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

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

#91

Post by heavenlyblue » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

thatguy0900 wrote: post #64

heavenlyblue wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

What’s the difference between being silent about I because you don’t know it and being silent about it because you know you will be judged for it?

It’s the equivalent argument for “Turn it off” in the Book of Mormon.

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

#92

Post by lg » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #38

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…

> "X value is good." Thinking that this can be true or false is itself a category error - values are more like the axioms you put into a system, and can only be "good" or "bad" with respect to .. other values.

seems you've got the idea that you 100% believe is true, now search for people who disagree :)

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

#93

Post by pjm331 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

DantesKite wrote: post #68

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…

Reminds me a lot of the list in a book I just started reading - G. Polya’s How to Solve It

1. Understand the problem

2. Devise a plan

3. Carry out the plan

4. Look back

In particular when talking about devising the plan:

“If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem?...”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

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

#94

Post by thatguy0900 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #91

thatguy0900 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. What’s the difference between being silent about I because you don’t know it and being silent about it because you know you will be judged for it? It’s the equivalent argument for “Turn it off” in the Book of Mormon.

It is very hard and obnoxious to consistently lie about your core beliefs in a group forever. It will foster resentment to be surrounded by people who openly mock or hate your opinion while you know you must remain silent. It is a very different situation to being neutral on it or agreeing with those people.

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

#95

Post by wildermuthn » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

It isn’t hard to learn how to think: practice increasingly complex levels of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools actually do a fair job of this, especially at advanced stages.

It’s trendy to criticize social media these days, and I’m not fully on that bandwagon, but there’s something to the criticism that social media and most of the internet is making us dumber with its relentless race to the bottom of reading/writing complexity. Most web content is now a cliff-note, at best. We used to learn most things by reading books. Now it’s too easy to gloss over understanding by googling the answers we need immediately. This is a generalization, and the pattern can be avoided by the disciplined, but we shouldn’t forget that tools dictate patterns of thought and behavior by what they make easy vs. what they make hard.

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

#96

Post by ncmncm » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

> When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated.

Not true. Thinking is a grab bag of heuristics. Each topic favors a different mix. The best thinkers apply several to each problem, one after the other. They collect, curate, and refine them, and discover their range of usefulness. Experience helps winnow the clinkers. Some of the best seem unpromising.

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

#97

Post by HPsquared » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

dooglius wrote: post #69

HPsquared wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Psychology and politics (which is just mass psychology) are more art than science. STEM on the other hand is built on repeatable experiments, controlled conditions and reliable rules. These foundations are much less reliable in the world of politics, philosophy and economics.

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

#98

Post by tboyd47 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

Human beings learn by example. This is no different.

If students are finding it hard to think, then perhaps it's because they have no examples around them of people thinking. Principle of parsimony.

There's also a character aspect to it. Making decisions based on your own evaluations (not an authority figure's) takes courage and confidence. To listen to others' input and re-evaluate your own decisions requires humility. To act rationally in the face of strong emotions requires tranquility of mind. Do students find in their role models the traits of courage, humility, and tranquility, or do they find the opposite; cowardice, self-righteousness, and panicky over-reaction?

If all the adults in the room are freaking out over every little problem, shaming and blaming each other, and waiting on someone higher-up to make all their important decisions for them, how can you possibly expect students to learn critical thought from them?

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

#99

Post by Archer6621 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

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…

I also don't believe in this claim, or at least in it being a generally applicable thing.

There's a point at which slowing down gives diminishing returns in my experience. I'm a music composer and I had to learn that the hard way. Sometimes my first ideas end up being good enough already, or even better than previous/future ideas that I had iterated a lot on. I also found that working for too long on a piece can potentially make it worse than previous iterations eventually.

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

#100

Post by 0xBABAD00C » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

I am not stating anything profound here, but I found that learning math and science (college level and up) has had a huge impact on my quality of thinking. I agree with other posts emphasizing that early life nature/nurture experiences can have a strong effect, but learning and doing math and science gives you the ability to acquire mental models and thought patterns honed over many generations of top minds of humanity. It's one thing to be "street smart", raw IQ + grit + right attitude, and it's another thing altogether to be able to distill systems, structures, and predictable interactions in an otherwise chaotic observed reality. To me the latter is what determines quality of thought. Anecdotally, I've met people who were far smarter than me on the raw intelligence scale, but haven't gone the math/science route, and you can just feel how poor their toolkit is for modeling different aspects of everyday reality.

A very crude analogy would be the hardware you have and the OS and software you're running on it: studying STEM subjects is akin to installing useful software, developed by generations of brilliant engineers that you wouldn't be able to reproduce on your own in 100 lifetimes.