How to think, the reality:
- be born smart
- grow around smart succesful people
- discard all self improvement and "how to" material
How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
21–30 of 136 posts
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#22This 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.
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#23This 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.
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#24[deleted]
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#25Schools and colleges need to teach this: https://www.criticalthinking.org/ instead of how to feel emotions and think with emotions.
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#26I 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.
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.
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#27This 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…
Any books you recommend on these topics?
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#28> The best way to improve your ability to think is to actually spend time thinking.
dooooooooh
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#29This 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…
Any books you recommend on these topics?
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.
Re: How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
#30This 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…
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.