How To Understand Things
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Highlights
- Intelligent people simply arenât willing to accept answers that they donât understand â no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they arenât able to convince them selves of it, they wonât accept it.
- thinking hard takes effort, and itâs much easier to just stop at an answer that seems to make sense, than to pursue everything that you donât quite get down an endless, and rapidly proliferating, series of rabbit holes.
- A competent thinker will be reluctant to commit himself to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands — he will lack âthe will to thinkâ — unless he has the conviction that something worthwhile will be done with the results of his efforts.â
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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 â or having a bug in your thinking â bothers you a lot. You have the drive, the will to know.
- It is uniquely easy to lie to yourself because there is no external force keeping you honest; only you can run the constant loop of asking âdo I really understand this?â.
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(This is why writing is important. Itâs harder to fool yourself that you understand something when you sit down to write about it and it comes out all disjointed and confused. Writing forces clarity.)
- Another quality I have noticed in very intelligent people is being unafraid to look stupid.
- She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
- People who have not experienced the thing are unlikely to be generating truth. More likely, theyâre 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 donât represent your own synthesis.
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The photographer Robert Capa advised beginning photographers: âIf your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enoughâ. (This is good fiction writing advice, by the way.) It is also good advice for understanding things. When in doubt, go closer.