This is great! I love the bit on flexibility over correctness. This post also has me thinking about the importance of being social in learning. Engaging with others can help highlight what you don't know and dig you out of those learning wells you may find yourself in if you're typically a "solo-learner" like me. Even the greatest of the greats were highly social and collaborative, in contrast to the common image of the academic or intellectual.
yes exactly! a small way I realized this is watching a lecture accompanying a paper rather than just reading the paper itself: you get a much clearer picture of the author's thought processes and motivations, and listening to the Q&A gives you more insight too. getting that collaboration has been something I want to do more of this year, talking to more people, listening to more actual conversations, etc.
I dig it! Especially the stuff about being flexible to various frames of thinking. I like to think of all of our different frames of thinking kind of like languages. Reality isn't written in a particular language superior to all the rest (or maybe it is and it's just beyond my mind's grasp), but it can be described by many different languages. And it's fun to become multilingual in my understanding of reality. To be able to listen to a Christian ramble about God or a scientist ramble about the Big Bang or a psychonaut ramble about machine elves, and to not feel that their symbols are at war against my own and to form my own responses in terms of the same language of the person I'm speaking with. It can also be quite disorienting at times to function with the paradoxes that come along with a loosened grip on one particular model, and I appreciate you linked to your "Why I meditate" post at the end, as meditation is definitely what helps me most in this exploration.
couldn't agree more. I still remember a comment you wrote way back on one of your instagram posts, I think someone was disagreeing with a comic you made and you wrote something appreciative and finished it with "it's just words". I made a note of that, and strangely enough I think that comment was one of the things that helped me start to see things in this frame-oriented, language-oriented way, and be less threatened by disagreeing ideas. it's just words.
"it's fun to become multilingual in my understanding of reality...to not feel that their symbols are at war against my own and to form my own responses in terms of the same language of the person I'm speaking with" 🔥💯
Fascinating piece and perspective . Just being aware of what you don't understand is just so critical to the learning cycle - especially if that is a critical pillar of understanding the topic in entirety.
Excellent piece! I will say that I wish academic texts were more accessible to the general public. For example, if I’m reading a sociology book and it’s riddled with big words and jargon, I’ll lose patience because I think of how much more clearly and simply it could’ve been written (without losing meaning) and hence less time-consuming to read and understand.
thank you, and agreed! what's even more annoying is that this wasn't always the case: scientific papers used to be written in a more conversational style. see, e.g. this https://newscience.substack.com/p/scientific-styles
This is great! I love the bit on flexibility over correctness. This post also has me thinking about the importance of being social in learning. Engaging with others can help highlight what you don't know and dig you out of those learning wells you may find yourself in if you're typically a "solo-learner" like me. Even the greatest of the greats were highly social and collaborative, in contrast to the common image of the academic or intellectual.
yes exactly! a small way I realized this is watching a lecture accompanying a paper rather than just reading the paper itself: you get a much clearer picture of the author's thought processes and motivations, and listening to the Q&A gives you more insight too. getting that collaboration has been something I want to do more of this year, talking to more people, listening to more actual conversations, etc.
I dig it! Especially the stuff about being flexible to various frames of thinking. I like to think of all of our different frames of thinking kind of like languages. Reality isn't written in a particular language superior to all the rest (or maybe it is and it's just beyond my mind's grasp), but it can be described by many different languages. And it's fun to become multilingual in my understanding of reality. To be able to listen to a Christian ramble about God or a scientist ramble about the Big Bang or a psychonaut ramble about machine elves, and to not feel that their symbols are at war against my own and to form my own responses in terms of the same language of the person I'm speaking with. It can also be quite disorienting at times to function with the paradoxes that come along with a loosened grip on one particular model, and I appreciate you linked to your "Why I meditate" post at the end, as meditation is definitely what helps me most in this exploration.
couldn't agree more. I still remember a comment you wrote way back on one of your instagram posts, I think someone was disagreeing with a comic you made and you wrote something appreciative and finished it with "it's just words". I made a note of that, and strangely enough I think that comment was one of the things that helped me start to see things in this frame-oriented, language-oriented way, and be less threatened by disagreeing ideas. it's just words.
"it's fun to become multilingual in my understanding of reality...to not feel that their symbols are at war against my own and to form my own responses in terms of the same language of the person I'm speaking with" 🔥💯
Fascinating piece and perspective . Just being aware of what you don't understand is just so critical to the learning cycle - especially if that is a critical pillar of understanding the topic in entirety.
Excellent piece! I will say that I wish academic texts were more accessible to the general public. For example, if I’m reading a sociology book and it’s riddled with big words and jargon, I’ll lose patience because I think of how much more clearly and simply it could’ve been written (without losing meaning) and hence less time-consuming to read and understand.
thank you, and agreed! what's even more annoying is that this wasn't always the case: scientific papers used to be written in a more conversational style. see, e.g. this https://newscience.substack.com/p/scientific-styles