How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught

277 132 5 years ago

ltbarcly33• 5 years ago

If you have taken upper level college STEM, or Philosophy courses, literally this is what they are trying to teach you.

jmeister2• 5 years ago

1. The article quotes a famous essay by an Ivy League humanities prof lamenting that students aren’t taught to think any more.

2. STEM thinking doesn’t carry over well to social systems. Hayek devoted his career to this problem. I recommend reading his Nobel speech, “The Pretense of Knowledge”.

halpert2• 5 years ago

Hayek had a belief that society couldn't be engineered through knowledge, but that's far from a settled fact. With the rise of MMT, it may be that Hayek was largely wrong. Critical thinking would indicate that, while his argument is compelling, there isn't enough evidence to have a definitive opinion either way.

ltbarcly33• 5 years ago

STEM thinking is the only kind of thinking that works at all, for anything, on anything, at all. Humanities thinking is just combining words together in complicated and memetically convincing ways and declaring victory without even having a way to check if anything works. The humanities is and always will be isomorphic to the Catholic Church in 1250, just dressed up in today's clothes.

Hayek wasn't advocating some way of thinking that is better than scientific quantification or another kind of Positivist analysis involving mathematics and some form of the scientific method, he was saying that the complexity made such a quantification hopeless. He wasn't saying the English Department could centrally plan an economy, he was saying nobody could do it!

ignoramous4• 5 years ago

I recommend reading his Nobel speech, "The Pretence of Knowledge".

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay...

Some excerpts, since I found it to be a riveting read:

...failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."
And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.
...the social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. Competition, for instance, is a process which will produce certain results only if it proceeds among a fairly large number of acting persons.
..."phenomena of organized complexity" with which we have to deal in the social sciences... [where] the character of the structures showing it depends not only on the properties of the individual elements of which they are composed, and the relative frequency with which they occur, but also on the manner in which the individual elements are connected with each other. In the explanation of the working of such structures we can for this reason not replace the information about the individual elements by statistical information, but require full information about each element if from our theory we are to derive specific predictions about individual events. Without such specific information about the individual elements we shall be confined to what on another occasion I have called mere pattern predictions – predictions of some of the general attributes of the structures that will form themselves, but not containing specific statements about the individual elements of which the structures will be made up.
I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.
...I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking. It is indeed true that, in contrast to the exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our profession are not always prepared to accept this. Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.
The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science.
A theory of essentially complex phenomena must refer to a large number of particular facts; and to derive a prediction from it, or to test it, we have to ascertain all these particular facts. Once we succeeded in this there should be no particular difficulty about deriving testable predictions – with the help of modern computers it should be easy enough to insert these data into the appropriate blanks of the theoretical formulae and to derive a prediction. The real difficulty, to the solution of which science has little to contribute, and which is sometimes indeed insoluble, consists in the ascertainment of the particular facts.
A simple example will show the nature of this difficulty. Consider some ball game played by a few people of approximately equal skill. If we knew a few particular facts in addition to our general knowledge of the ability of the individual players, such as their state of attention, their perceptions and the state of their hearts, lungs, muscles etc. at each moment of the game, we could probably predict the outcome. Indeed, if we were familiar both with the game and the teams we should probably have a fairly shrewd idea on what the outcome will depend. But we shall of course not be able to ascertain those facts and in consequence the result of the game will be outside the range of the scientifically predictable, however well we may know what effects particular events would have on the result of the game. This does not mean that we can make no predictions at all about the course of such a game. If we know the rules of the different games we shall, in watching one, very soon know which game is being played and what kinds of actions we can expect and what kind not. But our capacity to predict will be confined to such general characteristics of the events to be expected and not include the capacity of predicting particular individual events.
Of course, compared with the precise predictions we have learnt to expect in the physical sciences, this sort of mere pattern predictions is a second best with which one does not like to have to be content. Yet the danger of which I want to warn is precisely the belief that in order to have a claim to be accepted as scientific it is necessary to achieve more. This way lies charlatanism and worse. To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought not to discourage the over-confident because their experiments may after all produce some new insights. But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority.
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

Lessons for System Design practioners in there somewhere.

throwawaygh4• 5 years ago

an Ivy League humanities prof

...whose most popular professional contribution appears to be lamenting his own irrelevance from the comfort of an ivory tower with an endowment whose safe withdrawal rate is larger than many country's GDPs.

STEM thinking doesn’t carry over well to social systems

1. Apparently is does. Otherwise the newspapers full of humanities folks would've won the advertising wars.

2. What the hell is "STEM thinking"?

2a. Is Philosophy "STEM thinking? OP mentioned philosophy, right? Although I can't pretend surprise at the notion that ignoring 1 of 2 examples counts as close reading these days in humanities departments.

2b. Is Geometry "STEM thinking"? Geometry has certainly been included in the western definition of liberal art for longer than Economics has been a science. Or a field. Or a word.

2c. Are esoteric prognostications on the nature of transubstantiation "STEM thinking"? What about (other) extremist propaganda that flames religious violence (today instead of far long ago)?

Hayek

Even hard core leftist scientists would probably agree with Hayek's critique of the social sciences, none of which fall under the STEM umbrella.

Also, have fun with the ensuing flame war this is sure to trigger.

My contribution: Hayek always struck me as a very crisp thinker, but in terms of intent more of a high brow propagandist than a public intellectual. The Google ad engineers don't really give a shit about how you perceive various humidifiers, but do sincerely want you to click the ad. Hayek was the google ad engineer of his age, and was quite good at his job. Which isn't to say he didn't care. He did care. A lot. He was just a bit of a tool. But, crisp thinker. Good tool. Comfy life from it, too, and well-deserved. No judgement here.

checkyoursudo• 5 years ago

My bachelor's degree was in philosophy. We were taught almost nothing besides how to think, which ironically perhaps made it a bit harder to find jobs right out of college.

I knew a successful commercial real estate broker who once told me (socially), "Someday I'm going to figure out how to make real money off of philosophy majors." Me too, man, me too. [Narrator: He never did.]

pitspotter2• 5 years ago

Philosophy (as I regard it) is a sort of history of very clever but confused thinking, thinking which didn't lead anywhere. Thinking which did lead somewhere got relabelled science or something-else-not-philosophy.

Thus what little philosophy I have read (mainly Popper) has helped me to tolerate confusion.

Paradoxically my ability to think has been improved by this ability to be confused, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxa1gLt5YKI

For instance, I've noticed that most people refuse to see problems. They either want the answer straight away, or they want to pretend that the question or task is invalid or not needed. It takes a real thinker to put a confusing thought on one side and then pick it up later.

bern4444• 5 years ago

I would have expected this to go into ways of thinking. Understanding first and second order effects of decisions, means of analyzing situations - who's involved, what are my goals, what are my peers' goals, how can I push them in the direction I want, etc

This is fairly straightforward though.

elbear• 5 years ago

If you're not familiar with the site that has this blog, it teaches mental models, so it goes through the things you mentioned. I guess the author assumed the readers would be familiar with his work, so he didn't feel the need to link to those pages.

throwawaygh4• 5 years ago

I guess we can at least take shallow pleasure in the irony of an article entitled "How To Think" written with the style and substance of LinkedIn Spam.

nefitty• 5 years ago

Can you recommend something on the topic? I'm asking sincerely because I'm currently working on my personal study plan.

ngcazz• 5 years ago

This was posted a few months ago: https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-clearly-to-improve-und...

throwawaygh4• 5 years ago

Study something deeply under the direction of an expert critic. Repeat at least once. This is difficult to find -- even most colleges/unis don't provide it. Mastery takes years. Best to do this in your youth.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Without criticism, at least a couple times to mastery, it's extraordinarily difficult to differentiate confusion from clarity.

(Programming is a wonderful field because reality is such a harsh critic and experiments are free... your code either works or it doesn't, and the most expensive input to the compiler is measured in human heart beats. But the field is exceptionally rare in that respect.)

But also, as a general heuristic, it's safe to avoid 4 minute reads that promise to tell you something as grand as "How To Think".

meimo• 5 years ago

This style (and linkedin posts) remind me of one of Edward Tufte's observations, that business presentations and toddler's books have around the same words per page.

quocanh• 5 years ago

How to think: think longer.

throwawaygh4• 5 years ago

"I have spent endless nights thinking about who killed JKF. Surely, now, I know how to think clearly on the subject. Please come down to my basement where I have a special room dedicated to all the thinking I've done on this subject. And I have thought longer on this subject than anyone else, so clearly I know how to think on this subject."

ncmncm2• 5 years ago

I have a bulletin board with a network of yarn stretched between pinned up pictures, clippings, drawings, and notes for you to study.

amznbyebyebye• 5 years ago

For solving leetcode style problems:

(1) try the problem, meaning get to the logic for the solution and then

(2) implement your solution at least once

(3) read the solution

(4) scrutinize incredibly heavily why you got it wrong or why your code wasn’t as efficient as the ideal solution <- this post mortem step is the secret sauce to getting better at these problems, but you have to go really really deep. At this step you will uncover some key learnings.

(5) build a map of the key learnings,

Rinse and repeat on new problems.

socratees• 5 years ago

Can you kindly elaborate on steps 4 and 5?

How do you do that post-mortem? I can agree, let's say if the problem is 'pick top k elements', and you already know what needs to be done, you can hone in on what went wrong. But in cases where you don't know how to come up with the steps, how do you go about that?

Thanks!

Jensson• 5 years ago

Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking

They do in the decade they spend trying to teach each kid math. It mostly fails though, but not because they aren't trying, teaching how to think to people who don't think well is really hard simply because they don't think well and therefore can't easily pick up what you try to teach them.

CrazyStat• 5 years ago

Strong disagree, at least in the US. With the possible exception of a proof-based geometry course, almost all of US math education is memorizing and applying rules and procedures with minimal emphasis on how to think about problems. Most math teachers themselves don't really know how to think about problems.

trabant002• 5 years ago

How to think, the reality:

- be born smart

- grow around smart succesful people

- discard all self improvement and "how to" material

SamPatt2• 5 years ago

This claim that the best writers write slowly is suspicious at best.

Many of the best writers out there were prolific. And there are innumerable bad writers who barely write at all.

Writing is an iterative process. I'm skeptical of advice about slowing down writing intentionally. I've found writing more and editing more improves my writing more than slower, more deliberate writing, particularly since it's less likely to happen.

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

This is suspicious to me as well. I write professionally and I know many others who do as well. My experience tells me that people have some sort of innate writing capacity to them - some are waterfalls, some are little trickles, but you cannot judge the quality of the water just by size of the stream.

sturza• 5 years ago

I think the main point was not about a mechanical process to write as little as possible. At least i did not understand it that way. I got that the "final" sentence or piece of text is hard to come by, and "good" writers iterate a lot, that's why their output comes so slow - one paragraph per month, for example. Another signal why i think this was the correct interpretation - throughout the article, they present slow thinking and not stopping to an impulsive idea, and considering it the input to the bigger text (that authors write).

abernard1• 5 years ago

Writing is an iterative process.

To take liberties with your statement, I'd paraphrase this as "writing is work." I too agree with your skepticism of the article, and I'd argue it's because the platonic ideal of thinking before acting isn't actually how humans think.

Humans fundamentally do, and this action provides the ingredients from which to construct thought. Good writers produce lots of bad writing which allows them to reflect on their mistakes or identify the special subset of their writing that was good.

Archer6621• 5 years ago

I also don't believe in this claim, or at least in it being a generally applicable thing.

There's a point at which slowing down gives diminishing returns in my experience. I'm a music composer and I had to learn that the hard way. Sometimes my first ideas end up being good enough already, or even better than previous/future ideas that I had iterated a lot on. I also found that working for too long on a piece can potentially make it worse than previous iterations eventually.

SamPatt2• 5 years ago

I find the same with photography. I notice when editing that the first photo of a scene / subject is the best photo much more frequently than chance.

Though it's also true that the last photo is also much more frequent. If I took 20 photos of something, I'd say I use either the first or last photo taken probably 1/3 of the time.

dunemaster• 5 years ago

Absolutely this. All great writers were extremely prolific and disciplined about their craft with no exception. This whole myth about some genius lying on the table and thinking about the order of arranging words is a myth that romanticizes the act of writing.

keiferski4• 5 years ago

This is such a huge topic that any answer shorter than a book will be inadequate. But I've found two things to be helpful for learning "how to think."

1. Study philosophy. While defining philosophy precisely is difficult/impossible, it's essentially the study of thought. But, it's very important to study philosophies outside of your normal frame of reference. Read books from different eras, languages, countries, and viewpoints that are alien to your current way of thinking. If you're from the modern secular West, that likely means you should read premodern, religious, non-Western writings. The idea is to peek into a different world and see how human minds operated.

A good method for this is: pick an idea that you are 100% sure is true. Not "the Earth is round" but "X value is good." Then search for people who disagree. Trying to understand how an intelligent person could come to an opposite conclusion will improve your thinking ability.

2. Study formal logic. Especially symbolic logic, as it helps you focus on abstract structures and not on their content. The feeling of mental clarity that comes from this is hard to describe, but I really recommend it.

akelly• 5 years ago

Any books you recommend on these topics?

keiferski4• 5 years ago

Sure, for 1, Nietzsche is always a good choice if you want someone to challenge modern assumptions. René Guenon if you're looking for a mystical, metaphysical approach to religion, especially Hinduism and Islam. I also really love the Tao Te Ching and think it's a totally different approach to Western ones.

For 2, I used Virginia Klenk's Understanding Symbolic Logic in a course and recommend it.

oldsecondhand• 5 years ago

Nigel Warburton: Philosophy - The Basics

tgv• 5 years ago

Formal logic isn't special in helping you think. It doesn't offer any tool that you can use in real life. You might just as well study chess or engine design deeply. It's the studying and problem solving that trains thinking.

keiferski4• 5 years ago

I found that studying symbolic logic, especially in a philosophical (language-based) context, helped me clarify my thinking. In other words, it helped me differentiate between concepts, trace arguments, and determine if something actually made sense. It’s not so much about solving problems, more about “organizing” the way you think.

barrenko• 5 years ago

Montaigne's essays did the trick for me.

ignoramous4• 5 years ago

Trying to understand how an intelligent person could come to an opposite conclusion will improve your thinking ability.

I don't think you can term flat-earthers intelligent. That's a dangerously low bar.

A good method for this is: pick an idea that you are 100% sure is true. Not "the Earth is round" but "X value is good." Then search for people who disagree.

This is a neat trick (does it have name?), but the true value is in realising their fallacies to hone your own thought process, not why / how they convinced themselves through deliberation, and contemplation, and divine knowledge, and self-enlightenment, and what have you.

Study philosophy. Study formal logic.

Philosophy ranked as the highest form of knowledge among the polymaths in the Islamic Golden Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsafa

The encyclopedia of Ikhwan al-Safa and other such massive bodies of work are representative of Philosophy's central role among the scholars at the time: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ikhwan-al-safa/

runald2• 5 years ago

I don't have any numbers on this, but I'm certain lots of "flat-eathers" are just trolls that enjoys annoying people who tries to act smug and smart, but in actuality failed to get the humour behind the flatness of earth. Anyone who is seriously trying to argue with flat-earthers have a very low bar for intelligence. Which is not to say that there aren't actual dumb people who actually believe the earth is flat, but I reckon those people are far below the minority.

marginalia_nu6• 5 years ago

I don't think you can term flat-earthers intelligent. That's a dangerously low bar.

Well if they aren't intelligent, wouldn't understanding their reasoning be easier to understand? I at least don't associate simpletons with convoluted logic.

0xBABAD00C4• 5 years ago

pick an idea that you are 100% sure is true. Not "the Earth is round" but "X value is good." Then search for people who disagree.

The risk, of course, is getting convinced otherwise and having to live with that, in cases where "X value is good" is a socially useful and/or mandatory lie. Learning to think comes with its own dangers: knowing something isn't true requires more energy to hide it, and civilization is built on layers of lies. You could've gotten your head chopped off in the middle ages, for instance, for thinking anything naughty against the church and its leaders.

ethanbond• 5 years ago

When that happens go to William James and read Pragmatism, then realize you can just decide what you want to believe based on what is adaptive for you. (Easier said than done, and first requires convincing yourself that “true” is often less valuable than “useful.”)

heavenlyblue2• 5 years ago

Your opinion on this is akin to my parents opinion about sports: those who do sports get traumas and then regret it. Therefore don’t do sports.

This is a very weak fallacy.

Zababa• 5 years ago

This is an inherent risk to a lot of things that not many people talk about. Learning more things, seeing more of the world always comes with a risk of feeling trapped in your old life at the end. This is true for abstract things like thinking about freedom or liberty or equality, but also for pedestrian things like trying a better than usual toilet paper.

pjc50• 5 years ago

"X value is good."

Thinking that this can be true or false is itself a category error - values are more like the axioms you put into a system, and can only be "good" or "bad" with respect to .. other values.

lg• 5 years ago

seems you've got the idea that you 100% believe is true, now search for people who disagree :)

rzz3• 5 years ago

I don’t enjoy reading the old language and lack of modern context. Any more modern philosophers you recommend reading? Or modern summaries of older philosophers?

OtomotO• 5 years ago

I very much enjoy Richard David Precht for a nice summary of philosophy with ancient and modern context.

pietrovismara• 5 years ago

I found "on the suffering of the world" by Schopenhauer to be eye opening, especially his thoughts on death.

dgb232• 5 years ago

The Problems of Philosophy by Russel is maybe useful here.

keiferski4• 5 years ago

I generally don't like summaries, as you just get a contemporary interpretation of what the translator/academic thinks the philosopher was saying. Far better to go straight to the source.

Eventually you'll need to read the original works, but I'd recommend starting with philosophical fiction. Crime and Punishment, The Plague, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc. Plato's dialogues are pretty readable, too, as is Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche.

codegrappler• 5 years ago

If you are American I would recommend “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville. Very easy to read and has some really mind opening lines. “Americans are cartesians without ever having read Descartes” still sticks with me to this day and I last read it over ten years ago.

marginalia_nu6• 5 years ago

If you don't mind a podcast or two, you can get a lot of context from these: Stephen West's "Philosophize This!" as the light-weight option, and Peter Adamsons' "History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps" as the more academic option.

Both go chronologically, from pre-socratics onward. West's podcast is a bit rough in the first episodes, but it keeps getting better.

estaseuropano2• 5 years ago

I think in many cases the old philosophers are still very readable, but make sure you get a modern translation. Publishers like to reprint 60-100 year old public domain translations, which often makes the material very inaccessible. Get a good copy from a still-breathing translator of anything like Plato and You'll likely enjoy it. Other more modenish ones:

Descartes - "Meditations"

Rawls - "lectures on the history of moral philosophy"

Or some modern ones like Alain de Botton

hobofan• 5 years ago

SEP (= Plato) is a great resource for anyone who doesn't know it: https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

Especially topics related to ontology and epistemy are some that have given me a new lens to view the world with.

marginalia_nu6• 5 years ago

If you're from the modern secular West, that likely means you should read premodern, religious, non-Western writings

I wouldn't skip the western writers.

A lot of us walk around in the ruins of thousands of years of western thought, without even realizing it. So many things are taken for granted without any sort of motivation, it's a very shaky foundation once you start poking at it a bit.

Ask almost person simple questions about central themes in western thought, ask them why freedom is a desirable thing, ask them why society should be just or why we should have equality, why we should care about human rights, and they'll most likely just get flustered and call you an idiot for not already knowing the answer which they refuse to tell you because you're obviously too dumb. These are fairly simple questions that could come from the mouth of a child, and they absolutely do have well thought out answers, but the point is that almost nobody dares pose these questions, so they live in ignorance instead. Everyone's a skeptic but only when it comes to things that differ from what they already believe is true.

To that end, Plato is a fantastic teacher on how to identify things we take for granted, how to challenge assumptions and how to arrive at answers, and an all-round enjoyable read to boot.

estaseuropano2• 5 years ago

Fully agree on both points. 1) For anyone getting started, I think the easiest point of entry is still Descartes' Meditations. Incredibly cogent, accessible and shows in practice a way of thinking. I disagree with the last two bit that's exactly what you should do: follow a train of thought until you find better arguments.

2) formal logic seems incredibly boring, a kind of further abstraction of maths, and when I was studying it was everyone's least favorite subject. But of all things I've studied this has given me some of the most practical thinking tools that I use every day. Its like learning cheat codes for the world of reasoning.

adverbly• 5 years ago

It sounds like you aren't quite talking about the same sort of thing as the author is. The author seems to be focused more on independent, original thought, and actually recommends more or less the opposite to your points:

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself.

Your advice seems to be focused on how to "build a better intuition/thinking" skills(what a CEO might typically want to learn), where the author's sounds to be more around "how to build high quality original work"(what a creator might want to do). Your advice probably fits the title of "how to think" better, but there's something to what the author is saying as well - high quality, original work is extremely valuable. Again, you're right - this deserves a book.

ifengo• 5 years ago

Unrelated. Stumbled upon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2686142 and would love to hear how you feel about your 20s now.

cable2600• 5 years ago

Schools and colleges need to teach this: https://www.criticalthinking.org/ instead of how to feel emotions and think with emotions.

Lapsa• 5 years ago

The best way to improve your ability to think is to actually spend time thinking.

dooooooooh

nathias• 5 years ago

Thinking is not one skill, it is the totality of your cognition and its uses. There are no shortcuts to take, learn philosophy, science, art, but before you can do that you have to learn how to doubt yourself and to make yourself receptive to arguments.

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated.

wow, my reflexive screw you kicked in so hard just then I should go check my blood pressure.

toolslive• 5 years ago

You can also limit yourself to a very small universe to make it easier to think correctly. However, results might be disappointing. Take for instance the game of chess. It's embarassing that we humans are not very good at thinking correctly and we're not very good at thinking deeply neither. It turns out we're better at using shallow pattern recognition, instincts, gut feeling and gambling.

veritascap• 5 years ago

Check out the book Maxims for Thinking Analytically. Then read Power vs. Force by David Hawkins to get the other side. Even better skip both and read Iain McGilchrist’s new 3000 page 2 volume work: The Matter With Things.

passion__desire• 5 years ago

https://www.citatum.org/book/Intuition_Pumps_and_Other_Tools...

You can`t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can`t do much thinking with your bare brain.

- Bo Dahlbom, quoted by Daniel Dennett in his book

"Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 (talk by Daniel on Google Campus)

codingdave2• 5 years ago

Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking.

Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do.

There is definitely a financial problem with the cost of college, I don't want to diminish that fact. Our higher educational system needs a refactor for a plethora of valid reasons...

But how to think - how to deconstruct, compare, contrast, and reconstruct into something new - this is exactly the basis for traditional liberal arts education. It is why they have you study a broad set of topics -- to apply that thinking both into your own areas of expertise, and across broad subject matters. To build you up with T-shaped knowledge and the ability to expand it further.

I feel the understated problem in our educational system is that people are being encouraged to think of it as a place to get job skills to get your first job, and thereby people don't even realize the underlying lessons that it really teaches.

Maybe the ideal answer would be to get some of that pushed down to earlier levels of school.

danaris• 5 years ago

Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do.

This is the ideal. Sadly, reality rarely actually measures up.

What liberal arts colleges most commonly do in practice is assign lots of work that assumes that students can think critically in all the ways you describe, and expect that either they've already learned it, or they will learn it in order to be able to actually complete the work.

There are certainly individual professors at most liberal arts colleges who take it upon themselves to explicitly teach such things, and there are a few that even have a robust enough "core curriculum" that it includes at least one class explicitly focused on those skills, but by and large, there is no formal, explicit teaching of skills like critical thinking in higher education.

padastra• 5 years ago

I am not aware of any data that colleges--liberal arts or otherwise--teach much in terms of critical thinking. Rather their value seems to derive primarily from their ability to select talented students and provide them with a network of similarly talented peers. That and they get "credit" for the learnings of students as they age from 18 - 22/26, when that's a pretty ripe time for maturing thought with or without the classroom.

Moreover, it's clear that most colleges agree with my viewpoint. For example, if Harvard's product was an amazing curriculum, they could expand that to many, many more students than their current class size and charge for it (instead, their actions are rational when their product is exclusivity and high-talent networks).

CactusOnFire• 5 years ago

My BA degree required taking a class called 'Critical Thinking' which focused on formal logic.

I do agree with the sentiment, and that schools need a massive overhaul, but I figured that I should provide my 1 data point to the discussion.

JackFr• 5 years ago

Though I have a degree in math, my undergraduate experiance was at a liberal arts college. Outside of my major I was required to take at least 2 history classes, 2 philosphy classes, 2 theology classes, 2 lietrature classes, 2 social science classes and a foreign language (modern or classical) to the intermediate level. I was a very rich and rewarding experience, and I firmy believe every bit of it makes me a better software developer and human being.

That being said, there was no explicit 'critical thinking' aspect to it, rather one learned the importance of reading and writing. If we define 'critical thinking' as the ability to bith understand a subtle argument and to make one, it was the reading and writing that did that.

bnralt• 5 years ago

Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do.

Where's the evidence that they do? And how would we determine which schools/teachers/courses do this effectively, and which don't?

It's not unusual that people who are taught to think less critically believe that they are thinking more critically (conspiracy theorists are a good example of this, as are most ideologues). So let's consider another possibility - perhaps colleges teach students to think less critically, but to believe that they are thinking more critically. It's worth at least considering whether or not this is the case, instead of simply assuming it's not.

I often see a lot of comments assuming that colleges teach critical thinking, but I rarely see much critical thinking applied to that assumption.

andi999• 5 years ago

Probably part of it is that (at least I think so) critical thinking is not a good word for the process. It might be better called evidence based analysis or fact based thinking.

loki49152• 5 years ago

This should be what we expect to find, at least in US schools, because it was the explicitly stated, intended purpose of Progressive Education. They designed the entirety of their program after the Prussian model which was to produce workers trained enough to succeed in farms or factories but not smart enough to question the orders of their leaders.

Read William James. Read John Dewey - but really read him, because he was more aware that he had to soft-sell the socialist indoctrination program to an individualistic culture that wasn’t interested in buying.

MCllorf• 5 years ago

Producing data for something like that sounds like an incredible ask and I'd be super interested to see how other people have tried to tackle that problem.

My anecdotal experience is that they teach something close to that in philosophy departments, at least insofar as you need to be able to present the logical steps and connections you're making in a plain way so your paper is easier to engage with regardless of how abstract the topic is.

I think the actual critical thinking is something that happens internally and you can't really correct or improve that as a teacher if the student isn't capable of explaining what they're thinking - and if you can teach the student to explain what's going on inside their head, they can learn more effectively from people more intelligent than them later on because then it's public knowledge what they're screwing up instead of private. So to that end good writing might be even more fundamental than critical thinking skills.

trabant002• 5 years ago

how to think - how to deconstruct, compare, contrast, and reconstruct

That is not "how to think" in my opinion. That is how to split hairs. And the results of such education - or better said lack of results - are quite telling.

If we only talk about formal education math does a way better job of teaching you how to think.

codingdave2• 5 years ago

That is how to split hairs.

That was a common topic of discussion when in the middle of the process, too - was this actually helping us? We (my classmates and I) always said that the worst education ever is half of a liberal arts education, because you learned how to rip everything apart but did not learn how to constructively put it back together. You have to complete the cycle, not just tear things down.

gumby• 5 years ago

> how to think - how to deconstruct, compare, contrast, and reconstruct
That is not "how to think" in my opinion. That is how to split hairs.

I don’t know about you but the GP’s process describes what I do when looking at a problem and deciding what code to write, or when visiting (or revisiting) a piece of code that needs attention.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

"Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do."

I'm not convinced this is actually true, having been through a Liberal Arts education myself. During my orientation the professors would proudly extol the virtues of University and how we were about to embark on a four year journey that would make us into true critical thinkers, members of a society able appreciate the world by exposing us to as many disparate subjects as possible.

In practice, though, there were a set of GenEd courses I had to fulfill in order to graduate. Of course the GenEd courses touted themselves as critical thinking crucibles but I just found them to be mere extensions of what I had been learning in High School. Rhetoric 101 and 102 wasn't about persuasion, it was about reading a common book and writing an essay about it's themes - exactly the kind of thing I had been doing since middle school. Essays were just essays. There was nothing particularly new or more difficult about the lessons designed to teach us critical thinking.

Edit: The essence of what I am getting at is twofold. One, critical thinking IS being taught in schools already. I suspect "we don't teach kids critical thinking" is a reflexive go-to trope to explain why so many people seem irrational. But teaching these concepts is not a new revelation and teachers have been doing so for decades, if not generations. Even in antiquity people tried to teach about the difference between Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

Two, "critical thinking" in College/University Liberal Arts curricula is not radically different from the methods used in high school. Namely, common assignments and asking the students to elaborate on their views and defend them. There is no secret method to producing critical thinkers that is accessible through college education. I assert it is merely more of the same.

devwastaken• 5 years ago

University does not teach critical thinking. They teach assignments and tests, where the information is forgotten as quickly as it was received. You do not learn critical thinking having to remember every definition in the textbook. Yet that is still how classes work.

Whatever the intent of liberal arts, it's a clear demonstrable failure now. You should not be able to graduate without being able to think for yourself on a wide range of topics. Yet here we are, and we know that people heavily compartmentalize and have severe difficulties getting into the professions related to their degree. Even the employers no longer believe a degree serves critical thinking. It just says you have debt, are willing to work for less, and will be easy to push over.

We can no longer economically afford to keep the social experiment going. The poor are kept poor and the rich rich with the insane requirements and costs of a degree. Defund universities across the board, fire the accreditors, remove all these nonesense old people sitting on a government paycheck stolen from the middle class.

throwoutway• 5 years ago

Even the employers no longer believe a degree serves critical thinking. It just says you have debt, are willing to work for less, and will be easy to push over.

I’ve been told (by employers) that “it only shows that you can stick to something for four years without giving up”. Which makes it a ridiculously expensive proposition

rileyphone2• 5 years ago

There are plenty of university classes that go beyond “teaching assignments and tests”, though they’re easy to miss. My favorite courses were those in a room of less than 20 where speaking in the class felt natural and encouraged, whether a math or philosophy class, and grades were evaluated from demonstrating understanding.

I believe that making student loans expellable in bankruptcy would go a long way to righting the bloated costs and budgets we see today. There’s also probably a case for setting a price ceiling based on a multiple of the local minimum wage, as well as a whole slew of strategies to be explored before launching a salvo against the research institutions that power our scientific progress.

8note• 5 years ago

The only university courses I know of that are about rote memorization are biology classes, but those aren't liberal arts per se.

csh0• 5 years ago

OP mentioned that he believes that liberal arts colleges do teach critical thinking. You responded by saying that universities do not teach critical thinking and then you went on to claim that the liberal arts initiative is a "clear demonstrable failure" but I am not really sure what you mean by this. I think you are conflating liberal arts the subject, sometimes used as an umbrella term for the humanities, with liberal arts colleges. Could you explain?

Liberal arts colleges, as OP was referring to, have only awarded 4-5% of all bachelor's degrees conferred on a yearly basis for the last decade[0]. In light of this information, I find it difficult to believe that liberal arts colleges are the source of the problems you claim, considering that the vast majority of bachelor's degree holders went to a non-LAC. It would be strange to look at the entire population of BA/BS recipients, note some lack of critical thinking ability in them, and then focus your energy on the source of only 5% of them.

If you are interested to point fingers at a major source of student debt and a place where "critical thinking skills" are definitely not being taught, consider for-profit colleges as a potential candidate. "For-profit colleges only enroll 10 percent of students but they account for half of all student-loan defaults."[1]

[0]https://www.gettysburg.edu/offices/institutional-analysis/pd... [1]https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/whos-fault-student-loan-...

vanusa• 5 years ago

Depends what school you go to and crucially -- your attitude going into that school. I never once thought of my education as a matter of learning a set of definitions, or even a series of concepts. But rather -- as the teachers at my (far from elite) high school articulated to me -- as a process, a way of learning where ideas really come from, and for "learning how to learn".

You're perfectly right -- classes by themselves just don't do much. It's your decision to sit down and learn the material, not just for the test, but for the sake of you're life's work and the person you want to be -- that's when you start learning.

But if you expect to just show up and heave your head filled with knowledge -- let alone critical thinking skills -- you're going to be bitterly disappointed.

_pmf_• 5 years ago

Sophistry and rhetoric are not "thinking". They are intellectual sleight of hands.

908B64B197• 5 years ago

Colleges do. At least, liberal arts colleges do.

Engineering/Scientific schools do as well.

The scientific method pretty much requires to question every assumption and serious engineering is all about looking at and understanding tradeoffs.

I feel the understated problem in our educational system is that people are being encouraged to think of it as a place to get job skills to get your first job, and thereby people don't even realize the underlying lessons that it really teaches.

Exactly. Why take rigorous classes and master the fundamentals when you can go to a coding bootcamp and rote memorise algorithmic questions to pass interviews?

DantesKite• 5 years ago

Claude Shannon had some interesting thoughts about this. I summarized them below:

1. Reduce the problem to its most essential parts

2. Find related problems that have already been solved

3. Restate the problem in as many different ways as possible

4. Generalize a solution to as many problems as possible. See where it can apply again.

5. Break large gaps between a problem and solution by solving a bunch of smaller problems (sometimes even in a roundabout way) and gradually piece yourself bit by bit towards the solution.

6. Invert the problem and solution

http://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Is it there that he describes being highly lazy and multitasking ? Having numerous projects started and working on them when inspiration kicks

pjm331• 5 years ago

Reminds me a lot of the list in a book I just started reading - G. Polya’s How to Solve It

1. Understand the problem

2. Devise a plan

3. Carry out the plan

4. Look back

In particular when talking about devising the plan:

“If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem?...”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

throw10920• 5 years ago

These are steps for solving a problem, which is very different from thinking. The former isn't very useful if you don't have a good idea of what the problem is or what the constraints on the solution are, both of which usually require thinking in order to get or refine.

Moreover, the linked article isn't saying that problem-solving isn't being taught, or widespread - in fact, the authors probably thought that there was too much problem-solving and not enough thinking going around.

wildermuthn2• 5 years ago

It isn’t hard to learn how to think: practice increasingly complex levels of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools actually do a fair job of this, especially at advanced stages.

It’s trendy to criticize social media these days, and I’m not fully on that bandwagon, but there’s something to the criticism that social media and most of the internet is making us dumber with its relentless race to the bottom of reading/writing complexity. Most web content is now a cliff-note, at best. We used to learn most things by reading books. Now it’s too easy to gloss over understanding by googling the answers we need immediately. This is a generalization, and the pattern can be avoided by the disciplined, but we shouldn’t forget that tools dictate patterns of thought and behavior by what they make easy vs. what they make hard.

ncmncm2• 5 years ago

When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated.

Not true. Thinking is a grab bag of heuristics. Each topic favors a different mix. The best thinkers apply several to each problem, one after the other. They collect, curate, and refine them, and discover their range of usefulness. Experience helps winnow the clinkers. Some of the best seem unpromising.

tboyd47• 5 years ago

Human beings learn by example. This is no different.

If students are finding it hard to think, then perhaps it's because they have no examples around them of people thinking. Principle of parsimony.

There's also a character aspect to it. Making decisions based on your own evaluations (not an authority figure's) takes courage and confidence. To listen to others' input and re-evaluate your own decisions requires humility. To act rationally in the face of strong emotions requires tranquility of mind. Do students find in their role models the traits of courage, humility, and tranquility, or do they find the opposite; cowardice, self-righteousness, and panicky over-reaction?

If all the adults in the room are freaking out over every little problem, shaming and blaming each other, and waiting on someone higher-up to make all their important decisions for them, how can you possibly expect students to learn critical thought from them?

0xBABAD00C4• 5 years ago

I am not stating anything profound here, but I found that learning math and science (college level and up) has had a huge impact on my quality of thinking. I agree with other posts emphasizing that early life nature/nurture experiences can have a strong effect, but learning and doing math and science gives you the ability to acquire mental models and thought patterns honed over many generations of top minds of humanity. It's one thing to be "street smart", raw IQ + grit + right attitude, and it's another thing altogether to be able to distill systems, structures, and predictable interactions in an otherwise chaotic observed reality. To me the latter is what determines quality of thought. Anecdotally, I've met people who were far smarter than me on the raw intelligence scale, but haven't gone the math/science route, and you can just feel how poor their toolkit is for modeling different aspects of everyday reality.

A very crude analogy would be the hardware you have and the OS and software you're running on it: studying STEM subjects is akin to installing useful software, developed by generations of brilliant engineers that you wouldn't be able to reproduce on your own in 100 lifetimes.

avgcorrection• 5 years ago

Schools don’t teach you a method of thinking.

This “schools should teach X” is quite the meme. Most of the things I learned in school were fast forgotten. So when someone says “X should be taught in school” my first thought is “we should promote X to become easily forgotten…”. :)

watoc• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can find convincing articles that would explain that overthinking leads to bad decisions and that you should be more spontaneous.

Some of the best/well known books have also been written in less than a month.

thunkshift1• 5 years ago

‘I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.’

Spot on

Tycho• 5 years ago

I think the more pressing problem is how to concentrate. According to a Times article the other day, 20% of university students are using “smart drugs” to help with this.

mif• 5 years ago

Reading books and having meaningful conversations is a good start.

How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught

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