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.

If you can break inaccurate mental models, life becomes easier to navigate. But how do you do that? I know two ways.

1. Find people who understand things better than you and read what they have to say. Read with the intention of answering your questions. If you can’t find the answers, email them.


2. Perform experiments. By this I don’t mean do random thing

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