How To Understand Things

And you’ll have a semantic mental ‘framework’ in your brain on which to then hang all the great things you learn from your reading, which makes it more likely that you’ll retain that stuff as well. I read somewhere that Bill Gates structures his famous “reading weeks” around an outline of important questions he’s thought about and broken down into ... See more

Importantly, this is a ‘software’ trait & is independent of more ‘hardware’ traits such as processing speed, working memory, and other such things.

But it’s not just energy. You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you a lot. You have the drive, the will to know. Related to this is honesty, or integrity: a sort of compulsive unwillingness, or... See more

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.

There are some mantra-like questions it can be helpful to ask as you’re thinking through things. Some examples:But what exactly is X? What is it? (h/t Laura Deming’s post)Why must X be true? Why does this have to be the case? What is the single, fundamental reason?Do I really believe that this is true, deep down? Would I bet a large amount of money... See more

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

One component of it is energy: thinking hard takes effort, and it’s much easier to just stop at an answer that seems to make sense, than to pursue everything that you don’t quite get down an endless, and rapidly proliferating, series of rabbit holes.

Another quality I have noticed in very intelligent people is being unafraid to look stupid.

People who have not experienced the thing are unlikely to be generating truth. More likely, they’re resurfacing cached thoughts and narratives. Reading popular science books or news articles is not a substitute for understanding, and may make you stupider, by filling your mind with narratives and stories that don’t represent your own synthesis.