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

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

#41

Post by OtomotO »

rzz3 wrote: post #40
keiferski wrote: post #23

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…

I 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?

I very much enjoy Richard David Precht for a nice summary of philosophy with ancient and modern context.

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

#42

Post by sammalloy »

runald wrote: post #39
ignoramous wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I 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'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.

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

#43

Post by sturza »

inglor_cz wrote: post #30
SamPatt wrote: post #22

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…

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.

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).

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

#44

Post by checkyoursudo »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #2

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

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.]

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

#45

Post by hobofan »

keiferski wrote: post #23

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…

SEP (= Plato) is a great resource for anyone who doesn't know it: 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.

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

#46

Post by pietrovismara »

rzz3 wrote: post #40
keiferski wrote: post #23

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…

I 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?

I found "on the suffering of the world" by Schopenhauer to be eye opening, especially his thoughts on death.

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

#47

Post by dgb23 »

rzz3 wrote: post #40
keiferski wrote: post #23

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…

I 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?

The Problems of Philosophy by Russel is maybe useful here.

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

#49

Post by keiferski »

rzz3 wrote: post #40
keiferski wrote: post #23

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…

I 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?

I 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.

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

#50

Post by dgb23 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #8
jmeister wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

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 wa…

It’s baffling that this response is unchallenged. Maybe because it is self-defeating, since it is in of itself a philosophical assertion?
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