How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by marginalia_nu » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #35

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…

> 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 think you can term flat-earthers intelligent. That's a dangerously low bar.

Well if they aren't intelligent, wouldn't understanding their reasoning be easier to understand? I at least don't associate simpletons with convoluted logic.

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

#62

Post by HPsquared » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

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 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.

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

#63

Post by 0xBABAD00C » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #60

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bu…

Your 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.

I 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.

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

#64

Post by thatguy0900 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #60

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bu…

Your 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.

It'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.

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

#65

Post by 0xBABAD00C » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #52

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bu…

When that happens go to William James and read Pragmatism, then realize you can just decide what you want to believe based on what is adaptive for you. (Easier said than done, and first requires convincing yourself that “true” is often less valuable than “useful.”)

> When that happens go to William James and read Pragmatism, then realize you can just decide what you want to believe based on what is adaptive for you.

Now when that happens, also make sure to remember all the adaptationists who stayed silent and turned a blind eye on all the atrocities committed by their governments and leaders, in their name and with their silent agreement.

Ultimately this comes down to individual and group-level optimization strategies: do we exploit the current hill of the fitness landscape we are on, or do we explore to find other hills on this landscape. Adaptive silence is conforming with the group to stay on the current hill, truth-seeking at all costs is sending scouts to explore other hills with the possibility of discovering new heights for the group. A highly social and truly adaptive species needs a combination of both strategies, it's a delicate balance and neither extreme is smart or risk-free.

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

#66

Post by jccalhoun » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

dgb23 wrote: post #50

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

agreed. It is a strawman argument.

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

#67

Post by codingdave » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

> 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.

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

#68

Post by DantesKite » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

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

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

#69

Post by dooglius » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #62

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Is it actually more effective at that? Are people who employ humanities thinking any better at say social engineering than are people with equivalent verbal skills who don't employ humanities thinking?

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

#70

Post by pitspotter2 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

checkyoursudo wrote: post #44

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.]

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

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.