ago> 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. The risk, of course, is getting convinced otherwise and having to live with that, in cases where "X value is good" is a socially useful and/or mandatory lie. Learning to think comes with its own dangers: knowing something isn't true requires more energy to hide it, and civilization is built on layers of lies. You could've gotten your head chopped off in the middle ages, for instance, for thinking anything naughty against the church and its leaders.
- heavenlyblue 5y agoYour opinion on this is akin to my parents opinion about sports: those who do sports get traumas and then regret it. Therefore don’t do sports. This is a very weak fallacy.
- 0xBABAD00C 5y agoI think you constructed and bravely defeated a weak strawman. My opinion is not akin to your parents' opinion at all. Everything comes with risk and reward, I was simply pointing out the risks. I never said "the reward isn't worth it". Diving into actions without understanding the risks is indeed a cognitive fallacy/blind spot.
- thatguy0900 5y agoIt's not that much of a fallacy. What if you come to a socially unnaceptable conclusion about some ethnicity or culture after too much study? If you are a software dev that poses a significant risk to your job and social life.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago> What if you come to a socially unnaceptable conclusion about some ethnicity or culture after too much study? If you are a software dev that poses a significant risk to your job and social life. What’s the difference between being silent about I because you don’t know it and being silent about it because you know you will be judged for it? It’s the equivalent argument for “Turn it off” in the Book of Mormon.
- rzz3 5y agoI don’t enjoy reading the old language and lack of modern context. Any more modern philosophers you recommend reading? Or modern summaries of older philosophers?
- OtomotO 5y agoI very much enjoy Richard David Precht for a nice summary of philosophy with ancient and modern context.
- pietrovismara 5y agoI found "on the suffering of the world" by Schopenhauer to be eye opening, especially his thoughts on death.
- dgb23 5y agoThe Problems of Philosophy by Russel is maybe useful here.
- keiferski 5y agoI generally don't like summaries, as you just get a contemporary interpretation of what the translator/academic thinks the philosopher was saying. Far better to go straight to the source. Eventually you'll need to read the original works, but I'd recommend starting with philosophical fiction. Crime and Punishment, The Plague, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc. Plato's dialogues are pretty readable, too, as is Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche.
- ithkuil 5y agoOriginal texts are important but you also need to have a very good understanding of the historical language and wider context in order to not fall in similar pitfalls yourself as the ones you wanted to avoid on the first place.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoA good translation will contain a lot of that information as in the notes. I like the Oxford World Classics series as the translations are very good and the notes are often fantastic, the Cambridge Companion-series also make a very solid complement.
- hobofan 5y agoSEP (= Plato) is a great resource for anyone who doesn't know it: https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html Especially topics related to ontology and epistemy are some that have given me a new lens to view the world with.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago> If you're from the modern secular West, that likely means you should read premodern, religious, non-Western writings I wouldn't skip the western writers. A lot of us walk around in the ruins of thousands of years of western thought, without even realizing it. So many things are taken for granted without any sort of motivation, it's a very shaky foundation once you start poking at it a bit. Ask almost person simple questions about central themes in western thought, ask them why freedom is a desirable thing, ask them why society should be just or why we should have equality, why we should care about human rights, and they'll most likely just get flustered and call you an idiot for not already knowing the answer which they refuse to tell you because you're obviously too dumb. These are fairly simple questions that could come from the mouth of a child, and they absolutely do have well thought out answers, but the point is that almost nobody dares pose these questions, so they live in ignorance instead. Everyone's a skeptic but only when it comes to things that differ from what they already believe is true. To that end, Plato is a fantastic teacher on how to identify things we take for granted, how to challenge assumptions and how to arrive at answers, and an all-round enjoyable read to boot.
- estaseuropano 5y agoFully agree on both points. 1) For anyone getting started, I think the easiest point of entry is still Descartes' Meditations. Incredibly cogent, accessible and shows in practice a way of thinking. I disagree with the last two bit that's exactly what you should do: follow a train of thought until you find better arguments. 2) formal logic seems incredibly boring, a kind of further abstraction of maths, and when I was studying it was everyone's least favorite subject. But of all things I've studied this has given me some of the most practical thinking tools that I use every day. Its like learning cheat codes for the world of reasoning.
- adverbly 5y agoIt sounds like you aren't quite talking about the same sort of thing as the author is. The author seems to be focused more on independent, original thought, and actually recommends more or less the opposite to your points: > Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. Your advice seems to be focused on how to "build a better intuition/thinking" skills(what a CEO might typically want to learn), where the author's sounds to be more around "how to build high quality original work"(what a creator might want to do). Your advice probably fits the title of "how to think" better, but there's something to what the author is saying as well - high quality, original work is extremely valuable. Again, you're right - this deserves a book.
- ifengo 5y agoUnrelated. Stumbled upon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2686142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2686142 and would love to hear how you feel about your 20s now.