Tag: reflection (Page 1 of 3)

Fiction is irreducible

August 10, 2021 / / 1 Comment

I recently tried to suggest a friend read Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, and it was fascinating how much of a struggle it was to come up with a convincing argument to read such an extraordinary book. The best reason I could come up with: “It has such cool world-building, and the characters are so dramatically different than the ones in most western fiction novels… you have to read it, man.” It was an endorsement that pales in comparison to the incredible experience of reading the book. I wondered why it’s so easy to talk about and recommend non-fiction books while it’s impossible to capture the essence of good fiction.

Fiction is fundamentally irreducible. Whereas non-fiction is easy to summarize into a few key points, the narrative structure of fiction makes that impossible. If you attempt to summarize fiction, the best you can do is water it down into some platitude that pales in comparison to the underlying novel. Why is that? Perhaps it is because, at its core, all fiction follows an archetypical story — the foundational pattern of all stories are the same. As Paulo Coelho remarked: “Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

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The Evergreen note-taking process mirrors how we want to actually learn

September 10, 2020 / / 1 Comment

Upon encountering a new piece of interesting information, I want to be able to understand how it relates with my current ideas. What ideas does it change? What ideas does it agree with? Which ideas does it contradict? How does it fit into my general framework of understanding?

When I encounter something new (even assuming that I’m able to make a connection to something), it generally is a very superficial connection. For example, if I was learning about Nick Sleep’s investment process and how it’s long-term oriented, I might find that it is very similar to Buffett’s process; at most, I’d make a quick mental note of that, and move on. What connection that might exist is a weak, ephemeral first-order connection. However, what I actually want is to not only realize that Nick Sleep’s investment process is similar to Buffett’s (the first person who popped into my mind), but also see what other individuals have had similar ideas? What are the similarities? What are the differences? Furthermore, I want to generate understanding of second-order connections, and an existing linked structure of notes makes this discovery much easier.

The evergreen note-taking method (borrowed this name from Andy Matuschak) takes this implicit process and makes it explicit, while also furthering the reach. Effectively, you are forced to integrate each new piece of information immediately, and it lives on.

It takes effort (it’s simple, but not easy), but it is the closest match of any system that I’ve seen to the natural learning process.

The Feynman Method forces you to explain to understand

August 23, 2020 / / 1 Comment

The Feynman Method involves pretending to teach the concept to a student, which forces you to wrangle with the material and create simple learning analogies (if you find that you stumble anywhere in the explanation, you don’t know the concept well enough). After completing the Feynman Method, you now truly understand the concept and own that knowledge.

In a way, my notes are an extended Feynman Method exercise. In a sense, the function of all my notes is to enhance thinking by making each of the often associative connections in my thinking into an explicit, detailed connection (see the function of note-taking is to augment thinking rather than store information).

Intelligence is about honesty and the will to think as much as it is about raw intellect

July 16, 2020 / / 1 Comment

“The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved.”

Nabeel Quereshi

I read an excellent post by Nabeel Quereshi on intelligence and learning. He makes the argument that intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers they don’t understand, and they need to prove it to themselves. This reminds me of the Richard Feynman idea: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

One of the best ways to be intellectually honest is to explain a topic to yourself with the Feynman Method, since the Feynman Method forces you to explain to understand. In addition, writing and proper note-taking are exercises in intellectual honesty, since it forces you to make information and connections explicit: The function of note-taking is to augment thinking rather than store information.

Thinking is hard — “will to think” is a cool concept from the famed physicist Enrico Fermi. Thinkers are naturally reluctant to commit themselves to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands.

The other implication is that intelligence (as defined here, which is more of a practical/problem-solving ability intelligence rather than scientifically-measured intelligence/raw intellect) is software, not hardware. It can be augmented by practicing the right principles.

Reimagining learning with Evergreen notes

June 16, 2020 / / 1 Comment

After reading through Andy Matuschak’s amazing Evergreen note system and Sohren Ahren’s excellent book How to Take Smart Notes (one of the only books on note-taking that’s actually worth reading), I’ve spent a good amount of time overhauling my knowledge creation and synthesis process. Matuschak’s work forced me to think critically about how note-taking fits with the learning process. At the end of the day, augmenting learning is what really matters, and note-taking need to serve that purpose.

I’ve included a snippet below from my own Evergreen notes, which means they’re also probably formatted in a foreign fashion to most readers. The biggest change is the double brackets surrounding clauses or sentences. For those of you familiar with different Markdown syntax, these brackets denote other text files with relevant ideas. Therefore, this note-taking process replicates the real-life learning process: explicitly connecting disparate pieces of information with other ideas. I can’t possibly do this justice by describing it, so please visit Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen notes to explore his implementation.

Here we go:

What is the point of note-taking? It should be to record down new facts that you encounter, such that you can integrate the insight into your existing understanding of the world. Most people are very good at the first part — recording the facts — but then neglect to explicate how each new fragment of knowledge fits into their extant body of knowledge ([[The Feynman Method forces you to explain to understand]]).

Learning is the process of connecting and relating. If your notes don’t explicitly promote that process, what is the point of taking these notes? It just gives you a false illusion of knowledge.

Therefore, effective note-taking should help augment your thinking process. Notes are highly effective for retention of information (“The faintest ink is better than the sharpest mind”), but you need to put in the time and effort to connect everything — you need to do the actual thinking. [[Intelligence is about honesty and the will to think as much as it is about raw intellect]].

Good notes allow you to identify existing connections between your thoughts, and serve to generate more ideas off of these connections — [[The explicit notetaking process mirrors how we want to actually learn]]. We know that knowledge is constructed in an iterative and cumulative way rather than absorbed fully-formed, so good notes should help facilitate this process.

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