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An old professor that specialized in helping students prepare to university or civil servant tests used to say that if you want to understand a subject, you nee

by ouraf 3y ago

An old professor that specialized in helping students prepare to university or civil servant tests used to say that if you want to understand a subject, you need to do two things about it: - Make some kind of logical scheme to help with disambiguation (things like which legal process comes first, of the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle order of philosophers and ideas) - Write the long form of the subject everything by hand. Pen on paper. If it's a law or bill, write it fully, if it's a scientific concept, write every part of it that is related to the subjects that can appear on the test. It's slow, tiresome and a complete nightmare for students with anxiety problems (trust me, i know), but as you write, you very slowly burns the knowledge that fills your logical scheme into your brain. That's what the people that succeed in hard tests do to dominate nebulous topics. I don't know if it translates to actual mastery in different areas, but it's a very strong studying technique

sowbug 3y ago
I have lots of smart friends, but one in particular is leaps and bounds smarter than all of us. I've spent years observing why that is. Your first point resonates with my observation. My friend seems to operate with a strong mental scaffolding that allows him to quickly absorb new information -- you can almost see his brain saying "this goes here, that goes there" as you speak to him. This scaffolding also plainly exposes holes in knowledge, which makes him an incredible conversation partner when you're talking about a technical topic -- "you mentioned A, B, and D. Seems like there should also be a C. What happened to that?" I've known this guy for a long time, and you can imagine that his scaffolding only grows stronger over time, so that it's very rare to discuss a topic with him where he's completely adrift. It helps that he doesn't have the personality of a know-it-all; even if he is a master of a topic, he has an uncanny ability to uncover the thing you know that he doesn't, which makes conversation with him enjoyable rather than intimidating. Two final points. One, his memory is not notably better than anyone else's. He forgets conversations and situations as much as anyone else, but he definitely remembers when he's filled a hole in his scaffolding. Two, his mental scaffolding is very conventional. By that, I mean he rarely has a weird way of thinking about things that makes sense to him but to nobody else. So when he asks a question, it's almost always the same deep question that other experts in a field have been working on, rather than a strange take. While this seems like a liability, it means that his conversations with experts tend to get to the important parts very quickly, rather than wasting half an hour establishing a common lexicon. Maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, and the conventionality of his scaffolding is a consequence of the vast amount of knowledge he's learned and needed to reconcile, rather than the reverse.

by ouraf 3y ago

sowbug 3y ago

I have lots of smart friends, but one in particular is leaps and bounds smarter than all of us. I've spent years observing why that is. Your first point resonates with my observation. My friend seems to operate with a strong mental scaffolding that allows him to quickly absorb new information -- you can almost see his brain saying "this goes here, that goes there" as you speak to him. This scaffolding also plainly exposes holes in knowledge, which makes him an incredible conversation partner when you're talking about a technical topic -- "you mentioned A, B, and D. Seems like there should also be a C. What happened to that?" I've known this guy for a long time, and you can imagine that his scaffolding only grows stronger over time, so that it's very rare to discuss a topic with him where he's completely adrift. It helps that he doesn't have the personality of a know-it-all; even if he is a master of a topic, he has an uncanny ability to uncover the thing you know that he doesn't, which makes conversation with him enjoyable rather than intimidating. Two final points. One, his memory is not notably better than anyone else's. He forgets conversations and situations as much as anyone else, but he definitely remembers when he's filled a hole in his scaffolding. Two, his mental scaffolding is very conventional. By that, I mean he rarely has a weird way of thinking about things that makes sense to him but to nobody else. So when he asks a question, it's almost always the same deep question that other experts in a field have been working on, rather than a strange take. While this seems like a liability, it means that his conversations with experts tend to get to the important parts very quickly, rather than wasting half an hour establishing a common lexicon. Maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, and the conventionality of his scaffolding is a consequence of the vast amount of knowledge he's learned and needed to reconcile, rather than the reverse.