How To Understand Things

My countervailing advice to people trying to understand something is: go slow. Read slowly, think slowly, really spend time pondering the thing. Start by thinking about the question yourself before reading a bunch of stuff about it. A week or a month of continuous pondering about a question will get you surprisingly far.

"When I was a philosophy student, I used a photocopier to enlarge pages of books onto A3 paper. It helped me understand difficult texts by slowing me down, and it left room for my notes. My classmates thought it was ridiculous, but it helped."

There's so much this world, it's people and it's rules tell you to do, tell you to be.

It's hard to escape i... See more