71–80 of 136 posts
> 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 li…
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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…
And 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.
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…
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.
> 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 li…
This is the ideal. Sadly, reality rarely actually measures up.
What liberal arts colleges most commonly do in practice is assign lots of work that assumes that students can think critically in all the ways you describe, and expect that either they've already learned it, or they will learn it in order to be able to actually complete the work.
There are certainly individual professors at most liberal arts colleges who take it upon themselves to explicitly teach such things, and there are a few that even have a robust enough "core curriculum" that it includes at least one class explicitly focused on those skills, but by and large, there is no formal, explicit teaching of skills like critical thinking in higher education.
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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, to…
Original 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.
> Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking They do in the decade they spend trying to teach each kid math. It mostly fails though, but not because they aren't trying, teaching how to think to people who don't think well is really hard simply because they don't think well and therefore can't easily pick up what you try to teach them.
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 pro…
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?
Descartes - "Meditations"
Rawls - "lectures on the history of moral philosophy"
Or some modern ones like Alain de Botton
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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…
1. Analyzing one-time events of extreme complexity occurring on a human scale. Science isn't really useful for examining the Punic Wars or the American Civil War or World War 2. We could throw our hands up and say that it's impossible to have knowledge about these things, that whatever we say about them is just memetically compelling drivel, but I don't think that's true.
2. Questions involving human values. Hume summarized this nicely in his analysis of the "is-ought" problem. Science is unmatched on the "is" side of the equation, but for the "ought" side it's pretty useless. Of course psychology and neurobiology can examine human motivations, but I think there is something more subtle and complex about the human notion of "value" that doesn't get addressed there and is probably not reducible below the level of human consciousness and experience. Even if you accept the idea that "human beings are just biological machines compelled by their neurochemistry which drives them to behaviors x y and z," you still have to decide what to do with that information, so it becomes a circular problem and you cannot reduce your own experience below the level of a consciously deciding being.
3. Examinations of the human experience. This is where literature really thrives, in my opinion. Sure, I could try to reduce "Anna Karenina" to a set of scientific explanations, but I think AK is actually a much more semantically compact structure for explaining the experience of human families and marriage than a "more precise" scientific explanation would be.
All of these have the common property that the experience of being human cannot be extracted from the knowledge equation. That of course makes their statements less likely to be capital-T "True" and more prone to imprecision, because human life occurs on a big complex messy scale that is extraordinarily hard to analyze and that may vary across groups and individuals. But when I read a great novel or work of history, I don't agree that I'm just falling into some memetic trap. Oftentimes I think the author has pinned down some aspect of reality that would be impossible to capture in any other way.
EDIT: I think it's worth pointing out as a bit of evidence for my worldview here the Francis Bacon's "Novum Organum," which could be said to be the foundation of scientific thinking, is itself a work of philosophy.
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…
To take liberties with your statement, I'd paraphrase this as "writing is work." I too agree with your skepticism of the article, and I'd argue it's because the platonic ideal of thinking before acting isn't actually how humans think.
Humans fundamentally do, and this action provides the ingredients from which to construct thought. Good writers produce lots of bad writing which allows them to reflect on their mistakes or identify the special subset of their writing that was good.