Learning how to think (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Learning how to think (2015)

fs.blog

213 pointslxm46 comments

I would argue that my degrees in philosophy were granted to me while I was learning to think and judge well at university.

It's funny that the paper author goes only into multitasking / concentration after wondering why people struggle to think critically. Sure, distracted thinking is generally not good thinking, but slowing down in and of itself won't improve your judgment skills. It's kind of a bummer that after the author says "there's a problem with critical thinking!" -- he moves on and doesn't talk about ways to actually develop critical thinking besides, you know, this 4 minute essay that just says "slow down the decision making process." I would have hoped he would have talked about different ways to analyze or prioritize problems, or discussed game theory or maybe gone into wicked problems[1].

Oh well

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Ironic isn’t it? The author complains about people not thinking enough but his articles don’t seem well thought out either. It’s full of reductionism and oversimplications.

Slowing down, concentrating, and having lots of time are definitely helpful for thinking but he implies that it is sufficient for thinking and that everyone has that luxury.

What about people operating under duress like in wars or pandemics? Can epidemiologists slow down while a pandemic spreads exponentially? Can soldiers slow down while they’re being shot at?

I’m pretty sure those people would like to have the space to make better decisions but more often then not, they don’t. Those are very wicked problems.

> Can soldiers slow down while they’re being shot at?

What's there to think, either shoot back or run. OTOH planning war strategy is thinking.

> Can epidemiologists slow down while a pandemic spreads exponentially?

They have to if they have to invent the medicine. I think you are confused b/w hardwork and thinking.

You would have included eating to your list. You sure are taking it out of context. He didnt imply you think before you do everything.

Even as Engineers we know that some of the problems we come up against in the course of a project could have been foreseen and tackled if only we spent some time to deeply understand the project.

Now you're taking my point out of context.

I countered with the implication that there may be more important factors than just time for those acting in time-constrained situations to make "good" decisions and that he was oversimplifying, not that we always think before we do everything.

AFAIK, most people don't eat their meals under duress. I could be wrong though.

All those essays and fancy problem solving techniques and hacks are good. But they were also invented by people that sat down to think.

I don't know for you but I know that when I slow down and tell myself to relax, start poking at the problem from different angles things go well. I dont know how it happens. The brian reaches a point you even continue solving the problem while sleeping. There might be hacks for that but with the right intention and time it mostly happens for me.

In other words, would you agree that people that make right decision fastest are the smartest? What I mean is that making a good decision while taking a lot of time is much easier than making the right decision without spending much time.

In real life we often have to make suboptimal decisions merely because we cannot spend much time on each one.

>would you agree that people that make right decision fastest are the smartest?

they are the smartest in that decision space, probably due to training in it and have made a lot of similar decisions in the past.

Only in very simple solution spaces. In general the solution spaces are pretty big and taking a while to mull it over is worth while. Especially for novel problems. If the problem is similar to something you thought about previously or have already encountered them of course it can be responded to. Even the smartest chess grandmaster will play better with more time. And for hiring, I always prefer people that have a great answer in a day or so than an ok answer immediately which they are happy about.

Interesting. I find most people index too heavily on the other direction. There are diminishing returns on thinking at some point for to the inherent imprecision of making decisions in this world. You can make the best decision and things can still go wrong. Or you can have misunderstood the problem. Or you could be solving the wrong problem.

For most ill defined problems, it's best to accept you may be wrong, but make the best quick decision you can, and be willing to reevaluate.

I worked at a place where design was expected to take a free weeks for a new server project that would take say three months. From what I saw we produced software that was easy to maintain and easy to add new features too. But we rarely had to rip out and redo old features or old libraries. People were much more Likely to come up with the right layering of software to solve the problem, including the problem of high velocity changing produce specs. We also figured out the right place to put in some DSL templating engine or easy to edit configuration. Working there for years and watching the system scale over many orders of magnitude user traffic and feature growth left me with an appreciation for deep, clear thought, in the face of uncertainty.

> I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write.

Dear Son,

I am writing this slow, 'cause I know you can't read fast. There are a few things happening here at home. We don't live where we did when you left -- you're father read in the paper that most car accidents happen within twenty miles of home, so we moved. I won't be able to send you the address because we moved into your cousins old house and they took the numbers with them so they wouldn't have to change their address. The new place has a washing machine! It's in a small room that also has a shower in it. The first day, I put four shirts in. I pressed the lever and I haven't seen them since. The weather is nice here. It rained twice this week. Three days the first time and four days the second time. Remember that coat you wanted me to send you? Well, your aunt said that it would be too heavy to send in the mail, so we cut the buttons off and put them in the pocket. Monday we got a bill from the funeral home. It said if we don't make the last payment on Grandma's funeral ... up she comes ... Your father has a lovely new job. He has over 500 men under him. He's cutting grass at the cemetery. Your brother's wife had a baby this morning. We don't know whether it's a boy or a girl, so we don't know if you are an aunt or an uncle. Your uncle fell in the whiskey vat and drowned. We cremated him. He burned for 3 days. Last week 3 of your friends went off the bridge in a pickup truck. One was driving and the other two were riding in the back. The driver rolled down the window and swam to safety. The other two drowned. They couldn't get the tailgate down. Not much else. Write more often. Love, Mom

P.S. -- We would have sent money, but the envelope was already sealed.

I've noticed that people I meet that I think of as intelligent usually had an adult that talked with them intelligently when they were younger.

I think thinking is seen, then emulated, and this emulation needs a bit of coaching.

Yes, once you start reading some of this can happen without someone else available, but ultimately thinking is learned by exposure to good examples of it and iterated practice.

My adoptive parents are a counterexample to this. That or I'm not intelligent but tests and life outcomes would seem to indicate otherwise.

I would definitely agree that an intelligent conversant can positively impact the outcome and as such apply the stimulus to my own child. A lack of this was one of my childhood and early adult life's frustrations.

Parenting/mentoring has lots of hard or painful parts, like setting boundaries/limits.

But a really EASY and effective thing is to just to set a good example.

(it can also make kids mindful if you tell them to set a good example for other kids)

Growing up much if not most of my learning was just from observing.

I've come to the same conclusions as you.

To me this is one of the main social benefits of platforms like YouTube: you have unlimited access to the greatest "critical thinkers" there are. In times when transmission of knowledge is being heavily challenged ("disrupted") by the constantly changing technological landscape, it is great that you can sit down and enjoy hours of in-depth courses and lectures on all imaginable topics.

Part of it I guess is that the amount of "sensitive connection" is greater than when reading a book -- something about seeing the person establishes a deeper connection.

If I was provocative I'd say there are many online father figures for disoriented people (though it's obviously not all positive, e.g. "PUAs").

This is about concentration, focus, and it is absolutely a skill and not really taught.

Beyond that, introspection is not really taught either. That is, so I have been thinking about this thing a lot, am I being honest with myself about what is grounded in reality and what isn’t? Am I being honest with myself about my overriding preference for my gut feeling vs. what can be verified in the real world with some more effort?

I used to really appreciate fs. After a few years i, personally, think it’s clickbait and i am not the target audience anymore.

I agree too. I have the same feeling about Scott Young's newsletters. They both seem talk a lot but don't provide the same level of value they used. Then again, this article is from 2015.

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

> Good decision makers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

One I still subscribe to is James Clear, I really like his 3-2-1 newsletters every thursday.

One from a few weeks ago:

> "Fear of failure is higher when you're not working on the problem.

> If you are taking action, you are less worried about failure because you realize you can influence the outcome."

> "Fear of failure is higher when you're not working on the problem.

> If you are taking action, you are less worried about failure because you realize you can influence the outcome."

I wish I could internalize that. For some reasons I feel as if it was the opposite.

This fear of failure by others is why so many people have a hard time delegating. Sometimes things will fail, and that’s ok (with a few exceptions, of course).

It’s self-help. Usually the half life of those is a few articles and then you kind of know that they’ll just repeat that until people stop paying attention to them

same... this article doesn't actually seem to cover its own topic. One has to wonder if the article itself was written slowly, or rushed to production to garner more clicks?

I would have loved to learn about how to synthesize and filter what you read, and at what point your amount of stuff to read reaches saturation. I always hear "I read all the books I could find!" but that's an impossible statement for almost any field — I just want to know if there's an agreed upon state where one can feel that one has read everything available to start thinking for oneself and forming original thoughts.

I had the exact same impression. It has become so watered down and superficial.

There's a lot to be said for slowing down, taking time off from the churn to just think. Reading the comments in here, this does not jive with the HN crowd.

Funnily, I have found slowing down, taking time off from the computer screen, thinking while gardening or doing the dishes or whatever, then putting down ideas on paper, makes me a better programmer, and lets me achieve much better technical solutions than if I were to spend my whole day inside of an IDE. YMMV I guess...

> Good decisions create time, bad ones consume it.

My key takeaway from this article, well put.

>Thinking is one of those things that can be learned but can’t be taught.

Then the article (poorly) tries to teach you techniques how to think better. Pass.

I had high hopes for this article, but it kind of let me down. The tl;dr is that you should slow down and focus in order to make better decisions, and that people suck at multitasking and multitasking makes you stupid.

The article didn’t really get into how to learn how to think.

My opinion is that there are two critical skills to thinking effectively.

The first is to assess each of your “inputs” critically - why do you think that something you know is true (epistemology)? Why do you believe a particular fact? People have a tendency to cherry pick and to accept information unquestioningly if it confirms a bias; you have to constantly challenge yourself not to do this.

The other aspect of effective thinking, IMO, is to work backwards to first principles (challenge those too btw). Extrapolate your thought to extremes and see if it still makes sense- if it doesn’t, you’re likely just rationalizing to come up with your preferred outcome rather than really thinking.

And of course practice. A lot.

how to you determine whether you're practicing thinking "correctly"? As in, if I practice piano I know if it sounds good or not, and over time my playing will sound better. If I practice the wrong things, I'll know that my piano isn't getting any better.

How do I know that I'm practicing thinking correctly?

Good thinking is mostly just taking things apart by asking 'why' or 'how' until you arrive at 'don't know' and trying to answer that question.

There actually isn't much more to it.

You can also then combine the whys and hows to create new stuff. That bit people find impressive if it helps them solve an immediate need.

> Good thinking is mostly just taking things apart by asking 'why'...

So, good thinking is what your five-year-old forces you to do.

> Good decisions create time, bad ones consume it.

This is, in broad strokes, right, but it is hugely reductionist. It is always worth remembering that we're not always in the right circumstances to allow good decisions, and we should probably not judge.

Otherwise, great essay. I've always thought it'd be nice to make "life start" grants or loans to facilitate exactly this kind of process of learning to think outside of universities too.

This notion of "busy people don't make good decisions" seems a bit concerning to me. Even if all my decisions are perfect, and I have free time, why wouldn't I invest this time into something productive? In the end, being busy is just showing the ability to manage time, not necessarily decision making skills.

The author of TFA asserts "busy people don't make good decisions" without citing studies or presenting evidence.

You can save a lot of time by ignoring articles like that.

Interesting, I think you're onto something, though others may find it obvious. Any other tricks for filtering time sinks which don't give value without putting the time in?

Who funds the “research” and/or the publication in which it appears.

If one or both of those is a foundation or opaque organisation, who funds it, and what are their interests?

Ahem... Spend less time on HN?

Sorry, yes, "snarky" -- but OTOH, it can really be a huge timesink. (Guess how I know.)

(2015)

and just posted a few days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27027188

I think this is not a great article

First, define in detail what you mean by "think".

不用了e

Teaching me how to think is precisely what my 'worthless' liberal arts degree did. Interestingly enough, that skill was what let me transition into IT. And it allows me to outperform the vast majority of my co-workers, 95% of whom have masters degrees in some computer-related subject.

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. This is a classic flamewar topic and when you broach those with provocative language ("worthless", "outperform"), we're going to get a tedious, repetitive flamewar.

I'm sure there are more interesting and thoughtful ways you could share your experience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Anyone with a computer related subject who didn’t learn to think wasted their time in school.

When hiring developers, I am seldom interested in the candidate's degree or even their experience but rather how they think and problem solve. Are they contemplative, willing to delve into the problem, willing to ask questions which might imply they don't fully understand the problem, do they ask for a moment to think about it...

I have noticed universities have done a really good job to convince graduates there is a correct and immediate answer, pattern, procedure, process, etc to any problem. In essence, they have stifled thinking.

The article is from 2015, but nothing has changed.

Realistically, I think the US University experiment does a good job teaching this with first-hand experience. Giving a kid significant access to money they'll make in the future, surrounded by positive and negative opportunities to spend that money, and no clearly correct path to follow since the answer is dependent on your personal background. That's a recipe for learning to think quickly. Though, it's like pushing the baby bird out of the nest, you might only have one shot to get it right.

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