Even if you can’t experience the thing directly, try going for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and

facts

, and then reason up from those facts. On foreign policy, read books published by university presses -- not

The Atlantic

or

The Economist

or whatever. You can read those after you’ve developed a model of the thing yourself,... See more

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

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

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.

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.

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

.