Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fs.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–136 of 136 posts

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

#131

Post by originalvichy »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #56
rzz3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you don't mind a podcast or two, you can get a lot of context from these: Stephen West's "Philosophize This!" as the light-weight option, and Peter Adamsons' "History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps" as the more academic option. Both go chronologically, from pre-socratics onward. West's podcast is a bit rough in the first episodes, but it keeps getting better.

Lawrence Cahoone’s lectures on Audible are a great intro as well. One about intellectual tradition and one about political philosophy.

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

#132

Post by ifengo »

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…

Unrelated. Stumbled upon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2686142 and would love to hear how you feel about your 20s now.

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

#133

Post by vanusa »

devwastaken wrote: post #104
codingdave wrote: post #67

> 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…

University does not teach critical thinking. They teach assignments and tests, where the information is forgotten as quickly as it was received. You do not learn critical thinking having to remember every definition in the textbook. Yet that is still how classes work. Whatever the intent of liberal arts, it's a clear demonstrable failure now. You should not be able to graduate without being able to think for yourself…

University does not teach critical thinking. They teach assignments and tests, where the information is forgotten as quickly as it was received. You do not learn critical thinking having to remember every definition in the textbook. Yet that is still how classes work.

Depends what school you go to and crucially -- your attitude going into that school. I never once thought of my education as a matter of learning a set of definitions, or even a series of concepts. But rather -- as the teachers at my (far from elite) high school articulated to me -- as a process, a way of learning where ideas really come from, and for "learning how to learn".

You're perfectly right -- classes by themselves just don't do much. It's your decision to sit down and learn the material, not just for the test, but for the sake of you're life's work and the person you want to be -- that's when you start learning.

But if you expect to just show up and heave your head filled with knowledge -- let alone critical thinking skills -- you're going to be bitterly disappointed.

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

#134

Post by dunemaster »

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…

Absolutely this. All great writers were extremely prolific and disciplined about their craft with no exception. This whole myth about some genius lying on the table and thinking about the order of arranging words is a myth that romanticizes the act of writing.

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

#135

Post by socratees »

amznbyebyebye wrote: post #17

For solving leetcode style problems: (1) try the problem, meaning get to the logic for the solution and then (2) implement your solution at least once (3) read the solution (4) scrutinize incredibly heavily why you got it wrong or why your code wasn’t as efficient as the ideal solution (5) build a map of the key learnings, Rinse and repeat on new problems.

Can you kindly elaborate on steps 4 and 5?

How do you do that post-mortem? I can agree, let's say if the problem is 'pick top k elements', and you already know what needs to be done, you can hone in on what went wrong. But in cases where you don't know how to come up with the steps, how do you go about that?

Thanks!

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

#136

Post by ltbarcly3 »

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?

It's not a philosophical assertion, it is very much a falsifiable claim. We can find problems where there was a scientific solution and a non science based solution and see which was more effective. The problem is, without statistics most solutions cannot even be evaluated in anything but the most ludicrous, angels dancing on pins ways.
Post reply on HN