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.

cognitive velocity. It was necessary, I concluded, to improve my sample efficiency .

I define intelligence, loosely, as sensemaking from the observation of patterns. A smarter person can detect patterns before a dumber person. The smarter mind is more efficient with the data it receives from the world. So what I really needed to do, while I still po... See more