How To Understand 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

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.

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.

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 pieces. e.g. he’ll think about “water scarcity” and then break it down into questions like “how much water is there in the world?”, “where does existing drinking water come from?”, “how do you turn

... 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.

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

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.

looking stupid takes courage, and sometimes it’s easier to just let things slide. It is striking how many situations I am in where I start asking basic questions, feel guilty for slowing the group down, and it turns out that nobody understood what was going on to begin with

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

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